look out, ill informed observations from a non-pundit.
despite the near hysterical noise to signal ratio emanating from the democratic primary punditocracy and their conservative brothers and sisters in arms ranting across the blogosphere and polluting the nation's consciousness with minute by minute campaign horserace nonsense, i venture the following forecast.

1. hillary clinton cannot beat barack obama for the democratic nomination except by creating turmoil within the party that will fatally compromise her own potential candidacy
2. if hillary clinton uses this turmoil strategy to steal the democratic nomination, john mccain will beat her decisively in the general election
   
3. if obama takes the democratic nomination before the democratic convention, he is unbeatable against mccain
4. many superdelegates who endorsed clinton early in the race have "buyer's remorse" and will switch to obama, but are respectfully waiting the end of the primaries until they switch
5. the best outcome for the democrats is for obama to conclude the primary season on June 3rd with a simple majority in pledged delegates and popular vote, and for the remaining superdelegates who are not obligated to be neutral until the convention to endorse clinton or obama, leading to an obama trifecta: a majority of superdelegates, pledged delegates and popular vote and a lock on the nomination
   

clinton cannot win the democratic nomination, she can only "steal" it.
the delegate math is against clinton. she cannot win the pledged delegates and she cannot win the popular vote, even with michigan and florida. of the remaining 10 states obama will take north carolina, oregon and montana, and will remain close enough in the popular vote in the rest of them (and may even win some) to finish the campaign in first place for both pledged delegates and popular vote. adding in michigan and florida may close the delegate and vote gap somewhat for clinton, but not by enough to get her into first place. with obama blocking her path to a delegate or popular vote victory, her only route to the nomination is to overwhelm obama among the remaining superdelegates and to also seize pledged delegates from obama. but obama has the momentum to fight to the finish for at least a draw if not an outright victory on the superdelegates, which will give him the nomination as a stone cold fact, regardless of the clinton spin. this will all be apparent by the middle of june.

btw, clinton surrogates who plead the "big state/electoral college" case are living in a parallel universe where basic logic does not apply.
just because clinton ekes out narrow primary wins in a few big states does not mean those states are automatic "clinton or mccain but not obama" victories in the general election. what are these people smoking? do they really think voters are that stupid? (sadly, yes, they do.) the two issues are unrelated, and the only people trying to connect them are pundits and partisans desperately spinning tall tales to justify the clinton candidacy.

compare clinton and obama on campaign management skills.
clinton -- relieved original campaign manager in february when obama blew past her after super tuesday, had to float an emergency personal loan of $5 million to her campaign to cover a cashflow crisis, recurring problems keeping bill clinton on a short leash and her chief strategist had to step down due to a conflict of interest.
obama -- same campaign management team for 15 months, with no cashflow problems.

if clinton steals the nomination, mccain will crush her.
clinton may think she's a fighter, but a hillary v. mccain election will have negative liberal excitement (due to the theft of the nomination from obama, which can only be accomplished with a chaotic and mano a mano land war among democratic delegates). clinton's presence at the top of the ticket will energize the conservative base, which will mobilize to defeat her, while the democrats will lack an energized liberal base due to the clinton carjacking of the nomination. against this national backdrop of chaos and disunity on the left and apparent stability on the right, the broad mass of "undecideds" (i.e., the people who believe -- wrongly -- that there is no difference between republicans and democrats) will break to the right of center candidate based on a last minute "lesser of evils" decision.

the real story of this election is shown by obama's fundraising superiority.
it is not the total dollars that matter, it is how they are gathered. obama has perfected the web 2.0 strategy (first hinted at by howard dean in 2004), which speaks directly to the emerging ipod/youtube majority. it's not just old media that is smashed, it is old patronage systems. obama is broadcasting from a new bully pulpit that disintermediates old media and old fundraising. listen to the clinton bundlers complain about how they should be allowed to make back room deals to force their candidate on the party. they remind me of the music titans (the riaa) suing their customers. obama doesn't need campaign bundlers. and that's just the campaign finance side of the question. neither clinton nor mccain can touch obama on the social networking side. visit the three websites and you'll see mccain and clinton broadcasting top down messages from a 1990s paradigm while the obama website orchestrates a nationwide community movement based on agile, modern social networking principles.

