ON THE BRINK..............IF

        Approaching two years of pandemic living, humankind is the poorer for it. 

    "When your negativity bucket is full, it's full!" said the Rat as he threw neighbor Bob off the cliff in the cartoon strip Pearls Before Swine.

     We are devolving.

    Extraordinary souls have devoted themselves to others, to healing and to the common good, but almost everybody else is  worried or angry or both. 

     We've begun to understand we are a planet of grief, grievances and that pieces do not fit as they did. Life as we knew it is also a victim. 

        Those things, organizations, structure, mores, routines and all that held us together as a last tendril of civility are gone or are changed, drastically. We find ourselves on the brink emotionally, politically, and as a planet.

        Petulance has become our happy face.

       Our manner of living pays it no honor, nor even nods acknowledgement, but this growling spectacle of how we live with each other, is being measured. Standards change of course and so, in that way, we are scored by comparison. 

        History has the last word. Presently we are at war over values of culture. The battle-line is the nexus of I and we. 

        How do we live into and what do we expect from society? How do we get along?

        Media is the clarion. 

        Radio, television and social media have morphed story telling and journalism. It's changed reporting and our expectations. 

         Curated and aggregated information, like all things, was subject to human foibles. That is how racism, male supremacy,  cultural bias and the like got baked into normative assumptions. Though overdue and limited, old media was and is, self-correcting.               

        Now, however, we watch algorithms, products of human reasoning, maturing through data and machine learning, amass power and influence, though unrestrained by idealism, values, faith, principles and standards of decency and civility. It shows.

        No one elected the tech titans, yet their profit making platforms are addictive and they bend culture. Old media plays along. The manic pandemic lifestyle wedded us more intensely to our screens. Everything has changed as we live in a feedback loop of discordance. So much of life is like fingernails on a blackboard.

        Snark, "gotcha," and the takedown is the code of behavior and modus operandi. There is not enough probing for understanding and there is way too much lunging for the throat.

      Correspondents feed their social media streams, and maintain a "following" in addition to the work of being experts on their beat. Time was when only information and fact gathering was the job. Developing sources and contacts takes time, now devoted to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds.     

        This era of media practices "false equivalency." It is lazy, stupid and deplorable. 

      Here's how it works. A correspondent, news anchor or writer will give value to lies and deceptions, that are obvious political stunts or posturing, by how they pose a question. It is prompted by the seeking of an artificial "balance" or pretense of objectivity. 

     It's kept the Trump big lie and all of it's perverted manifestations alive. Even talking about it breaths more life into it. Raising it gives it an undeserved sort of credibility. Think  Cyber Ninja vote "recount" in Arizona, as one example.

     Republicans have no agenda. They will condemn neither the insurrection nor the Trump lies. When one of them trots out a fallacy, or an absurd claim, it is used as a kind of block and check to what Democrats or the administration say, do or propose. I am waiting for the flat earth society to get street credibility when a major news organization cites them in a story. 

    Lies are lies, crazy is crazy and bull shit is bull shit. A responsible media would call it out and not be trapped into shilling the ludicrous. 

       "News by flavor" has sharpened the edges between us. In fact it is only about business, building ratings and selling ads, but the poor fools who consume hours of the stuff end up duped and manipulated.

        Chronic news "content slant and skew," propagandizing and active disinformation is destroying us by division and diminishing the value of information. Too few seek multiple sources and verifiable credibility.

        There is no reason Mitch McConnell should be believed. He leads a party that is out to destroy a democratic republic and its time honored rules. McConnell is seen and quoted but rarely if ever challenged about dirty tricks and deception. 

        Presently he is delaying the calendar, trying to avoid a voting rights bill that could put a stop to the fraudulent voter suppression blitzkrieg of Trump's fascists. He's trying to stop passage of legislation, notably the infrastructure funding, that 70% of Americans support. He's playing brinksmanship even on government funding which is to pay for the $8 Trillion he and Trump added to the debt. He is incapable of bipartisanship, even to the benefit of his own voters.

       McConnell is playing a death match for the sake of power. What he says is given credibility by media, but he is never challenged on motive. It is spineless reporting.

        The evacuation of Afghanistan moved more humans than any time in history. More allies and friends were moved from harm than in any war. The media and republican inspired take was "a botched job."  History will cite the full story of stopping this nation's longest war, fraudulent and mismanaged from the start.    

        

     There is seething pressure building among many. They want to see Democrats unite, and not squander opportunity at a time of peril. Since Reagan, Republicans have tried to undo the Democrat social pact with America. 

     Republicans have given tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations, cut social spending and shrunk government service at every opportunity. The nation is now crumbling, our standing in the world is slipping in categories like health, income and education. 

