Summer almost gone, and Captain Future
already has new Space Cadets to train.
Don't they get younger every year?

The Daily Quote

"One must think like a hero to be a decent human being."
May Sarton

Free Speech? You Can't Even Buy It

Television networks have been living off the twin notions that paid advertising is free speech, and that in order to speak freely, you have to pay. All those millions corrupting the US political process, all those officeseekers and office holders who are wholly owned by big money interests and their "lobbyists" who not only dictate laws but write them, they all wind up in the pockets of the media, mostly television.

Is it free speech if everyone doesn't have equal access? Apparently not. What's even worse however, is that not everyone has equal access even if they show them the money.

For years, TV networks in Canada and the US refused to air anti-consumption and pro-environment ads sponsored by adbusters magazine. Nobody noticed. But two new instances are attracting a bit more attention.

One is the Gold Star Mothers For Peace who tried to buy time for a powerful 15 second statement by Cindy Sheehan. Several TV stations refused, one of them, a CBS affiliate in Boise, because the ad was not "factually accurate."

This sets a standard of truth that few of its commercials could meet, not to mention the Swift Boat ads lying about John Kerry. But even with that standard, the burden of proof for Bush's lies isn't hard to meet.

The ad is being shown on CNN, and is available for viewing at various sites on the Internet, including truthout.

Another troubling case is the networks refusing to air ads critical of the networks' lack of coverage of the Sudan and other African human crises. The Sheehan ad instance is craven, pandering to the rich and powerful who will buy more ads than the Gold Star Mothers for Peace ever will. But this instance is sheer cowardice. If the fact of the networks almost totally ignoring genocide and starvation in favor of celebrity gossip isn't evidence enough, their censoring of ads because they tell the truth about their failure completes the picture of their corruption.

News Note: Captain Future's commentary on election reform and the Great Vacationer (posted here at Dreaming Up Daily) was frontpaged over at epluribus media this week.

Summer Reading (Sometimes)

It’s hard to get behind the idea of beach reading in a place where it seldom breaks 70F, and the beach is as apt to be windy or foggy as not. Don’t get me wrong, we love our beaches, they’re never crowded and quite close by, but though I’ve read on the beach once or twice, I was fully clothed. With a thermos of hot coffee by my side.

So the fact that I actually did some summer reading this summer has almost nothing to do with summer, just with the impulse.

MORE HERE

A Mythology of the Future

“We’re here to remember one of the heroes of the Scottish culture,” begins Black, festooned in a red Enterprise uniform T-shirt and speaking in a Glaswegian burr, as he takes the microphone. “Cmdr. Montgomery Scott—Scotty.”

A ripple of laughter washes through the audience at the pub. Black pauses in mock ignorance.

“Why are you all laughing?” he asks mischievously.”

Most myths are set in the past, implying that the age of heroes and defining deeds is in the remote long ago. This is especially appropriate for certain kinds of myths, such as explanations of how the world or a people came to be; the foundation stories of a culture. But in the modern era, a belief in progress through time made myths of the future possible.

Because our age is characterized by looking ahead, and because the future has always been essential to the American identity, our culture is also defined by myths of the future. It may well be that our foundation mythology is the mythology of the future.

MORE HERE

Arcata sunset. Kowinski photo

The Daily Quote

“As I used to tell my [writing] apprentices, what you want most is intelligent praise. If you can’t have intelligent praise, you’ll take stupid praise. If you can’t have stupid praise, then the third-best thing is intelligent criticism. And, of course, the worst thing is stupid criticism.”
John Barth

Crime Pays It Forward

The business of a big company called ChoicePoint is running background checks for lots of other big companies, so they have a huge database of records full of personal and sensitive information. In fact, the Los Angeles Times reports, the company claims it has “the largest private collection of court records, Social Security numbers and other public and personal data in the country.”

But some 150,000 of those records were “released to identity thieves.” Now if you think this would be a shameful lapse, especially embarrassing to a company in the security business, well---that just shows why you aren’t in the security business. Because it wasn't an embarrassment---it was a business opportunity!

People who were worried about what information of theirs these identity thieves got were told by ChoicePoint, sure, coming right up---for a price.

