a unifying theory of modern conspiracies (lol)

[2023 note: this was actually written a couple of years ago but for some reason (cough) I never hit publish ... ]

So, I had this great insight this spring that might be the key to explaining at least a lot of conspiracist things if not all of them ...

You see, all along, it's been the dandelions.  Secretly they are taking over the earth (this appears to be some kind of hive-mind activity -- I'd hate to consider them having individual sentience!). The ships from their home planet will be arriving soon, hoping to find us softened for the easy capture of our ever-less-hospitable-to-humans, but increasingly fabulous for dandelions, environment, so their human allies have been ramping up the pressure.  From the day they talked innocent children into planting them on roadsides to beautify the country lanes (for historical evidence see Anne of Green Gables -- it's book one or two, I think -- where the author cites this specific activity in passing) -- from that day, I think we all have to admit that they have gradually been taking over at least this country (possibly invading from Canada, per citation).

And this despite the creation of and amazing increase in the use of poisons designed essentially (perhaps actually?) specifically to kill them.  And teachings in our movies, on TV, and in our schools about tidiness and perfect lawns -- a propaganda blitzkrieg that was fairly successful at least into the 1970s, and still holds sway over many human minds today.

But my clue was watching my lawn this spring -- a remarkably perfect spring for dandelions, and a remarkably un-Portland spring: deep rains followed by a week+ of no moisture at all, with clear skies and happy shining sun, repeated over and over.  *Someone* must have been messing with the weather (seriously -- who ever heard of a dry day between January and Rose Festival?!), and there were no logical economic beneficiaries to the new weather ... but ... my *dandelions* were settling in for a long, deep-rooted summer, clearly with the goal of finally eradicating my grass!!

Could it have been the dandelions all along?!?

Could this explain the obstinate support by our federal government of Monsanto and related companies, which is otherwise so unjustifiable?!?

Could this explain why all the children, starting in the mid-1860's, have been herded into compulsory standardized schooling? Both sides have a stake in that: the dandelions want us all to be green hippie drug-addled brainwashees, and the anti-dandelion freedom fighters need to train up an army of citizens who are educated on lawn poison and its efficient application, and will react with drone-like rejection when faced with a dandelion threat!

(Of course you've never heard of the anti-dandelion freedom fighters -- who would have believed them?  I'm sure they are valiant truth seekers whose families pretend they don't exist ... or they are protecting their own families from both the unfaithful and the dandelion sympathizers, by faking their deaths.  That takes a truly dedicated and intelligent person to pull off ... .)

Of course with any alien-planet scenario it ought to be easy to wrap in the secret goals (or create new secret goals that fit better) of the space programs (although this is a pretty big leap from the Isis/Masons connection, so I'm still working on that ... anyone with better knowledge of the Masons / Isis-in-space / Knights of Templar stuff is welcome to chime in in the comments ;) ).

But I think a unified theory that wraps in chemtrails, brainwashing institutionalization + media saturation, government subsidies to highly suspect companies which don't clearly benefit the nation, AND (maybe) the "faked" moon program is a pretty good unification theory ;).

OH!  AND, I just figured out 9-11's connection -- the neo-Cons/military are the normal suspects (if one doesn't go all the way to the Masons or even the Illuminati) ... what if the neo-Cons/military are, like Monsanto, carrying a secret and noble, but praiseless and seemingly nefarious, burden of keeping up and building up humanity's battle capabilities?!  I'm sure the poor dears are horrified by the use to which some incompetent leadership has put the resources that ought to have been carefully maintained for the first significant extraterrestrial conflict!  (The oddly successful movie Independence Day, in colorfully justifying Area 51, was perhaps, then, a carefully crafted warning by the resistance, bringing the strange bedfellows of mainline shoot-em-up, minority leadership, and geek sympathies together in subconsciously supporting the preparations against extraterrestrial invasion!)

And apparently even the Illuminati might truly have been cast unfairly as devils all this time.  They may truly have the success of the human species at heart ...