    The more serious challenge is more sinister than policy differences.

      Republicans are so without belief, they gave their party to Trump and he is the front man for a dumbed down populism, white supremacy, looney nationalism and dark money. Republicans aid and abet foreign enemies and enable a wealthy cabal to use Trumpism to turn our democracy into an autocracy. 

        Even in the face of such a dire and toxic scene, the Democrats again are at war with themselves unable to see the bigger picture. 

        Politics and government is damaged and a global crisis only makes it worse.

   

       There has been exceptional reporting and stunning revelations but that valuable information has to compete for bandwidth. Media suffers as we all do, from fatigue and pandemic depression. Fear and anger are dominant emotions.

         Deep analysis, visionary strategies, pragmatic determination still exist but they have trouble cutting through the noise and fog of a pandemic infected planet following four years of turmoil of the most incompetent and simply the most evil and divisive presidency in US history. We are exhausted. Sick and tired. It's a helluva position to be in when we face existential challenge, to our nation and to the planet. 

        If our systems are broken, if common sense no longer exists, if people don't believe science, if one of our great parties has become a cult, there is only one place to go as we stand on the brink. As beat up as we may be, we must go within, summon strength, honor our aspirations, stand on the shoulders of all who have faced adversity, embrace whatever is sacred in our life and be a light bearer whenever, wherever, and however we can.

        

          Stay strong! This too will pass.

          See you down the trail. 

           IF

            by Rudyard Kipling

  If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

SURVIVING AGAIN

        Our destiny changed that day and we've see an endless media loop exhausting how many ways that is so.

     None of us who saw it can erase the image. But today 1 in 4 in America were not alive then. History and education should be  the guardian of the memory. 

    

    A piece of the once "angry young man" has stirred in this old boomer, but not perhaps as you might think. To quote Ed Murrow again, "This just might do nobody any good." I'll pick up his next line too,  "...some just might accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest..."

     A Marine, counsel for the Commandant, a strong man of enduring courage wept and was overwhelmed as he remembered the day the plane struck near his office in the Pentagon.

     A brother recalls seeing his twin return to a tower to help with evacuation, minutes before he is lost in the collapse. 

    A man tells how he saw a video of a woman in flight dropping past the building on the way to her death, he recognized the clothing as that of his wife. 

    If you've been near radio, television, or a screen you too have no doubt heard more, much more, of the same. It is heart breaking. It is unfiltered tragedy. It is also excessive, and exploitive.

    The honest emotion is undeniable. Its expression is painful, horribly painful. But there is a place for it and there are reasons these humans should need dredge up such pain and heartbreak. I don't think that reason is because a network, or media enterprise thinks it should be.

    I'm sorry my father is not here to hear me say that. He was also an absolutist on the first amendment and press freedom but was not without his criticism of media's tendency to hype. As a practitioner of the craft I'd bristle and we'd have a good chat.

        The attack on Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination,

and before that the end of the Civil War and World War I would draw newspaper attention to those anniversary date,  "look- backs."

      There may be value in those historic reflections, but what makes the date of the 20th Anniversary any more appropriate or relevant to plumb the history than 6 weeks before that, for example. The hook, is anniversary; 5, 10, 15, 25, 50, until there are no survivors and few alive who endured the history.

       There is nothing in the study of history, the psychology of the brain, or compassion for victims that needs to be exercised on an anniversary date. Scholarship is ongoing while media hits get clicks or ratings. 

        I get the history, the importance of remembering and teaching and understanding, and learning. But for heavens sake we need not put these suffering people through the anguish of loss, and broken hearts so we can put together a television program or pod cast to cash in on and exploit the emotion.

        History courses, museums, memorials, family gatherings, tributes, and such is the decent and civilized place for the expressions of those thoughts and feelings. 

        Making people sit for cameras and then range through hurt and loss seems hurtful, wrong and crass.

        This point of view is probably as popular today as it was when I raised in newsrooms and pushed back against such arbitrary enterprises, "back in the day." There was a ghastly triple homicide that local stations and newspapers always trudged out around the anniversary date. Nothing new, no changes, just a replay of gore and sad stories. What's gained?

        There have been a couple of pieces in the blizzard of production that attempted to measure how we have changed, and how we have been affected. They were long on analysis and probing and short on the emotional sound bites and forced memories. 

        On September 10 I was shuttling between Washington and New York. I had meetings near the Towers and at the Pentagon and just across the river. We were working on a nuclear arms project. We were scheduled for a night flight back to Indianapolis, but one of our contacts had been delayed by weather out west. We made plans to fly back to New York, stay in Manhattan and meet him the next day and then shuttle back and take another meeting in Washington. He called to say he was stuck in Chicago and we should reschedule when timing was better. We flew home on the late flight.