connect the dots.
once he has the nomination, obama's organizational supremacy will unleash on the general population a 50 state voter registration drive. the old list of "battleground" states will be swept away by the ruthless demographics of democratic party access to large pools of previously inactive voters. the good news is that in many districts the intolerant and hate-baiting anti-immigrant conservatives will be buried by the unification of tolerant middle americans with millions of new voters. the obama voter surge will bury mccain, and the obama coattails will be long and broad and deep, reaching deep into previously republican precincts. obama's insurgent strategy, if well executed, will bury the old electoral college map with a new reality. obama is the only candidate poised to make this victory sweep across the electorate; neither mccain nor clinton are viable modern brands because they are burdened with the baggage of old politics. this is the magical, once in a lifetime opportunity presented to the democrats by the obama candidacy. nominate obama and the reagan southern strategy is dead and buried. nominate obama and a new generation is handed the reins of power. nominate clinton and blow off the opportunity for a paradigm shift to a new democratic majority by running blindly after clinton's second wave feminist stunt, a mirage and a cul-de-sac that changes none of the social power paradigms.

if clinton seizes the nomination, the obama web 2.0 strategy is dead for this election cycle.
this kind of momentum is not fungible. the new voters who are energized by obama are not energized by clinton, who is dogged by old negatives, who is not multi-racial, who is not young and who has conspicuous truthiness troubles. clinton seizing the nomination by what is essentially a back room deal will be momentum killing. combined with the high negatives of clinton, this will hand the election to mccain. the broad middle of americans, given a choice between mccain or clinton, will break for mccain -- they have seen the clinton brand in action before and it was not pretty. mccain will bask in the anti-clinton glow, it will be a gift to the conservatives, it will energize their base, and clinton and the democrats will lose.

the long nomination fight is good for the party.
there is no emergency to make a snap decision before the last ten democratic primaries are held. the intense and historic battle is necessary to stress test obama's candidacy in order to effectively annihilate the old political order (i.e., major donors dictate who gets to be a candidate). letting obama waltz to the nomination without a fierce fight would be like teaching your teenager to drive by never leaving the parking lot, by never practicing in real traffic. for the democrats to be unified, the losing side (clinton and her second wave feminists) has to be soundly and fairly beaten. this is being accomplished by the shock and awe phase of the new paradigm, demonstrating its ability to mobilize voters and to overwhelm the old fundraising patronage system. and second wave feminists, by definition, are stuck in a paradigm that expired in the 1980s. this is an excellent wake up call for all the old white ladies who mistakenly think it is now "their" turn, as if the universe is fair and balanced on this point. the best candidate for the democrats is obama, because he unifies all the democratic themes, while clinton uses identity politics to divide democrats.

in june the majority of superdelegates will break for obama.
obama is the stronger organizer with the wider network. obama has ridden an insurgent candidacy built on a grass roots base. superdelegates are keenly aware of the value of this approach to each local democratic contest. in general, the pursuit of superdelegates is more like a caucus event than a primary event, which favors the obama organizing superiority. after the last primaries in the first week of june, gore and carter will lead the torrent of superdelegate endorsements for obama. dozens of clinton superdelegates with "buyer's remorse" will switch to obama. the final superdelegate tally will not be close. bill clinton will throw more private tantrums, but that will just be the final nail in the coffin. and hillary clinton will be left with her promise to fight all the way to the convention while obama secures more than enough delegates to convincingly clinch the nomination. clinton will have to concede by july 1 for the good of the party. she will have no choice, because her followers will tell her to stand down for the good of the party.

mccain cannot beat obama.
this is a classic mismatch, like clinton v. dole in 1996. it will not be close. mccain's lobbyist led effort will lack the social networking agility and fundraising prowess of obama's modern grassroots machine. despite his sensible approach to foreign and immigration policy, mccain's anti-woman and anti-science pandering to the religious right will lose him credibility with middle americans, and his conservative nonsense on the economy will scare both main street and wall street. and mccain will struggle to fill 5,000 seat venues, while obama will be greeted like a rock star in 20,000 seat stadiums. after his drubbing, mccain will return to the senate with honor, while the democratic majority will grow in both houses.

the obama presidency will be the beginning of a new century for the american dream. that's my uninformed mark in the sand. now let's watch things unfold.

