Poem

First Lines**


Everything need be dramatically drawn down.

Through the thin wall he heard the tinkling ice.

He thought of his daughter grown wise.

Despite the bleak weather, he crawled from his bed.

Grandson, don't go to war.

Something bit him and the wound itched.

Through the dark narrows the road followed the river.

Her mother may be dead, I don't know.

She despised him.


**Thanks to RP Thomas


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Seeing Everything

Major league catchers have to be all eyes, alert and all-seeing, like Rocky Gale, to manage a game.

For the first time in years (maybe forever?) all of MLB opened on the same day this year.  I watched three opening games yesterday, but rarely with the wide-eyed fanaticism of the catcher.

I haven't caught an Opening Day in many years.  It was interesting.  Maybe I'm cut out for the armchair league after all?


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24 Hour Fitness Scam

So I went to the 24 Hour Fitness gym in Portland's Pearl District today to discuss my HMO's Medicare gym benefit.  I'm trying to find a basketball gym for a daily hoops game, get a little exercise.

The salesperson was rude and insisted she wasn't aware of the program my HMO offers.  She tried to sell me on every aspect of the gym and then showed me my options, none related to the question I'd visited with--would the company accept an initial two-month payment from my HMO to get me inside?

Finally...

No, the club demanded a personal card number.  Problem here--my health care provider says it'll spring for the initial fee, and reimburse costs monthly thereafter.

Club says no do that. It don't accept Medicare payments.  And you have to sign a year-long contract.

Um...no.

Two sources, the club and my HMO, two different statements about how things work--or don't work.

Fuck all these stupid, scamming bastards.


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The Despicable Triumph of the Real Fake News

When the “War on Terror” was launched in 2001, mainstream media – especially cable TV news – started a parade. It was a narrow parade of hawkish retired military and intelligence brass promoting war as the response to the crime of 9/11, predicting success and identifying foreign enemies to attack. 

We can look back at this parade and laugh at the total nonsense dispensed. But the more human response is to cry – over the toll, still mounting, of hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond, and violent instability across the region, including countries that were relatively stable and prosperous on Sept. 10, 2001. (Not to mention militarization and loss of civil liberties at home.)--JC

It behooves one to understand that the U.S. is a police state.  It's a unique variety, but nonetheless, an honest-to-god military dictatorship.

It's unique because the world has never had a rich "lone superpower" ritually terrorize the planet before the U.S. grew its ugly force of absolute imperial strength.

No empire before this one had the Bomb to back up its quest.

It is damn near impossible to imagine a way to dismantle such terrifying power without a sweeping change of consciousness, which isn't likely to happen. People are too attached to the spoils, and it is precisely because they don't want to confront their hypocrisy and their shame that they are not in the streets with actual revolutionary fervor. So...

Tick, tick, tick.


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Early Morning, Marvin Gaye

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Monsters

Listen to the kids, the future.


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Cowboy Unleashed

I've heard Bolton repeatedly described as "bright."  This clip suggests otherwise.  From Pilger's "Break the Silence," 2007. The conversation, after Bolton's rude comments, turns to burgeoning fascism, wherein Bolton today cuts a Goebbels-like figure.

This, from a writer I would label a centrist. Even he calls warning.


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Poem of the Day

The Solitude of Night

It was at a wine party—
I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.
The blown flowers fell and filled my lap.
When I arose, still drunken,
The birds had all gone to their nests,
And there remained but few of my comrades.
I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.

Li Po

translated by Shigeyoshi Obata


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Yemen

And when — in God’s holy name — will we quit pretending that “we are great because we are good,” that when we take a three-year-old child and rip her small, frail body into shreds of bloody goo with our missiles, we are noble, we are righteous, we are a light in the darkness? I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the sanctimony, sick of the self-righteousness, I’m sick of the pious bullshit from mouths that are dripping with blood. I’m sick of the whole ungodly freak show of murderers, and apologists and cheerleaders for murder, prancing around in their pomp and their power while they grind innocent people — children just as precious and valuable as your children and grandchildren, old folks just as loved and honored as your parents, men and women just as beloved as your spouses and partners and lovers and friends — into piles of rancid viscera, into skeletal, fly-ridden living cadavers, starving in shelterless ruins.--CF

The righteous anger of  Chris Floyd.