Although, as a green hippie (with no drug-addling), I still strenuously disagree with the methods the freedom fighters seem to be choosing (mass destruction and poison are pretty clearly counterproductive in the long run), and I wonder whether they have sufficient objectivity on the larger historical picture to work logically past the terror-stories they may have had whispered to them as children.  I prefer to rip them out of the ground and hope I'm leaving no roots behind (and hope the "commercial composting facility" in town actually gets hot enough to kill the darn seeds, since they consistently have enough mojo stored in even just their leaves to fully transform from a yellow bloom to a puffball even after being removed!).  Also, I heartily support the Organic Consumers Association for encouraging the domestication and eating of them, as a preferable solution to poison and an ironic reversal for the eville plans (as yet unclear but clearly not for the benefit of humans) of these invasive plants!

So there you go.  A decent unified theory of all the truly crazyass shit the government has been foisting on us (as opposed to the merely annoying but I can imagine it made sense to someone at some point).  Have I missed any significant "conspiracy theories"?

I suppose the JFK assassination.  One could toss him, the CIA, the FBI, and the mob in on either side of the dandelion equation probably. It's more fun if the "goodguys" were actually the badguys, so let's put the mob/CIA/FBI arrayed against the dandelions and desperately trying to root out (ha ha), by intelligence work and some strong-arming, the dandelion supporters in the halls of government.  JFK would then I suppose be the pretty face on the dandelion movement, but it's probably not hard to argue he didn't know he was being used.

P.S. I've disturbed myself, by the way.  In case anyone wondered.  (No, I do not believe the dandelions are *actually* any of the outrageous things I've here stated.  They are, however, apparently annoyingly well adapted to live with humans in a temperate climate, like rats, corbids, starlings, and cockroaches.)

On objections to "the violence and destruction"

Trigger warnings: graphic descriptions of racist violence including lynchings

For those clutching their pearls, "but the violence and destruction! It's just not how democracy works!"

1) Democracy is clearly not working.

(a) It's not currently democracy, because there are people doing everything they can to prevent actual democracy and we never really got it set up right in the first place.

(b) Democracy is the method we chose to try to govern in a manner that preserves stated rights.  Pretty clearly, the most fundamental rights are more important than the tactic of democracy.  If the most fundamental rights are clearly and consistently trampled and the majority will not, for whatever reason, fix the problem democratically, then there has to be another mechanism, or we logically can't claim to *actually* value those rights.

Ok, so, the violence and destruction.  The two words are used together a lot, so we don’t think about them separately as much, but in the current context this is a white-supremacist/pro-“capitalist” concept-laziness.  (“Capitalist” because a lot of people feel very righteous about us living in a “capitalist” society, which we don’t.  We live in a wealth-protection racket with a veneer of righteous-sounding words.  The veneer is wearing away.)

SO: an important distinction: violence is against living things, destruction is against inanimate things.  In some times and places, violence was against *people* and destruction was against *not people* (including animals and whatever the local society considered to be subhumans ... in America, non-whites sometimes, Blacks in, if we are honest, most times).  In this essay I am aligning with the more modern usage, which exposes our inhumanity, and our knee-jerk "capitalism," better.

Violence is against living things, destruction is about inanimate things.

In the context of the protests, violence (from either side) is against *people.*

It is worrisome at a basic moral-value level that burning stores or police precincts stresses many viewers out more than the absolutely over-the-top violence perpetrated by the police on the protestors, sometimes because of real but almost completely not-actually-threatening violence from the protestors, but often, often, just because someone on the police force decided they needed to "assert their authority" or "control the situation."  In the situations when the protestors were flinging ONLY WORDS at the officers in question -- which was a bunch of situations of police violence against protestors -- I'm a little horrified that I have to point out that there was not a "situation" to "control."  There were citizens peacefully protesting.  That is not a "situation to control."  In the situations where the protestors were "complying" as best they could, even with highly questionable orders, by moving away, or being still and physically non-threatening if they had been handicapped by a police weapon or had a preexisting handicap -- again, I'm a little horrified that anyone needs to point out that that is not a "situation to control."  That is a situation that is *already under control,* and further violence *is not justified,* even if under the laws of that locale some arrests might be.  Kettling, when followed up with violence on the trapped people ... that was not a "situation to control."  That was straight-up entrapment by your government authorities for the purpose of torture.