posted by Will Ross at 10:46

"people have the power to dream, to rule, to wrestle the world from fools"
-- patti smith
posted by Will Ross at 10:11

dangerous squalor
compassionless people live a skin deep life, where empty slogans (for example, "tax relief" or "defend marriage" or "reverse discrimination") are cultural scams to protect the arrogant from the dangerous squalor lurking like inconvenient details in our culture's brutal conquering march across history. the current world champ of compassionless cronyism is george w. bush, the least capable president of my lifetime, a man who parties and vacations while sending our national guard to die in iraq for a war he started just because he could. the conservative media cannot figure out how to criticize the shallow figurehead bush presidency they have helped create. far from being the most powerful position on the planet, george w. bush is a visionless shill from the petroleum industry. he rushes from one cynical photo-op to another, acting as if he cares when his actions clearly show otherwise (example - cutting benefits for veterans while waging war with reservists and the national guard; or how about letting policy hacks alter inconvenient scientific conclusions). the bush presidency is one long media sideshow trying to spin away the disastrous impact of our obsessive elitism. there's no nice way to say it: my country is run by people who lack concern for the impoverished and the unfortunate. the clearest current expression of this malaise is the arrogant, corporate and compassionless presidency of george w. bush.

what reputation do we deserve as a nation when we allow our public education system and our economy to knowingly (intentionally?) slough off a huge underclass of apparently discardable lives? the answer is simple, as long as there is no natural disaster or emergency, "we" (who have the personal and cultural resources to plan and buy a path out of harm's way) act like nothing is wrong, like it's perfectly natural for aggressive beggars to roam our streets, for fifty million residents to live without health insurance, or millions of children to go to bed hungry.

but when a disaster like the flooding of new orleans hits, the impoverished untouchable class whom we have abandoned for generations is left stranded on rooftops and overpasses to die of neglect in full view of the world's media. this conspicuous failure is our report card as the richest nation in the world. apparently we're not smart enough to prepare for a predictable tragedy when a major city is built below sea level on the delta of a massive river as it empties into one of the world's great hurricane zones. we deserve to be slammed by history for the depth of our denial. the bungled response to the flooding in new orleans is a national disgrace.

how do we care for our most vulnerable citizens? apparently, we don't care at all, or if we do it's just enough to feel good about how generous we are. too bad it's not enough "care" to actually construct a safety net for the unwanted, but that seems to be our situation in a nutshell: we have allowed ourselves the inexcusable luxury of discardable citizens. oh we'll throw public tantrums in defense of the unborn, but meanwhile we punish the living with lives of misery, squalor and oppression. and now, watching those we have dispossessed as they expire on camera in the ultimate reality programming, we see in a mirror just how compassionate we are not. suddenly, those gaping holes in our safety net are coughing up corpses on prime time. our neighbors we find so convenient to ignore while we live in self-important affluence turn out to be directly in harm's way during emergenices. this is the danger of ignoring the squalor in our midst.
posted by Will Ross at 07:16

my deep blue neighborhood
my rural precinct in the "deep end" of anderson valley voted 76% for senator kerry (344 out of 451 votes).
the entire valley (all three precincts) voted 74% for senator kerry (740 out of 1005 votes).
results for other races were similar, with liberals steamrolling to huge local landslide victories.
color us deep blue, unrepentant liberals.
posted by Will Ross at 04:56

let's play "who's the traitor?"
it's an enchanting parlour game in which partisans on separate teams use character assassination to attempt the personal destruction of members of the opposing team. here's the basic move:   if your team can bait an opponent to react angrily rather than civilly, then you get to label your opponent a traitor (and for good measure, a fool and a poor sport). the real fun begins once each side accuses the other of being a traitor. at that point civil discourse breaks down and increased distrust between partisan sides accomplishes the functional equivalent of a successful terrorist attack. who needs terrorists when we can accomplish just as much social chaos with outrageously self-indulgent personal attacks masqueading as debate?

questioning the patriotism of americans is this decade's equivalent of red baiting from the mccarthy era. with bush's narrow victory at the hands of an ill-informed electorate, look for the divisiveness and mean spirited attacks to get worse. and who profits from rude american discord? can you do the math on this one in your head?
posted by Will Ross at 06:37

fringe opinions get a free ride
the columbia journalism review features blinded by science, written by chris mooney.

A climate scientist faced with a reporter locked into the "get both sides" mindset risks getting his or her views stuffed into one of two boxed storylines: "we're worried" or "it will all be okay." And sometimes, these two "boxes" are misrepresentative; a mainstream, well-established consensus may be "balanced" against the opposing views of a few extremists, and to the uninformed, each position seems equally credible.

as if it was needed, this is more evidence that our poorly informed culture continues to ignore critical thinking skills. the funny part about all of this recurring foolishness in the faux delivery of "fair and balanced" consumables for the public discourse is that careful readers with critical thinking skills can correctly parse the doublespeak that passes for mass marketed amercan journalism without batting an eye. the old grey lady can win pulitzers for pushing lies and bury the retraction months later, but careful readers with correctly functioning mental sieves do not miss these nuggets. sadly, critical thinkers are obviously in the voting minority or else we would not be so busy inflicting pax bush-americana on the rest of the planet.
posted by Will Ross at 19:07

princeton's purple voting map
red + blue = purple. here's a 2004 election map where the winner does not take all, courtesy of princeton math professor robert vanderbei.
posted by Will Ross at 04:53

herbicide resistant coca?
a suggestive but inconclusive article by joshua davis in wired magazine describes boliviana negra, a new strain of coca plant selected by local farmers to resist american anti-drug aerial herbicide spraying.