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Soldier Home (Part 1)

Despite 17 years of fighting, dying and killing, there have been no specific declarations of war. Instead, one president after another, and hundreds of derelict-in-their-duty congress members, have simply decided on their own that a vague resolution, rubber-stamped while the rubble in New York was still smoking, authorizes each and every conflict in which America’s soldiers—and many more civilians—continue to die. This AUMF authorized the president to kill or capture those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, but, well, few of America’s current adversaries had anything to do with that.--Maj.DS

Maj. Danny Sjursen.


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Soldier Home (Part 2)

The point of this admittedly unsolicited memo is not to urge the Times to open a bureau in Terre Haute or in the rapidly melting Arctic. Nor am I implying that the paper should tone down its efforts to dismantle the hetero-normative order, empower women, and promote equality for transgender persons. Yet I do want to suggest that obsessing about this administration’s stupefying tomfoolery finds the Times overlooking one particular issue that predates and transcends the Trump Moment. That issue is the normalization of armed conflict, with your writers, editors, and editorial board having tacitly accepted that, for the United States, war has become a permanent condition.--AB

Andrew Bacevich.


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Flesh-Eaters

I don't have all that much generational ground to stand on myself, but I do want to counsel the kids to beware of something. The Democratic Party election and candidate addicts and operatives always try to wrap themselves around any grass-roots social movements. The idea is to channel the elemental popular energy into the standard, "elite"-coordinated path of an endless get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of some shiny, new, fake-resistance, hope-and-change-promising Democratic contender.

These major party parasites are already dogging the gun sanity kids with voter registration cards and candidate websites and other electoral seductions that have long made the Democratic Party the "graveyard of social movements." Their fake AstroTurf resistance must be resisted.--PS

The Dems as parasites; I like it.


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Excercise

Watching all these tournament basketball games has gotten me fired up to get off the couch and into the gym.

Relive my youth.

I guess my Medicare coverage will foot the membership costs, so why not?  Have to pay out-of-pocket and request reimbursement.  Okay, why not?

Okay, I'll have to get off my ass.  Why not?

I'm talking myself into it.  I'll have to start off slowly...very slowly, and why not?

I do the same thing when I see a great movie.  I tell myself I'll become an actor...why not?

There is no end to my delusions. Dare I ask, why not?

Nah, I think the gym thing is doable.  Signing up soon.


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Damn!

I'm trying to watch basketball but my WiFi is working like my liver--that is, barely.

I have the senior deal via Xfinity. Bad timing.

I might have to make the big X my Ex.


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1--16

This weekend's basketball upsets and humdingers are almost too much for my little brain and central nervous system to comprehend.

This might be the best tourney ever, what with the 1 and 16 upset of Virginia by a school in Baltimore called University of Maryland Baltimore County.

The school's website crashed today after millions tried to log on and figure out who the suspicious victors really are. (Could it be a Russian plot?)

I watched the game.  It was unbelievable.


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Kids Being the Adults

The kids walked out today.  Good on them.


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Slip Sliding Away

Implicit in the First Amendment is a fundamental belief that the governed are far more capable than the government of distinguishing truth from falsehood and that the government’s role is not to regulate the content of the marketplace but to ensure it remains open to all ideas; those true and not… radical or conventional.

That these legislators, their constituents or lobbyists are offended by the content of various stories, opinion pieces or documentaries published or aired by Al Jazeera is of no constitutional moment.  To the contrary, information deemed by some to be offensive propaganda is to others relevant and probative of issues to be contested and resolved in an open and free society.

To be sure, it is the friction between conflicting narratives and opinion that furthers the reach of freedom not dampens it. It is the conflict between voices that not only empowers those who partake in the debate or listen to it but ultimately strengthens society as a whole.

Under the First Amendment, people may elect to embrace or promote “radical” anti-American, anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic commentary or opinion; it is a choice left to them and them alone.  Neither the government nor any of its minions have the constitutional authority to limit access to information not in itself otherwise prohibited by law.--SLC

This is a first-rate overview of some of the historical First Amendment battles in the U.S.  During our time, when a lunatic president and his uneducated followers, an acquiescent Congress and a nation hypnotized by anti-Russian propaganda are working overtime to silence dissent--well, we must come to grips with the idea that important freedoms are slipping away.


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No Rain, No Rain!

Man, we had a few incredibly nice days here in the great Pacific Northwest.  The weekend and yesterday were terrific.  Plenty of blue sky and mild temps, just like Spring.