The *actual violence* perpetrated by protestors against the police or anyone else has been nearly zero.  The destruction?  Sure some of that was protestors in some places, but 

(1) a lot of it was outside agents trying to make the protests look bad.  White supremacists, cops, random entitled teens and twenties who don't have a damn clue and think it will be a lark, have all been caught on videos or on chat strings planning or implementing this.

(2) are you demonstrating that you care more about a Target than about all the black people murdered and beaten up and framed and sent to prison by police in that city?  Are you really?

Statistical significance would discount the violence created by the current protestors compared to the violence levied against black people not only during slavery, when white oppressors had a general financial interest in keeping most slaves alive and physically capable of working, but in the Reconstruction years, when militias and sometimes just local communities on the fly -- you know, I got nothing to do after church this Sunday, you wanna? -- would get together and hunt black people.  When they assassinated elected black politicians one after the other in a targeted and deliberate way, and then started on black candidates brave enough to try to run for office to replace the dead.  When they burned and looted homes and communities.

Most of what I just described was flat-out shooting-blacks-with-guns, and mostly it wasn't battles, it was just massacre and murder.

And that's not even getting into what we think of as "lynchings," which were common enough that towns in the South sold commemorative, collectible photo-postcards. 

Because lynchings were such a public "good" at the time, they didn't, as we have been taught in our society if we are talking about them at all, just involve "hanging." They were a blood sport, for an audience (whether just a few guys or a town Sunday picnic on the green), where the hanging was not expected to kill a person quickly like an execution. Putting a rope around someone's neck and dragging them up into a tree guarantees a 'botched' hanging, a lingering and terrifying death (with an avid audience, it should be remembered) *even in the cases* when the white folks doing the lynching didn't ALSO ADD FUCKING FIRE. Late in the period when public lynchings were still an acceptable social event, the lynchers managed to keep a black male alive for four hours, burning him not all at once, but slowly and carefully.  Sometimes they killed whole families in lynchings.  Babies included.  Sometimes they experimented with fun things like poking out eyes or cutting out tongues or pulling out fingernails or cutting off fingers.  Some of those body parts were kept as souvenirs.

All of which ignores, by only considering the deaths, the severe beatings that always accompanied lynchings, to disable the victim (and for sadistic race-superiority enjoyment of course) ... and the severe beatings that were casually levied, everywhere and anywhere, in the last 150+ years on blacks who were not lynched, because white folks no longer had a financial stake in keeping "the blacks" capable of work anymore, and it's very psychologically satisfying to assert one's dominance.  In way too many places in America that is not only acceptable but encouraged, even still.  Dominance-assertion as a psychological jack-off is pretty common in every part of American society.  Certainly it is still visible from waaaaay too many police officers.

Dominance-beatings very effectively instill trauma and ongoing fear (which is the point), and sometimes permanent physical damages.  The deaths, however incredible the numbers are, are only a small part of the story of historical racist violence against the black community.  The same holds true now.  For every story I've seen over the last bunch of years about a black person murdered by police, there have been several other black people talking about the time(s) the police beat them.  And if I rouse myself enough to go looking around the internet on purpose for those stories, which I have sometimes done, it is quickly apparent that the sample making it through the social media algorithms is very small.

So yeah. There has been violence against some people and destruction in the last few weeks, and I'll even (unlike some) admit that some (although certainly and provably not all) of that was actually done by actual protestors. And that's not ideal. It's even, in a simple sense, bad.

But, those numbers, amounts, and types pale in comparison -- even the destruction (of inanimate things) numbers, amounts, and types, but especially, *especially* the violence (against people) numbers, amounts, and types -- to the overt violence and destruction that has been consistently enabled, encouraged, and accomplished against black people (and often their allies) by white supremacists (which in some places is still most white people) and the white-advantaging, black-disadvantaging power structures in our nation and in our cities.