        I remember a moment walking in New York, the sky was blue and it was a beautiful day, and I made note of how nice it was and how young those on the streets suddenly seemed. On most previous assignments or trips every thing seemed more of a hassle, gritty and the people were less friendly than they were on September 10, or so I remembered. 

        Several of the tortured souls I saw interviewed in the last week, mentioned what a beautiful fall day September 11 was. Somehow that touched me.

        See you down the trail.

   

 

THE TREE & THE FACTS

    Our good neighbor Karen asked what is that fluffy white snowball like tree blooming near our deck.

    I said it was a bit of a mystery, even to the expert arborist who keeps it healthy and trimmed. He thought it was a kind of Bottle Brush tree. Others told us it was called Paper Bark or that it was a kind of pepper.

   Our almost 19 inches of rain this year-the most in 5 years-agreed with it and it's been a magnificent bloom.

   Karen, who sees this exposure researched and learned it is a Melaleuca Linarifolia, also called Paper Bark and Bottle Brush.

   Full from the road, it is a center piece in a meditation spot Lana created just off our front deck.

   A closer look shows you why it's called Paper Bark.

    And the soft blooms look a bit like a bottle brush.

  Not sure how good it is for allergy sufferers, but it is beautiful.

GETTING AN ANSWER

    Hillary Clinton wasted no time in assembling the words of Jeb, Ted, Lindsey, Carly, John and others as they spoke of the Donald. It makes an effective commercial. We'll see a lot of that kind of thing.

     Perhaps I'm hoping for too much, but I'd like to see the 2016 political media begin to act like adults. They could begin by emulating the pros of yesteryear who asked questions  until they got an answer-to the question they posed. They did not accept a rehearsed and canned political spiel. Refusing to answer directly and prevaricating has become business as normal. Getting a straight answer is especially necessary in the case of Trump. That is not to say they should not also press Clinton, but she has a record, defined positions, actions and a voting record. Trump is only pie in the sky promises, double talk (he repeats himself endlessly) and braggadocio. 

      Americans will vote for whomever they choose, but when it is the Presidency at issue it is wise to extract as full a measure of the candidate's thoughts, mental facility and understanding of issues as can be extracted. Trump has been given a pass, thus far. He's also a skilled deflector. It's time for the high priced media talent to begin showing the mettle to demand substantive answers from Drumpf.

     Unseemly as it is more than a few Republicans will begin to close ranks around their nominee. They did it with Barry Goldwater last century. There will be even reluctant endorsers, that is what political parties do. Though none will provide the humor of Governor Christie. He's come to resemble a neglected orphan in a  Charles Dicken's setting, transformed into a kind of adoring lap puppy licking up whatever it is his master spews his way. And Donald spews.

      He'll get new staff, position analysts and policy guides and he will suddenly have people feeding his brain. But we all know it is just a cram. Until Hillary stands on stage with him at a debate, and don't you imagine she can be tough, we can hope the media will begin to see what's beneath that orange top. 

      See you down the trail

A NEW WAY TO THINK

PERSPECTIVE

    My brother John was apparently an effective psychotherapist. Even psychiatrists, with the capacity to order medical intervention, hired him to work with extraordinarily troubled patients.

    I was fascinated by an experimental technique he employed where in he had schizophrenic patients draw maps of their brains, including neural circuits. He would,  step by step, navigate them through a thought or reaction beginning with the sensory cues. The therapy was to "reroute the traffic," to find a new way of thinking, responding and reacting.

    As the 2016 Presidential circus launches don't we all need  a similar "intervention" as regards the mix of information and its delivery and how we feel or reason? Coverage is obsessively about the horse race and is more silly, shallow and of dubious focus and proportionality than during Obama-Romney. Much of it is ideologically or politically skewed and overly generous with pundits and hot air. It is long on entertainment and presentation value and short on thoughtful, non pack, intellectually independent journalism and inquiry.

   Electoral politics also populates the prismatic effulgence of the Internet. Almost no view is left unstated. And we've all got one, at least, so there is a law of diminishing returns at work. 
     It is a renegade American Idol. We'll see the parade of GOP hopefuls in a traveling fight and we'll wait for Hillary to stumble or crumble. Independents and Democrats either like her or they don't. Those who are Republicans must come to accord with one of their multiple choice field. But can there be many undecided or non-committed between D's and R's. Is there enough to compose a "significant difference" in the interim? 
    Before the media and campaign gillies roll, minds are set, but the carnival will go on for a reason certain. Money. Politics, especially presidential politics, is an industry and commerce is good. Billions are churned and much of it gets spread around the media that has no interest in shortening the season, silly or otherwise. They're in it for ad dollars. 