Alas, normalcy has returned.  It's raining.  The sky is as grey as my mood. 

Which came first?

(pictured, my home office)


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Norman's Books

Surrounded by books.


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Chaos

I think the NCAA basketball selection committee has gone the way of the CFP--that is, into the Stupid Zone.

Hacks are in charge.  Math freaks are in charge, toting their "metrics."

Political characters are in charge.

March Madness, like a 7-foot phenom, is for sale.

Start with the ACC, where 9 teams "earned" tourney berths.  Why?  USC is as good as half of those teams. USC of the PAC-12 was robbed.

There were many robberies, muggings, skulduggery everywhere.

Okie State was spurned after beating darlings Kansas (twice) and Trae Young's OU (twice).  Okie State also beat Florida State, one of the too many SEC teams anointed.

East coast bias has never been more profound than today.

Disgusting.  I've watched a lot of b-ball the last several days.  The March Madness Committee is fucked.

As I type this, the NIT is being announced. That's the tourney to watch this year.


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Shooters

After the usual shock and horror, my reaction after hearing about the latest United States mass shooting perpetrated by a demented white male with an assault weapon was, sad to say, “Here we go again.” I waited for the standard cycle to run its depressing course.--PS

You're obliged to read this.


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Spare Me

The things that will bug me, or otherwise infuriate me, between now and the end of March Madness.

1) Dick Vitale's motormouth and utter shamelessness, his habitual hype.

2) Jennifer Garner's Capital One commercials, which collectively are the worst in advertising history.

3) Joe Lunardi's faux expertise and ignorant bracketology.


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Schedule

Uh oh, I have time management issues popping up again these days.

Need to arrange my schedule around assembling another book of my writings, the basketball tourneys that are in full bloom, reading/research projects, and watching the movies I've checked out of the library.

My computer's ROM drive collapsed a couple of years ago.  I put it off for a long time, but I finally broke down and purchased an external DVD player.

Now there aren't enough hours in the day to do all the things that need be done.  All the things I need to do to feel good about existence, such as it is.

O, woe!


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The Real State of the Union

President Trump ordered the Pentagon to start planning a military parade on Veteran’s Day this November. Trump wants to outdo the military parade he attended in France on Bastille Day. Estimates are it could cost up to $50 million. The last military parade was after the Gulf War in 1991.

A coalition of groups is organizing to oppose the parade.--KZ--MF

Sign the petition.


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Sad Story

They met on a rainy morning several years ago, at the base of the Helmsley Building in Midtown Manhattan. As others hurried to work, Pamela J. Dearden, an executive with JPMorgan Chase, noticed a woman, unperturbed by the rain or her surroundings, standing on a 36-square-foot sidewalk grate she had chosen as her home.

Ms. Dearden, known to everyone as P.J., offered her umbrella to the woman, who took it and thanked her.--BW

There are literally thousands of untold stories like this one spread across our land.  In fact, this is a big reason why our country is not so "exceptional" as certain types would claim it to be.

Unless they mean exceptionally neglectful, which they do not.


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Hoop Dreams Redux

With a handful of conference champions already picked for March Madness, more are set to be determined this week.

The Big Ten Conference held its tournament championship a week early this year, giving that conference's teams an instant advantage when preparing for the national tourney next week.  Teams such as Michigan and Purdue will have extra days of rest in preparation, as will the teams from the mid-majors who have historically produced their champions a week earlier than the majors.

Oregon had an abysmally inconsistent year, so my Ducks won't be in the national picture after making it to the Final Four last season.

That is, unless the Ducks do the improbable and win the PAC championship by winning four more beginning on Wed.

Whatever, despite the obvious corruption that rules college ball these days, I'll take in as many games as I can until boredom blocks me.

I'm as ready as I can be, with a slate of games starting tonight and running through Sunday's Selection Day announcements.

Meanwhile, the Oregon women's team has nailed the PAC championship by routing perennial power Stanford.

There are a handful of teams nationally that are better than Oregon, including U Conn, but maybe the women can get to the final?



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Rachel Maddow is Stupid--and Dangerous

The evidence is damning. And the silence underscores the arrogance.

More than seven weeks after a devastating report from the media watch group FAIR, top executives and prime-time anchors at MSNBC still refuse to discuss how the network’s obsession with Russia has thrown minimal journalistic standards out the window.--NS

Norman Solomon undresses Maddow and MSNBC.


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