AND the violence (remember: against people) perpetrated by protestors is in every instance VASTLY LESS than the violence perpetrated by the police, who are sometimes just *starting shit* without waiting for "provocation" or any actual physical threat. Why is the violence from protestors getting all your condemnation, but the often (cough cough) "proactive" (aggressive), and always larger and meaner, violence by the police is not?

It is notable that these demonstrators are very few threatening anyone or anything with guns. (Hence FOX photoshopped the same white dude with a gun onto several scenes in the Seattle situation, to make it look scarier. So much for gun rights I guess.  Even white people aren't allowed to be visibly armed, if the rights they are protesting for are for *black* people.)

I'm not a proponent of violence or destruction. But if you weren't complaining BEFORE NOW, the whole rest of your life, about, and trying to stop, and fix, and prevent, the much vaster violence and destruction -- the much greater suffering -- that was forced onto the black community in **all the other years** (AND STILL IS, witness a cop murdering a non-aggressive black man in the goddamn middle of this social crisis ... pretty sure I haven't heard of any black people murdering a cop during the protests, not even an armed and dangerous cop who was threatening them, which is thousands of opportunities a day in this country right now, not *even* lynching the one that slowly and with apparent personal satisfaction and zero remorse choked the death out of a black man, when white people lynched black men for nothing and everything) ... 

... if you weren't *more* outraged by all the earlier violence and destruction against fellow Americans, it's not reasonable to suddenly "find Jesus" and be some kind of moral pacifist 'in alignment with your political beliefs' now.   Your 'political beliefs' clearly value property and the current power structure over people's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (but mostly over "life," let's just start with the most basic one) and JUSTICE.

Yeah, I'm against destruction, and I think it's generally morally wrong unless for real it is a move toward something better.  I wish people wouldn't burn Target.  I don't see how that moves the needle in the right direction.  I wish people wouldn't loot, but I can kind of see the justice of impoverished people looting, in the big picture, even while I mourn the livelihoods of the business people involved.  Burning that precinct -- after there was noone inside -- or trying to burn the Justice Center in Portland, when the few people inside that night could be expected to escape -- those made some sense as political statements and effective actions, against public structures and investments that *actively hurt black people in those locales.*  I'm still not down with destruction, but ... when there is evil, and it's entrenched, sometimes destruction is necessary.

DESTRUCTION OF THINGS IS NOT MORALLY EQUIVALENT TO DIRECT MURDER AND TORTURE-ABUSE OF PERSONS.

If you want to condemn some Americans for their violence, black people are not where to start to root out the problem.  Almost all black people have been conscientiously and deliberately choosing NOT TO TRY TO KILL the rest of us for 150+ years, despite having an arguable moral right, in the Old Testament sense (tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye), to *totally* do so.  Black people generally have consistently shown amazing humanity and restraint in the face of bald racism and hundreds of years of dehumanizing violence tolerated by their nation.  The fact that they've always trusted that actually, someday, the rest of us would finally step the fuck up is remarkable, and pretty much based on nothing in history.  It's an act of faith they chose and choose, and a gift of grace they offered, and offer, to the rest of us.

"But ... but ... the violence and destruction and looting!!"

Yeah, no.  Step up to fix the root causes, every day, at all levels.  If and when you have helped build a better system, so that the violence from the system pushed on black people is smaller than the violence done by black people protesting for justice and rights and basic safety, *then* you can totally complain about those evil looters and be taken seriously.  

Except, oops, there won't be any ... which is the implied goal of your freak-out, right?  

No protestors wreaking violence and destruction?

Win-win.

Why rejecting the idea of abolishing the police is intellectually dishonest

Pointing out the logical gap:  It is not necessarily true that the police need to exist, so people wanting to abolish police forces is not logically inherently worrisome.  It's worrisome based on fears, not reason.

If public safety and services can be more effectively and humanely delivered/ acquired/ designed in other ways (which we don't know yet because alternative solutions have not been tested), why is there a concern -- why logically -- with the police eventually being abolished?  Some version or part of the police might end up being socially necessary.  OR, we as a society, maybe we as a species, have just not asked the question seriously enough before and so have not yet innovated and tested less damaging answers.