Three hours after leaving the coca fields, I attend a meeting of two dozen heads of local farmer cooperatives - they represent more than 5,000 farmers in Putumayo - and they nod knowingly when asked about the new breed. "Nobody listens to us because they think we are dumb farmers," says one man. "The Americans are arrogant. They don't talk to the people who live here. We are the ones who are sprayed. We are the ones who live with the plants."

does the u.s. government's misguided coca eradication policy now provide free weed control for columbian coca fields?
posted by Will Ross at 20:04

hope deferred
kerry came close, but not close enough. this result just goes to show how much more work there is to do, though the heavy lifting will really fall on the shoulders of my children's generation. for what it's worth, this is my first apology to the next generation for the mess we are leaving them. my generation behaves like a bad guest. my country is drunk on some very strange brew. as i have done in nine previous presidential elections, when the ballots were counted i woke up wednesday morning to find the ballot i cast on the losing side of the race for the white house. this is the story of my life long dissent from the tyranny of the majority. i remain unapologetic for my belief in the possibility of an america that really does deliver on the dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all its citizens, not just for a privileged few.
posted by Will Ross at 10:58

hope is on the way
today is the 55th presidential election day in america. peggy and i voted early this morning. we were both on the phone last night with our kids going over the ballot propositions in detail. we agreed on 13 of the 16 propositions, and we agreed to disagree on the remaining three. on the national election we're clearly both kerry partisans. i have a kerry bumper sticker on my truck. kerry is not my first choice, but bush has been a complete disaster for this country and for the world. this is the day we've been waiting for: 11/2/04: the end of an error.

our rural polling place is the dining room at the anderson valley grange. until the march 2004 primary election we used punchcard ballots. in march mendocino county switched to optically scanned paper ballots, an excellent interim voting technology choice which provides a verifiable, manually recountable paper trail, and a big improvement over the discredited punch cards. the optical ballot is a paper card with ovals beside each office or proposition. filling in the oval with a black felt tip pen indicates the vote. after filling it out, the voter inserts the ballot into the optical scanner, perched like a small office machine beside the table where the poll workers sit. like similar devices, the scanner grabs the ballot and briskly sucks it inside. it is a fairly routine and understandable mechanical device.

today the grange was more crowded with voters than usual. while my ballot was being issued, a man was being taught how to insert his completed ballot into the optical scanner. "hmmmm," i thought as i walked to a polling booth, "he must not have voted in the primary." or he could have voted absentee (giving him the benefit of the doubt). i marked my ballot and walked towards the scanner. another man was being taught how to insert his ballot into the scanner. when it grabbed the ballot from him he jumped and blurted out, "whoa!" i didn't need any instruction to insert the ballot, because i had used the same system in the march election. what's interesting to me in this very small sample from my polling place is the presence of people voting in this election who did not vote in the last election. or at least did not vote in person.

i'm looking forward to the results tonight. my hope is that the obsessively publicised national polls showing a close race in an evenly divided country will be far wrong, that senator kerry will post a convincing and clean win in spite of the many republican dirty tricks, and that tomorrow the hand wringing can begin over the wretchedly wrong tracking polls used by the media to sell their dead heat horse race circus stories. dead heat? dead wrong. or so i hope.
posted by Will Ross at 09:31

kendra's next school
in january kendra travels to australia to attend southern cross university at lismore by the border of queensland and new south wales. more on this later.
posted by Will Ross at 23:59

memorial for edward b. lewis
on monday 25 october peggy and i were fortunate to attend a memorial service in beckman auditorium at caltech for edward b. lewis, one of the foremost geneticists of the 20th century. we were invited to this rare gathering by keith lewis, ed's son and a close friend of mine from high school decades ago in the seventies in pasadena. keith also invited my brothers brian and darrell, in light of many youthful adventures we managed to survive together. (in some future post i'll recount my 21st birthday, where brian and i were invited by the bartender to leave the vananda tavern on texada island due to our unruly behavior. keith lewis, also in attendance, was sober enough to help us hitchike back to our campsite that night down the island near davies bay.)