Yes, ChoicePoint chose to sell to victims the information it sold to the thieves. Only in the case of the victims, it was information about themselves they already knew. They just needed to know who else knows it. Talk about creating a new market.

ChoicePoint is not alone in this new "service" (Create the need, create the product: that's America). Consumer agencies also report that many such companies as well as credit agencies are using their vulnerability to data theft to sell consumers extra protection packages. Maybe it’s extra code, maybe it’s extortion, but it sure seems in character.

The Nixon approval curve in yellow; the GW Bush approval curve in purple.

Deconstructing GW

Do you remember those “Saturday Night Live” sketches during the weeks after the 2000 election when the result was still in doubt? One of them showed GW in the White House, looking shell shocked, hiding under his desk as part of his office was on fire, because he’d screwed up so badly.

It may be a little like that in the White House now (or it would be, if he were there.) The American Research Group survey shows his approval rating is at 36%, a point lower than Nixon’s after the Watergate hearings and impeachment hearings, and just before he resigned.

Iraq, a tragedy wrapped in a debacle inside denial-dipped arrogance, is a big part of the reason. For Bush v. the Mayor of Salt Lake City, and deconstructed by an Iraqi woman blogger, read on.

MORE HERE

fallen redwood, CA North Coast. Kowinski photo

The Daily Quote

Infinite gratitude towards all things past,
Infinite service to all things present,
Infinite responsibility to all things future.

The Zen Life, as described to Huston Smith,
quoted to Bill Moyers

The Perfect Storm?

High gas prices are already affecting the US economy, and several other events may be about to combine to create what some are calling the Perfect Storm that could sink this economy and who knows what else before it’s through.

A storm of its own was created on several of the bluish community blogs with a post and lots and lots of comments revealing that a change in law about to go into effect in October may well mean that credit card minimum payment requirements will be instantly doubled.

MORE HERE

Happy birthday, Ray Bradbury, author of "Fahrenheit 451," basis for a film by Francois Truffaut starring JULIE CHRISTIE (in three roles, as pictured here.)

Cumulative Impact

It’s been just about nine years since I drove that big Ryder truck off 101 and into Arcata. I’ve lived in a number of different places but except for where I grew up, I’ve never lived anywhere else for this long.

If every cell in your body is replaced in seven years, this place is a big part of me now. I can’t say I’ve ever felt quite at home here, and though it makes me sigh even as I type it, I know it’s partly my own doing, or not doing. But maybe not all.

Anyway, one of the first “jobs” I had here (it’s in parens because I never actually got paid for it, as the promise turned into a hope even before I was finished) was writing a couple of drafts of the script for a video called “Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact,” including the final draft. I was reminded of this by a news item this week.

MORE HERE

The Daily Quote

“Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.”
Nietzsche

He was elected President of the U.S. in 2000

He probably was elected President in 2004 (due mostly no doubt to that great slogan---wonder who thought that up?)

He became President and kept being President, so now he's set a presidential record...

President Gore, President Kerry and the Great Vacationer

If you thought Bush wasn't the best at anything, and especially if you thought he was actually elected President, you really ought to read this...

STORY HERE

Random Notes

In Dreaming Up Daily News, Captain Future's essay on the European Dream was a front page feature on the European Tribune blog, receiving many thoughtful comments and several compliments.

That was the Captain's second front page in a week. His "No Place to Hide" on climate crisis news was featured at the Booman Tribune under the title, "Today's Story That Will Be Remembered in 50 Years," or something like that.

The Vigil: At our Arcata CA vigil supporting Cindy Sheehan on Wednesday, some 200 people gathered with candles (another vigil was held in Eureka six or so miles away.) There hadn't been much publicity, most people seemed to have learned about it on the Internet. A woman stamped money for you with the words "Bush Lied, Thousands Died," while her friend stood nearby, smiling sadly, wearing a small sign about the size of a nametag that said, "When Clinton lied, nobody died." And he was impeached for that. Does anybody remember that? What a country.