    Plan on plenty of silly, inane, irrelevant, hyperbolic, partisan, mean and self important. Analytical numbers, polls, probabilities and indexes, will be creatively displayed. At the game's end, numbers win.  
     Sadly much of this will play without benefit of Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report. David Letterman is riding off into the sunset too. Yikes! We're being left without our media "neural circuit" traffic cops. What is our protection? 

     Cheers to the inventor of the off switch!

WESTERN DIVERSIONS

    See you down the trail.

WOULDN'T IT BE NICE & THEY DON'T BUILD LIKE THIS ANYMORE

WOULDN'T IT BE NICE

    Now the Obama vs Romney match is on, we may get an opportunity to see a national debate about the role, scope and intent of the federal government.  Though both are Harvard men and technocrats, they apparently possess different visions.  It would be nice if the campaign remained focused on that.  Sadly though, it appears big money, super pacs and huge advertising budgets will steal the plot and establish the tone and probable shallowness of the campaign.

      It would be nice if the media would forego being manipulated and spun by the ad dollars and their masters. Better if they'd stop the pundit pontificating and over zealous devotion to the "horse race" and odds sequences and shape the discussion about visions of America's future and how we get there via the Romney or Obama route.

      Wouldn't it be nice?

DAY BOOK

BUILT TO LAST
I was impressed by what I call "Federal Style" grandeur evident in the building at the Hoover Dam.  Buildings constructed in the 1930's remain impressive today in 
their stateliness, sense of artistic design and that little touch of deco.

Someone makes sure, but even today those

brass doors shine like new.

And after 70 years the marble with brass inlay "signs" are 

as classy as anything new.

SOME TIMES OLD CAN'T LAST
Here's a quick tribute to a tree that was a young windbreak
about the time of the Hoover Dam construction.

See you down the trail.

A BAD SOURCE COULD HAVE IT RIGHT

A CONTRADICTION IN A TIME

OF FAILING MEDIA

Something to remember about the confused media today is that just because it comes from a source with a point of view, does not mean that it is not right.  Fox gets things right.  MSNBC gets things right.  So do all of the nets and even many on line sources despite the fact that some, too many  to my liking, have staked out a political or philosophical skew. Amongst the chaff is some real wheat but you must discern.

It used to be easier when journalists cared about

information first, before the tyranny of ratings

and the need to be a "profit center."

Objectivity used to matter.

Unless you only read the Economist and watch the BBC, about the only way you are going to get "the straight news" is to consume information from all over the spectrum.  We should be doing that anyway, but most of us rely on the same old...

Glass-Stegall ?  Remember your history?  Here's something the OWS has done well. Regardless of the "commercial like" close consider the historic clips and the point they make about banks.

Here's the wikipedia paragraph that lays it out.  Look what the repeals did and consider those in light of credit default swaps and other such scams.  The point is, we had strong economic growth without devastating recession UNTIL we began "repealing" and de-regulating.

The Banking Act of 1933, Pub.L. 73-66, 48 Stat. 162, enacted June 16, 1933, was a law that established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and introduced banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation.^[1] It is most commonly known as the Glass–Steagall Act, after its legislative sponsors, Senator Carter Glass (D–Va.) and Congressman Henry B. Steagall (D–Ala.-3). Some provisions of the Act, such asRegulation Q, which allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates in savings accounts, were repealed by theDepository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Provisions that prohibit a bank holding companyfrom owning other financial companies were repealed on November 12, 1999, by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, named after its co-sponsors Phil Gramm (R, Texas), Rep. Jim Leach (R, Iowa), and Rep. Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (R, Virginia).^[2][3]

The repeal of provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act effectively removed the separation that previously existed between investment banking which issued securities and commercial banks which accepted deposits. The deregulation also removed conflict of interest prohibitions between investment bankers serving as officers of commercial banks.

We may not always like the source, but we are served by

remembering that sometimes the truth can come

in thorny packages.  Very few of the Old Testament

prophets would have won a popularity contests.

Political dialogue in the US has been hijacked by ideologues, zealots, hacks and cable news "personalities."  While most of it is bilious and not worth your time,

some of it is necessary to fully understand all points of

view, even those with which you disagree.  And

some of it is probably right, from time to time.

Even if the media is less objective than it should be

you can be as objective as you allow yourself in

considering, really considering, honestly considering,

all points of view.  You can always rest in your

 view, and if you've allowed opposing thoughts to

cross your mind and it has not nudged you a bit,

then you can take solace in the knowledge.

An open mind wont hurt.

See you down the trail.