dr. lewis, who was 86 when he passed away, won the nobel prize in 1995 for his ground breaking work in the field of developmental genetics. he first proposed a concept we now take for granted: specific sections on a gene control development of specific portions of an organism, based on his detailed studies of the bithorax complex.

the memorial ceremony honoring dr. lewis was a wonderful and upbeat event. speakers and attendees included some of the best geneticists on the planet. numerous nobel prize winners were on hand. personally i enjoyed the symmetry of simply sitting at an event in beckman auditorium involving ed lewis. this was my second time in beckman; the first was in the early 1970s at an awesome lecture on mayan mathematics by richard feynman, which i attended as a guest of ed and pam lewis.

during his turn at the podium, keith's older brother hugh told a fascinating story of one night when his father got him up before dawn. hugh was five or six years old. it was probably 1949 or 1950. they stood in the street and watched the eastern horizon until there was a flash in the sky. his father told hugh the flash was an above ground nuclear test, and it was a very bad thing that had to be stopped. in the 1950s dr. lewis drew the ire of american political hacks for speaking out about the link between radiation and cancer. his understanding of radiation and genetics led him to dissent against prevailing views on the hazards of radiation. fifty years later dr. lewis's dissenting views are now accepted as the truth. in the late 1950s he joined linus pauling, another nobel prize winning professor from caltech, and others in public opposition to above ground nuclear testing. during his moving remembrance of his father, hugh lewis publicly thanked caltech for the academic freedom they provided to his father as a scientist in pursuit of the truth.

the ceremony was closed by a stunning performance on flute by dr. lewis's music teacher, patricia farrell, from the san francisco opera.
posted by Will Ross at 22:42

"it'll be kerry by a landslide"
at the burbank airport this morning i was in line at an auto rental counter. a man in front of me saw the kerry - edwards button on my coat. he said, "you've got a kerry - edwards button, good for you. it'll be kerry by a landslide." a woman in line turned towards him and asked, "can i hold you to it?" i said to them both that i expect the election will not be as close as the tight horserace the media is selling us as the big campaign story. a woman who had just walked up and was getting in line behind me said, "we have to get rid of that corrupt, evil man in the white house." i grinned at the spontaneous poll result: four random passengers and no votes for bush.
posted by Will Ross at 11:19

site design changes 2
fix header layout in archive? check
enable comments? still trying
add blog roll? soon
posted by Will Ross at 13:11

the fog of war
two weeks before election day the biggest messages emanating from the bush-cheney campaign are to describe kerry as a massachusetts liberal and to whine about what was a relatively minor comment on mary cheney's sexual orientation but is now persistent front page news. this is fairly incoherent behavior from a ruthless and discliplined republican team more commonly on message than most political machines. are they out of ammunition? why did they change messages from kerry the flip-flopper? where is the bush-cheney october surprise? mary cheney is not an issue that deserves so much coverage. what am i missing that makes this appear to be a target of opportunity for the republicans? from my scan of the news the biggest issues of the week are:

• a military unit refusing to go into harm's way in iraq (the beginning of the breakdown in the chain of command, the fatal flaw that most characterised the conspicuous public failure of the american military in vietnam)
• new admissions that torture was widely used at gitmo
• a general consensus among world leaders that the world is more dangerous now than it was before america assaulted iraq, complete with a sound bite from u.n. secretary general kofi annon
• persistent questions about the impact of voter registration on the election
• alleged unpreparedness for recounts should they be needed (colorado and florida lead the pack for evidence of brittle polling systems)
• allegations of republican dirty tricks destroying voter registrations among democrats

when i look at our situation i see the bush-cheney neocon debacle destroying our professional military and sowing chaos across the planet in a catastrophic failure to lead. the pentagon's recent stop-loss orders expose the disastrous impact of the bush-cheney policies on the american all-volunteer force, which is obviously no longer all-volunteer. national guard enlistments are failing to meet force target levels for the first time, ever. team america under bush-cheney behaves like a thug on a looting spree. "you're either with us or you're against us." they act like their headlong rush in the wrong direction is leadership, but when the only superpower behaves like an armed and dangerous blundering fool, the world runs for cover. we have completely fulfilled the powell "pottery barn" doctrine:  "you break it, you own it.".