We change how we answer social-management questions all the time.  Overall, that change is toward more recognition of individuals' right to manage their own lives, and our shared responsibility to help others when accident and circumstance lands them with need they cannot themselves supply.

Some activists are calling for abolishment.  Acknowledging that I (currently, personally) see a real need to police ourselves as a society, I don't see that a police force is necessarily the best answer for that.  

Abolishment should be on the table, and in some people's minds a goal, or we will never have cause to imagine how deeply we can unwind the authoritarian assumptions that keep us all enslaved to the current power-structure.

Acknowledging the possibility is necessary for most-effective discussion.

Parallel "necessary for the discussion" assertion in a very different arena:

I attended a conference about artificial intelligence development in vehicles in Michigan, with most of the attendees from the Midwest and a significant chunk from the NE.  I was the only West Coast attendee.  I was also one of maybe three people in the room whose impression was that truly autonomous vehicles were possible.  Most of the people I associate with, in related industries or on the streets, on the West Coast, believe that truly autonomous vehicles are at least possible, and lots of us believe they are basically inevitable.

The people at that conference, mostly researchers from academia and vehicle production companies, were seriously considering all sorts of mechanical, security, and social questions about the current situation and the future.  And maybe they were all right, and the West Coast research community is wrong, and cars will never get past level three or mayyyybe level 4.  BUT, because they couldn't seriously admit the possibility, there are reams of really important questions raised by others that they, and therefore all the demographics they each represent, are not really considering, and are not participating in the development of answers to.  And, they are not contributing their concerns by asking questions -- and given their apparent lack of trust in actually-autonomous machines, I can guarantee you that the questions they would ask, if they participated, would be qualitatively and importantly different than the questions *actually being asked* on research teams and in facilities on the West Coast, where generally we are (my quick-take impressions) either more optimistic or more resigned to the coming dystopia.

They have removed themselves from a conversation that might lead to radical social shifts in every aspect of life, because they reject at the start, "instinctively" (but not, since lots of other humans don't) the assertion that the change could ever be that deep.  They therefore risk people whose entire psychological approach to the question accidentally excludes them (optimism and resignation are neither of them deliberate exclusions of skepticism or pessimism) -- they risk that those thinkers, with an essentially foreign cultural-mindset, will make all of the decisions at the cutting edge of testing and implementation, just because those foreign mindset people believe the cutting edge, and the eventual goal, are way further out than the "sensible" people at that conference do.

In a third arena:

I can't get most artists to understand that no matter how cool computer art tools now are, until very recently they were exclusively built by mathematicians and logicians, not artists, and that means they serve a different type of mind and problem-solving process than most artists have/use.  As the computer-native generation comes into its own, that is already changing, but artists should be aware when they step into a computer programmer's best approximation of what they think the artists said they wanted, that that is *not* the same as what the artists wanted, and it limits the questions that can be asked artistically and the answers that can be levied.

I love the new computer tools; they can do really amazing, neat stuff.  But conceptualizing what the questions *look like* in the mind of The Other can teach you a lot about the tool that is proposed or handed to you.

And so: It is necessary to accept that abolishing the police is a legitimate consideration, and might be the best-case end goal, in order to participate honestly (in the mathematical/logical-honesty sense) in the change-discussions that are going on.

*And* rejecting the idea is just intellectually dishonest.  It's not at all apparent that it's impossible. It's definitely massively inconvenient to a lot of people's psyches and understanding of the world, and makes most people in America very, very uncomfortable.  But that doesn't mean keeping the police as such is either necessary or logical.

It might be the best solution.  It might be not the best solution but better than what we have going on.  It might be a very bad solution indeed (in which case I have little doubt that reimplementing a police force will be way less hard than dismantling it was).

It needs to be an honestly accepted part of the discussion.

Corona virus social-media snapshot from around April 15

(recording this here as it was posted by a friend on Facebook to capture the chaos of the 'information' right now)

-------

It's clear as mud! 