Candles look great at twilight---everybody should carry them around every evening. There were children, a few students (Humboldt State doesn't start up till Monday, and Arcata' s population will double overnight) and lots of the Vietnam generation. One veteran (of the Coast Guard and the Vietnam antiwar movement) said something I've been quoting ever since: "Cindy Sheehan is the Rosa Parks of the antiwar movement." Think about it, read the Captain's take on it, and listen to what's changing in this country...

Note to U.S.: Look out. Up here in far far northern CA we usually have the highest gasoline prices in the contiguous states. But when a gallon passed $2 (not so many weeks ago) and the rest of the nation followed, we may have traded our title of anomaly for that of bellwhether.

So fair warning: a gallon of premium is $3.13 (yes, that's US dollars ), "plus" is $3.03, and regular is hovering just below the Big Three Buck barrier. Only a question of time (like tomorrow probably) before the price rises, the barrier falls and...who knows what? (Hint: Wal Mart profits are down.)

Eagles, tree, mountains...photo by Flo Shepard

The Daily Quote

"If nature is not a prison and earth a shoddy way-station, we must find the faith and force to affirm its metabolism as our own---or rather, our own as part of it. To do so means nothing less than a shift in our whole frame of reference and our attitude toward life itself, a wider perception of the landscape as a creative, harmonious being where relationships of things are as real as the things. Without losing our sense of a great human destiny and without intellectual surrender, we must affirm that the world is a being, a part of our own body."
Paul Shepard

Re-Wilding: Welcome to Pleistocene Park

When I saw this, I couldn’t help thinking of Paul Shepard, and the Ghost Dance vision of Leslie Marmon Silko.

Cornell scientists have come up with a wild idea. The Guardian describes it:

A bold conservation plan dubbed "Pleistocene Park" could see lions, cheetahs and elephants roaming America's Great Plains, it was revealed today.

Scientists have put forward a serious proposal to repopulate parts of North America with modern ancestors of wild animals that became extinct there about 10,000 years ago.

During the Pleistocene era, between 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, North America's ecosystems were far more diverse than they are today.

Big cats such as the American cheetah (Acinonyx trumani) and American lion (Panthera leo atrox) once roamed the plains, as did mammoths, mastodons, wild horses and the first camels.

The plan envisaged by scientists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, would see these lost creatures replaced with present-day counterparts, including Asian and African elephants, lions, cheetahs, Bactrian camels, feral horses, and wild asses.

Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell, said: "If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts. But if people hear the one-hour version, they realise they haven't thought about this as much as we have.

"Right now, we are investing all of our megafauna hopes on one continent - Africa."
The "rewilding" scheme, outlined in the journal Nature, would unfold in several phases. To start with, small numbers of animals, including elephants and lions, would be released on private land.

Each step would be carefully guided by the fossil record and scientific assessments of the environmental impact. Ultimately, one or more "ecological history parks" covering vast areas of economically depressed parts of the Great Plains would be opened up.

As in Africa, perimeter fencing would limit the movement of elephants and large carnivores that might endanger human settlements.

It’s an amazing idea. I’m not sure if the late human ecologist Paul Shepard would have approved of the specifics, but he’d have to be smiling at the general intent and the boldness of it.

Shepard believed that our species not only became human in the Pleistocene, but that we are still Pleistocene beings, and we need what they needed. Moreover, so does the planet.

Except for collections of essays, Paul’s last book was Coming Home to the Pleistocene, edited by his widow, Florence Shepard. We later collaborated on a web site dedicated to his work, which you can find here.

“Coming Home” was something of an updating of the first of his prophetic and earth-shaking trilogy (as I think of it) The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, after which followed Thinking Animals and Nature and Madness. All are available in new paperback editions from the U. of Georgia Press.

“Tender Carnivore” was published in the early 1970s, a time of big ideas, and part of what Shepard proposed as an ecologically and psychologically sound future for the US was to keep most of the human population on the coasts and allow the interior of the continent to return to wildness.

Towards the end of Leslie Marmon Silko’s great novel, Almanac of the Dead, a contemporary Native scholar talks about the Ghost Dance vision of a continent returned to its pre-conquest state. Although this is usually interpreted as a vain dream if not a kind of sacrilege against progress, he pointed out that in many ways it’s already happening. Vast areas of the American west are depopulating, and the landscape that hasn’t been severely damaged is returning to wildness.