meanwhile, on the home front, there are concerns about the ability of the american balloting system to manage a clean polling process on tuesday november 2nd. legal strategies are in place to drive this election back to the supreme court like in 2000. i remember in one marathon i was so exhausted that i stopped thinking coherently somewhere after the 25th mile, which in retrospect i likened to the fog of war. like the end of a marathon, this presidential campaign has entered the fog of war stage, and the bush-cheney campaign has just changed messages. are they that desperate? is this a diversion? or is it an early indication of their coming defeat? we'll know soon enough.
posted by Will Ross at 10:34

iraq tragedy destroys a local life
it is difficult to describe how terrible it feels when global events spinning out of control reach out and hurt someone you know. last week we were shocked to learn of a local casualty in the despicable bush war on iraq. manuel mendoza, a local boy who my kids grew up with in anderson valley, was critically injured while serving in the u.s. army in iraq, losing both his legs. he is now at walter reed, where a year of rehab awaits him as a double amputee. when i told my daughter about it she said, "what! i just hugged him when he was home..." and her voice trailed off. i remember buying 50:50 raffle tickets from manuel during high school sporting events in 1998.

as if i needed one, this is another reason to vote bush out of the white house. and let's not stop with the executive branch. i respect honest conservatism, but i don't respect the corrupt and mean-spirited special interest neocon fools who have siezed control of the conservative wing of american politics. they don't represent the america i grew up in, and i refuse to let them represent the america i live in.

i wonder why manuel's tragic sacrifice for bush has not made the local media...
posted by Will Ross at 13:23

site design changes
add blue to header? check
add subtitle to header? check
adjust date size and color to mute its importance and free the post title? check
alter archive to monthly? check
enable comments? first attempt failed, still trying
fix header display problems in archive? out of time now, do this later
posted by Will Ross at 06:05

new foot injury
after months of persistent heel pain (but more importantly, after using up the annual deductible on my so-called health insurance) i sought medical advice. the answer, plantar fasciitus. details available at www.footphysicians.com. i forgot to ask dr. c. how soon i can run again. i'll ask him in two weeks at my follow up appointment.
posted by Will Ross at 05:59

last night's pesto
place in blender:
   1 cup olive oil
   1/4 cup whole garlic cloves, peeled
   1/2 cup pine nuts
liquify.

add to blender:
   1 cup (packed) washed basil leaves
liquify.

add to blender:
   1/2 cup olive oil
   1 cup (packed) washed basil leaves
liquify.

pour contents of blender into a small mixing bowl.

add:
   2 cups grated parmesan / romano blend
stir until thoroughly mixed.
makes about 3 cups pesto.

that was the first batch. for the second batch i substituted pecans for the pine nuts. i still have enough basil leaves to make another seven batches. plus i already have 13 pints of pesto in the freezer.
posted by Will Ross at 09:11

social terrorists
when i was young and spiritually searching i interacted often with converts to various paths. generic jesus freaks. jehovah's witnesses. liberation theologists. jesuits. catholic workers. hare krishnas. buddhists of many stripes, especially zen. yogis. hippies living as born again native americans. my tai chi teachers. new age pagans. u-u's. sufis. recovering drug addicts with a burning twelve step desire. as a discovery based learner the study of spirituality easily held my interest for many years. i read the bible, blake, kierkegaard, gurdjieff, suzuki roshi, watts, sartre, levi-strauss, bateson, gibran, dostoevsky, plato, and more. i was one of the few people i knew who was not annoyed by jehovah's witnesses, with whom i had many friendly discussions.

early in the eighties one of my hippie pals, morningstar, told me his simple test to separate spiritual seekers from spiritual predators.

the morningstar test
a seeker says, "god loves me."
a predator says "jesus loves you."

using the morningstar test served me well over the years. it helps discriminate between fellow travellers who practice a fair minded tolerance for divergent views and nervous hustlers preying on the weak when they should be praying for release from their own obsessive weakness.

today while watering the garden it occurred to me that many americans who call themselves "social conservatives" are not as benign as that soft edged description implies. hard core social conservatives are really predators with the same basic agenda as terrorists. in america, hard core social conservatives assume the right to force their beliefs on the entire country. for american social conservatives the ends clearly justifies the means. i don't follow that path because of the misery it leads to as inexoribly as gravity pulls apples down to the ground. you're either with us or you're against us.

i can say the same thing about tolerance. you're either tolerant of others, or you're not. and in the case of americans who call themselves social conservatives, many are acutely intolerant of others. what do you call a person who says they are a "social conservative" and who also supports a bigoted or intolerant agenda? i call that person a social terrorist, a menace to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

i consider myself a social conservative in a truer sense of the actual meaning of the words than our domestic social terrorists who seek to cram their beliefs down my throat in the name of what they call "social conservatism." what can be more conservative than practicing tolerance? than patiently interacting with people of different beliefs without condemning them loudly simply because of their beliefs? than being trustworthy and honest in relationships with others?