Clear as a Biden speech! 

Clear as the space between Trump's ears!

The Covid19 Coronavirus Rules:

(Subject to change with USA Presidential Agenda and/or the Conspiracy Theorists Bright Ideas)

1. Basically, you can't leave the house for any reason, but if you have to, then you can.

2. Masks are useless, but maybe you have to wear one, it can save you, it is useless, but maybe it is mandatory as well.

3. Stores are closed, except those that are open.

4. You should not go to hospitals unless you have to go there. Same applies to doctors, you should only go there in case of emergency, provided you are not too sick.

5. This virus is deadly but still not too scary, except that sometimes it actually leads to a global disaster.

6. Gloves won't help, but they can still help.

7. Everyone needs to stay HOME, but it's important to GO OUT.

8. There is no shortage of groceries in the supermarket, but there are many things missing when you go there in the evening, but not in the morning. Sometimes.

9. The virus has no effect on children except those it affects.

10. Animals are not affected, but there is still a cat that tested positive in Belgium in February when no one had been tested, plus a few tigers here and there…

11. You will have many symptoms when you are sick, but you can also get sick without symptoms, have symptoms without being sick, or be contagious without having symptoms. Oh, my..

12. In order not to get sick, you have to eat well and exercise, but eat whatever you have on hand and it's better not to go out, well, but no…

13. It's better to get some fresh air, but you get looked at very wrong when you get some fresh air, and most importantly, you don't go to parks or walk. But don’t sit down, except that you can do that now if you are old, but not for too long or if you are pregnant (but not too old).

14. You can't go to retirement homes, but you have to take care of the elderly and bring food and medication.

15. If you are sick, you can't go out, but you can go to the pharmacy.

16. You can get restaurant food delivered to the house, which may have been prepared by people who didn't wear masks or gloves. But you have to have your groceries decontaminated outside for 3 hours. Pizza too?

17. Every disturbing article or disturbing interview starts with " I don't want to trigger panic, but…"

18. You can't see your older mother or grandmother, but you can take a taxi and meet an older taxi driver.

19. You can walk around with a friend but not with your family if they don't live under the same roof.

20. You are safe if you maintain the appropriate social distance, but you can’t go out with friends or strangers at the safe social distance.

21. The virus remains active on different surfaces for two hours, no, four, no, six, no, we didn't say hours, maybe days? But it takes a damp environment. Oh no, not necessarily.

22. The virus stays in the air - well no, or yes, maybe, especially in a closed room, in one hour a sick person can infect ten, so if it falls, all our children were already infected at school before it was closed. But remember, if you stay at the recommended social distance, however in certain circumstances you should maintain a greater distance, which, studies show, the virus can travel further, maybe.

23. We count the number of deaths but we don't know how many people are infected as we have only tested so far those who were "almost dead" to find out if that's what they will die of…

24. We have no treatment, except that there may be one that apparently is not dangerous unless you take too much (which is the case with all medications).

25. We should stay locked up until the virus disappears, but it will only disappear if we achieve collective immunity, so when it circulates… but we must no longer be locked up for that?

The Conundrum of Hillary Clinton: an ethical analysis

The Conundrum of Hillary Clinton

By Kirsten Rayhawk

An MBA program ethics analysis due July 30, 2016

 

“Many people talk about doing the right thing, but action is the true measure of character” (Maxwell, 2003, p. 44).

Hillary Rodham Clinton, now usually known as Hillary Clinton, has spent the last year-plus campaigning, with hard work and determination, to get the Democratic Party’s nomination to be their candidate for the office of President of the United States of America.  In the eyes of many people in our nation, both inside and outside of the Democratic Party, she had earned and more than earned the right to not only ask but to expect this from her party, and then to ask the general electorate to elect her to.

