Click to see the thrilling conclusion…

Sing this with great gusto to the tune of “Home on the Range”:

Oh, give me a home
where the homies do roam,
where the low-end renters all stay,
where no one hires guards
or has great big back yards,
and the white-flight snobs stay away.

Home in the city,
where Chinese and Spanish ring free,
where you don’t have to drive
to hear genuine jive,
and you don’t have to act like T.V.

Oh, find me a street
where house and shop meet,
where a panhandler strums a guitar,
built for strolls in the rain,
not for big franchise chains,
nor for people who can’t leave their car.

Home in the city,
where Chinese and Spanish ring free,
where you don’t have to drive
to hear genuine jive,
and you don’t have to act like T.V.

Yep…I wrote it. :)

Graphic by Tim Hollis

To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.

–Abraham Lincoln, 1847

Bet you never knew ole Abe was a Commie, didya? The labor theory of value rears its non-grata-since-the-end-of-the-Cold-War head — and on the side of the worker, no less! What a subversive, anti-American punk this guy must have been!

Here are some other good Abe quotes:

It is an old maxim and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler. Now, sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the people’s money being used to pay the fiddler. No one can doubt that the examination proposed by this resolution, must cost the State some ten or twelve thousand dollars; and all this to settle a question in which the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people, and now, that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

–from his “Speech in the Illinois Legislature Concerning the State Bank,” January 11, 1837 (emphasis added)

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are worthy of protection as any other rights.

I guess he wasn’t a Commie after all. He thought capital had rights — why, I don’t know. And yet, why is it that no one says such things any more?

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. This is not very different from the act of faith demanded by all those marches and petitions while Martin [Luther King] was still alive. One could scarcely be deluded by Americans anymore, one scarcely dared expect anything from the great, vast, blank generality; and yet one was compelled to demand of Americans–and for their sakes, after all–a generosity, a clarity, and a nobility which they did not dream of demanding of themselves. Part of the error was irreducible, in that the marchers and petitioners were forced to suppose the existence of an entity which, when the chips were down, could not be located–i.e., there are no American people yet…. Perhaps, however, the moral of the story (and the hope of the world) lies in what one demands, not of others, but of oneself. However that may be, the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up, and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.

–James Baldwin

Tonight, following a top-to-bottom review of the state’s election systems, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen all but banned black box electronic voting. “When NASA finds a problem, they don’t continue just because they’ve already spent the money,” she declared. “They scrub the mission and spend the money to get it right. We must do same with elections.” What a disturbing, radical thought. Does she actually think the people’s votes are as important as sending astronauts into space? Bowen must not have listened to enough corporate TV roundtable discussions by self-perpetuating experts whose main concern is how to responsibly manipulate the people.

Instead, she listened to those ultimate icons of irresponsibility, election integrity activists, who actually think it isn’t enough that elections be accepted as legitimate — they really have to be legitimate. Oh, what naifs these activists be! Just imagine if such unenlightened views had prevailed on the Supreme Court in December 2000. They wouldn’t have stopped the vote count in time to avoid the appearance that the election had been stolen. As a result, after they stole it, even more people would have realized the theft, doing further damage to that already fragile relic, The Legitimacy of American Democracy. For in a media-created world whose fundamental reality is he-said-she-said, legitimacy can only be a perception.

Returning the real world, Bowen’s top-to-bottom review had shown that a single hacker with inside access could implant malicious code onto a machine which would then spread to other machines, allowing a whole election to be stolen without anyone being any the wiser. In keeping with the basic principles of today’s American democracy, she should have said, “While this is cause for some concern, no one would really do such a thing, and besides, the wonderful companies who created these vulnerable machines can’t have their profits snatched away from them.” But instead, subversive that she is, the Secretary of State had these shocking words to say: “It is my hope that voting system vendors will, starting tomorrow, start to evaluate the competitive advantage to moving to open source software.” That would ruin all their lovely proprietary code, just to prevent an undetectable election theft that — let the point be stressed — has never once been detected.

Bowen’s ruling allows touchscreen DREs only for disabled voters, one machine per polling place, with stringent new safeguards added. Everyone else will vote on paper ballots — not paper TRAILS, now, but actual BALLOTS. Even the optical scan systems used to count these ballots will have to meet rigorous standards of reliability to be recertified. Is Communism coming back?

Bowen also decertified ES&S’s InkaVote machines without recertification or redemption, just because ES&S missed her deadline for submitting required materials for review by almost a month. She thus ignored ES&S’s Constitutionally guaranteed right to submit materials late in order to make it impossible for her team to review them in time. Bowen was supposed to let the deadline for decertification pass because of this, but instead, she acted as if it was ES&S’s fault they were late. No wonder so many people don’t believe our society is fair any more.