is it a sign of the dominance of intolerance among social conservatives that liberation is needed to break the bonds trapping us beneath stiffling paradigms of social exclusion and domination? left or right, conservative or liberal, from what i can see intolerance of the other is encouraged at both extremes. it is a yoke i live beneath as surely as the citizens of colonial salem feared the accusation of witchcraft. it is so easy to look back a few decades and see the misery and mistakes of earlier intolerance as unjustified suspician and elitism. it is much harder to flush out the current demons from our web of prejudiced assumptions and not so subtle justifications. ethical quicksand engulfs those who justify intolerance. in the future, we'll call them social terrorists.
posted by Will Ross at 08:29

hope, compassion and wonder

row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
life is but a dream

how can a parent teach hope, compassion and wonder to a child?
where is the soul of patience, the eyes of grief, the palm of peace?
who can see the arc of insight cascading like rainbows across the horizon?
when does a friend know it is time to reach out and comfort the confused or alone?
why is it so hard to help the people we love?
posted by Will Ross at 21:36

regime change is what i want
the first convention is in reruns on c-span. now the boys are on the road stumping for votes, four white males in two tag teams, the incumbents versus the challengers. at this juncture i side with the democratic challengers. the republican incumbents, with their divisive message, their mean spirited arrogance, and their grotesque pandering to the worst human instincts of selfishness and intolerance, will stop at nothing to stay in power. that's how they got into power, stopping at nothing. my prayers are for a new hope, for a regime change, for kerry & edwards to enter the white house. i'm tired of being lied to by the most incompetent executive team in my memory. bush is a buffoon, a shill for corrupt and powerful forces that don't care a farthing for the values of ordinary people who want to lead a peaceful and productive life. the republican machine he fronts broadcasts an endless loop of doublespeak: hate for gays, hate for minorities, hate for the poor, hate for women, bush's team is the most hateful i have seen in decades. i would consider myself a failure as a parent if my child grew up to believe in the narrow minded garbage that bush broadcasts. even a "c" student in "intro to critical thinking" can see through the republican spin machine. and don't ask me if i want to replace roosevelt with reagan on the dime, you know i don't. do the world a favor, register to vote and defeat a conservative this election. [wr]
posted by Will Ross at 16:49

too funny.

posted by Will Ross at 17:06

looking back from an imaginary happy future
imagine two tribes bickering over the same piece of ground. let's call them the greens and the blues. imagine the greens and blues have separate religions. imagine each tribe's god told them they don't have to share their land with any other tribe. imagine growing up green and inheriting a legacy of institutionalised intolerance blessed by religion and reinforced by peer approved atrocities. imagine the blues inheriting the same hopeless legacy. imagine the misery these selfish tribes will inflict on each other. "am i my brother's keeper?"

imagine more than two tribes. imagine thousands of tribes on one planet. imagine thousands of years of domination and distrust, enslavement and temporary triumphs as tribes enforce the prime directive to fear, mistrust and hate others. empires rise, and empires fall, but across the vast sweep of history most of the people suffer short, brutish lives fearing for their safety.

now imagine a new generation of children born to these bickering tribes. imagine among this new generation peace and tolerance suddenly breaks out between tribes. one generation suddenly recognises the pattern of intolerance and asks, "can't we all just get along?" how can one generation transcend the pettiness of blood feuds and genocide? looking back from this imaginary happy future at the bitter and violent past, what enabled the knot of distrust to be untied? how did the new eyes of children question received wisdom of jaded adults? how did they perceive the hopeless teachings of their parents for the hate that it is? how did they surge beyond the prison of persecution to break free?

that's the question. when will an entire generation discard the trash talk of their parents? is it practical to imagine all the people sharing all the world? where is the reservoir of hope to overcome the legacy of hate?
posted by Will Ross at 18:20

harvesting my chet's garlic a couple weeks ago was depressing. despite my efforts at the front end of the planting to sort the cloves into two distinct categories, in the end it made no difference to the final crop. every single bulb exhibited the defective re-sprouting character i am seeking to eliminate from the strain. the crop is curing in the back porch. in the next few months before planting i have to research my options for the correct cultural selection pressures to breed this defect out of this strain, and to return it to its former glory as an awesome garlic. [wr]
posted by Will Ross at 22:56

i saw michael moore's fahrenheit 9/11. i enjoyed it. i am amused by the punditocracy howling all over the media about michael moore and truth and lies as if documentaries are somehow objective. the myth of objectivity persists in the popular media. i learned long ago that the world is not run by the sharpest tools in the shed. i don't mind michael moore having his say any more than i mind talking heads of any ilk broadcasting their best ideas to a coalition of willing consumers.