I'm sure there are reasons not to do it this way, but Pleistocene Park has a ring to it. (Why do I hear Freddie Cannon singing the theme?) As the Guardian points out, it sounds a lot like “Jurassic Park” and so this is probably a selling name. But maybe there’s a part of it that could be named the Paul Shepard Prairie, and another the Ghost Dance plains.

Cindy Sheehan meets the farmer and veteran who donates land for relocated Camp Casey---right across from Bush's church in Crawford

The Daily Quote

“Political consciousness isn’t only in the political world. Doesn’t it have to begin with soul?”
James Hillman

It Takes A Mother

Cindy Sheehan began as a news item, was speedily inflamed into a controversy, and is fast becoming a phenomenon, maybe even a legend.

Before all of that, she was a mother---the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. That seems to be the center of her power over the American imagination at the moment.

The American penchant for the cult of personality can be disquieting, contending forces inflating virtues and flaws with equal vehemence. But even with that caution, that sense of unease, this phenomenon is amazing.

This is not a celebrity. This is not another pretty face. But this achingly real person is becoming the central symbol in a still expanding national drama.

She is the center of a storm of strong feelings on both sides, and despite contending pundits and bloggers, the real difference right now is that the usually anonymous American public is becoming part of this.

Just the past 24 hours illustrate this: a presumably angry opponent of her protest drove over a number symbolic grave markers with a pickup truck---wooden crosses with the names of Americans killed in Iraq---that was part of the Camp Casey protest site outside Crawford, Texas. And shortly after that, a farmer who owns a larger piece of land nearby offered its use to Cindy Sheehan so Camp Casey could be relocated. He is a veteran and had supported her silently, until the crosses were run down.

Materials for shelters there are being supplied by renegade soldiers at nearby Fort Hood, apparently where Casey Sheehan was trained or posted. Dealing with the heat as well as the growing corps of media is the constant challenge.

Meanwhile the number of protestors in Crawford grows every hour, and George Bush is stuck a few miles away at his ranch, because to leave before the scheduled end of his vacation several weeks from now would be to admit defeat.

Among the expected arrivals is another Gold Star mother, whose son was killed in Iraq. More may follow. Those reporting from the scene say that many participants have lost loved ones in Iraq, or have loved ones there now.

Demonstrations in support of Cindy Sheehan have occurred already in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. Move On is sponsoring candlelight vigils in cities and towns all over the country for tonight (Wednesday). Information can be found here.

Code Pink, which is a principal sponsor of this rolling event, is involved in organizing antiwar demonstrations in Washington in late September.

This is an unprecedented event, awesome if for only that reason. Nothing like this happened all the years of Vietnam. Whether the Rabid Right sensed this might happen, or their quick barrage of vicious character assassination helped create this phenomenon, the fact is that one American mother has become the symbol for the revolt of the usually voiceless, united with others heartfelt in their opposition to this war.

But as much as the Bushhead apologists would like to shift the focus onto favorite targets, what they must fear about this is the participation and leadership of families who have so far silently given up their young to a war begun by the arrogant and powerful, who sacrifice nothing and expected to reap the spoils.

Time to Wake Up to the European Dream

Americans as a rule know little about Europe, possibly even less than Europeans knew about America a half century ago, when Europeans seemed to think Al Capone was still running Chicago and cowboys roamed the West....On the other hand, maybe they were onto something.

Today’s American ignorance is less innocent. Along with the smug complacency and disbelief that we Americans could possibly learn anything from foreign lands, our ignorance of today’s Europe consists of holdover imagery carefully nurtured by big business Repubs, neocons who don’t want their delusions of empire spoiled by the hard-earned insights of Europe, and rabid rightists who certainly don’t want Americans to see European economic successes, particularly the vibrant manufacturing coupled with strong labor unions, universal health care and other social support---and workers with greater job security, shorter work week and more vacations!

Consider this: the nation with the highest labor costs in the world is also the world's champion exporter. And it's in Europe.

MORE HERE

Captain Future returns to the Past to revisit hair

The Daily Quote

“Something in us pursues information and data with some passion, but the soul is always eager to hear another story.”
Thomas Moore