Ideas like Bowen’s are to be expected from wacky activists who put the masses first. But when they come from an official popularly elected to a position of high responsibility over 36 million people, it’s enough to make a Beltway-fearing citizen believe that the aliens must have landed and scared the pigs away from the trough.

What’s next? Will this set a precedent? Will other states, seeing the stunning turnaround within the nation’s most populous state, follow suit with similarly out-there schemes?

Stay tuned.

You can read more details at The Brad Blog and on the California Secretary of State website.

Heyoka Magazine says,

THE WAR GAME
is a 1965 television film on nuclear war. Written, directed, and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC’s The Wednesday Play strand, its depiction of the impact of Soviet nuclear attack on Britain caused dismay within the BBC and in government and was banned for 20 years. It was scheduled for transmission on August 6, 1966 (the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack) but was not transmitted until 1985, the corporation publicly stating that “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. It was widely viewed before its BBC debut on video and in art-house cinemas, often using prints provided by Watkins. The film won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1966.

The War Game is available from Amazon, but you can watch it online right now. It’s horrifying and, unfortunately, a must-see. Calmly, without histrionics, it shows some of the various effects that, AT A MINIMUM, we should expect from a nuclear war–an event that, with the proliferation of nuclear capabilities, may actually be a greater danger now than it was during the Cold War.

The Amazon page shows clearly that the battle to silence such knowledge is far from over. “The War Game is a fictional, worst-case-scenario,” the supposedly neutral plot synopsis begins. Wrong and wrong. It is not a fiction at all, but an extrapolation of what might happen in the future should a nuclear war break out, as the narration makes clear throughout. It doesn’t follow any one person but shows a series of different events, all based on the impacts of firestorms in Europe and actual atomic bombs in Japan. Far from a worst-case scenario, it was probably an overoptimistic scenario, even back in 1966, when the bombs weren’t as powerful. The real-life firestorms it’s based on cannot compare to nuclear war. (Note: the plot synopsis for some reason does not always show up on the Amazon page; sometimes, sometimes not.)

Also, the Amazon reviewer’s comment, “Subtlety isn’t Watkins’s suit” is exceptionally idiotic–I suppose he was hoping for a film about the SUBTLE EFFECTS of nuclear war? This reviewer also refers to “the film’s blunt antiestablishment politics,” which isn’t entirely wrong, but isn’t entirely right, either. Apart from one moment in which survivors express the sentiment that the British civil defense system didn’t do any good, the politics of this film are essentially in the scientific facts and historical events on which it’s based. This is a bit like Bill O’Reilly: you can’t trust the facts, because they have an antiestablishment bias.

The real political stance of the film is sufficiently given in this: it refuses to twist facts to suit the Masters of War. “Do so,” say the hawks. “Do so, but to a moderate degree,” say the moderates. “Do so just enough to make support for the military clear,” say the pro-establishment doves. Only the “extremists” of the anti-war cause actually want the facts to be given straight.

If the position that facts speak for themselves without any politics involved is inadequate, it’s not just because some sort of framing structure is required to present and indeed comprehend facts–the framing structure required to arrive at this film’s position is basically the establishment’s own. More crucially, it’s because, in the face of massive, relentless, and predictable political pressure, only a strongly-held political position can cause you to hold on to the truth, no matter how clearly it may present itself. Only in this sense does this film, which stays faithfully within the format of its assignment and of the BBC’s style, take a political stand.

Documentaries that enact possible future (or past) scenarios are hardly unprecedented, yet Amazon’s plot synopsis reiterates, “Although it won an Oscar for Best Documentary, it is fiction.” The people who voted it the Oscar had better political judgment than whoever wrote that. I doubt, in fact, that its horrifying nature was the real reason it wasn’t aired. As Amazon’s reaction shows, the unwillingness to know the true magnitude of what the world faces should these weapons ever be used is alive and well today.

This film is soberly and unsensationalistically done, based on solid research. It’s a dry BBC documentary, and at the same time extremely powerful. The presentation is cool and relentless. It’s hard to watch, but watch it anyway, and arm yourself with knowledge. Only if enough people realize the danger we’re in is there much hope of doing something about it. Bush Sr. and Clinton did NOT take the steps they could have to rid the world of these weapons when the Cold War ended, and they are now in more hands than ever. The risk of all-out nuclear war may be less than during the Cold War, but the risk of a smaller one has never been higher. Even if a smaller one did not escalate into a larger one, the consequences would be unthinkable.

Confronted with the indefensibility of the established order, Amazon.com shows the same defensive reaction as the New York Times and other dyspeptic corporate media outlets, unable to cope with the unruly turn public discourse has taken over the past two years. Anyone who points out that the Emperor not only has no clothes but is revealed without them to be a bizarre and horrifying monster must have faulty eyesight and an ungenerous spirit. Such generosity, of course, is never required of those who point out faults of figures who could be suspected of “antiestablishment” proclivities.