in as much as i am able to i try to keep my critical thinking skills sharp. seeing this film helps put various threads into perspective for me. such as a reminder of the arrogance of the elites. and the personal tragedies imposed on ordinary people by that arrogance. and the amazing strength of ordinary people in the face of outright betrayals by their so-called leaders.

those who walk slowly can, if they follow the right path, go much farther
than those who run rapidly in the wrong direction - descartes

one component of the rush to watch a liberal screed like fahrenheit 9/11 is the absence of true liberal content in the media. conservatives not only control the media, they also control the bounds of the conversation. moore's documentary could not generate sellouts and record ticket sales if the news media had already told the same story. instead, moore's point of view, missing in action from the daily dose of safe and approved patriotic preaching that passes for our national media, touches a nerve missing from the national conversation. this is the "emperor has no clothes" moment for the media titans. if they were so right, then why is moore's documentary, with all the wrong and unapproved information, a blockbuster?

i saw a bumper sticker in arcata: 11/2/04: end of an error
posted by Will Ross at 17:58

distributed network imaging
posted by Will Ross at 08:50

my wardrobe has three broad color schemes: brown, blue and grey. i wear baseball hats to shade my head and eyes. my three kids went to very different colleges, and i have a baseball hat from each one. by chance, they are the perfect color complements for my wardrobe. call me a lucky dad: when i wear blues, i use the blue hat with "slugs" in gold lettering from santa cruz; when i wear greys, i use the black hat with a red "w" from wesleyan; and when i wear browns, i use the green hat with the yellow "h" from humboldt.
posted by Will Ross at 22:26

how long till iraq follows it's near neighbors among the ranks of newly "liberated" countries that split apart along strict ethnic or religious boundaries? if the past two decades have taught us anything it is that try as we might in the west to encourage everyone to just get along and focus on a collaborative social future, all across the globe petty differences explode overnight into national boundaries between discrete social herds of partisans who refuse to cooperate with their neighbors. it's almost as if there is a chaotic teenage phase a nation group has to pass through before it can mature into members of the civilised world. why do we wander so long in the wilderness? is it just an absence of visionary leaders of the stature of a mandela? or is it a doom long foretold where natural laws of the bent world tempt the minds of the many with dangerous delusions?
posted by Will Ross at 20:53

keep hope alive.
sometimes it is so hard to stay positive. sometimes i feel worn down by the machinery of hate and the shrill, mean-spirited, partisan accusations that pass for "dialog" in our culture. there are so many people that just want hope and options to succeed. i'm not talking about the predators or the greedy or the deeply cynical. i'm talking about the honest and hard working, about the lonely who try their best and get too few complements for their effort from the cold culture of mistrust and exploitation. i remember in high school the loud, controlling crowd of self-appointed leaders who found it so easy to ridicule and demean anyone who was not in their "in" crowd. i thought i would be able to get past this as an adult, but now i find the juvenile microcosm at school was an accurate reflection of rampant social chaos among adults. looking at the so-called leaders in our culture, whether right or left, conservative or liberal, old or young, i see too little compassion. i feel it in my bones. what a lonely planet. [wr]
posted by Will Ross at 01:30

it was a few weeks ago, but diana from gotham summarises things quite nicely:

In any case, the flap over Bush's national service is one of context. George Bush is a mediocre resentful drunk who failed upwards at everything in life, who admits that he joined the National Guard because he didn't want to serve in a war that he didn't have the guts to oppose, who as President betrayed the trust of the American people and the world by lying the country into a unecessary war whose disastrous consequences will be unfolding for generations...Oh, well, you get the point. I grow repetitive...Let's just say that Bush isn't the kind of guy that I'd want to serve a second term in the White House. The comparison with Kerry's Vietnam service is kinda embarassing...The controversy over Bush's service is one of fitness for office and betrayal of trust. And if it was no big deal, then why didn't he simply release all relevant documents in 2000?

praying for regime change here at home.... [wr]
posted by Will Ross at 12:03

today's announcement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is just more hate speech from president bush, who is clearly a divider, not a uniter. hopefully this bush administration is accomplishing on a national level the complete trashing of the republican base in the same way that california governor pete wilson used divisive hate speech to trash the republican base in california in the early 1990s. honest, fair minded people can be fooled in the beginning, but in the end we have no use for so-called leaders who rely on lies, diversions and intolerance to maintain their desperate grasp on power.
posted by Will Ross at 10:19