Clinton has been active in social change efforts since college, graduating in 1969 and kicking off a long career of questioning and acting decisively to change the received political and cultural assumptions, with focus and determination even in the face of reactionism and frequent failure – getting right to it as first student Wellesley College ever invited to speak at commencement and the last student Wellesley ever allowed to speak after the main commencement speaker (Keith, T. (2016).  She spoke of the hopes and efforts of her fellow youth acting out of “integrity and trust and respect” (Wellesley College, n.d.).  Some of her collegiate sisters (who elected her student body President) are still actively friends with her and did a round of radio interviews on her behalf this spring.

Clinton’s campaign has chosen to describe her social activism and political activity around the heart-strings issue of her work to make life better for all children, in America and then around the world, spending one entire day of the just-ended 2016 Democratic National Convention (Tuesday, July 26) on this topic: tracing her work as a lawyer for the Children’s Fund, for children with disabilities, for racial integration, for federal health care for impoverished children, for her current work with a Black Lives Matter group, Mothers of the Movement (Democratic National Convention, July 26, 2016).  This picture was presented by a parade of people who were friends or admirers, whose lives she had touched – usually directly and usually with personal followup – in a trackable, positive manner.

Significantly, this was the entire programme leading up to the official nomination vote Tuesday evening, in which Hillary Clinton was, in fact, after a strongly contended campaign, declared the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.

Clinton has worked as a lawyer and as a research scholar to defend children being discriminated against.  She served as First Lady of Arkansas from 1979-1981 and from 1983-1992, including work as chair of the state’s Rural Health Advisory Committee; she served as First Lady of the United States of America from 1995-2001, including chairing work to pass federal health care expansion and memorably representing the nation at the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995; and she served as Senator from New York from 2001-2009.  In 2008 she barely lost a bid for her party’s presidential nomination; after Illinois freshman Senator Barack Obama won the election, he invited her to serve as his first-term Secretary of State.

Clinton’s bona fides, interpreted through the lens of people who have seen her hands-on work, her dedication to her chosen issues, her determination and reputedly astonishing work ethic, and her face-to-face care and concern for individuals, seem to vastly justify her nomination this week.  Even detractors often will admit she is experientially qualified to become President of our United States; supporters will assert (and reasonably so) that she is uniquely qualified, and perhaps the most prepared Presidential candidate in history.

There is another side to this picture of an amazing public servant, though.

Ever since she entered the national spotlight as the wife of the charismatic 1992 Democratic nominee for President, there has been a broad thread of negative judgement about her – and at first this was nearly purely sexist.  Unfortunately, that thread is still alive and well, as a jaunt through nearly any current news website’s comment-sections can demonstrate.  It is easy to understand why she and her supporters understand criticism of her to be irrational and reactionary, when from the start the loudest and most consistent criticism has been so.

She was active in her husband’s Executive Branch work during his Presidency (1993-2001) in a way that many people were uncomfortable with.  Unfortunately, she came to public prominence during a time when operative Karl Rove was ascendant in the Republican Party, implementing a strategy of winning back power by being incredibly nasty.   And so she came under additional fire for not only how impractical and wrongheaded her ideas were (to them), but also for legitimately questionable ethical/legal decisions in doing federal work with no officially appointed position and therefore no structural accountability (nor any established guidelines for what could in fact be done behind closed doors), for piggybacking on her husband’s career when she fancied herself a feminist, and any other discredits as could be laid at her feet with any rational cause at all.  Depending on one’s point of view, none, some, or all of these charges held water.

During this time, possible financial malfeasance regarding real estate and cattle futures during the Clintons’ time in Alabama was dragged up by opposition research, casting early doubts on her ethics as both a lawyer and as a person.  And when, in his first term, her husband was caught in a sexual relationship with a young female White House intern, and rumors of his broader philandering gained credence, their marital relationship was called into question.  Her choices in reacting to the crisis were kept under the media microscope – interestingly, the “feminist” organizations praised her for sticking with her husband (who was politically convenient for them) and conservatives seemed disgusted that she didn’t leave.  She slut-shamed the women implicated in Bill Clinton’s reputed affairs, stretching her feminist credibility.

While Bill was in office, Hillary shilled for non-gay-friendly measures: a “traditional” definition of marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military.  She shilled for race-specific law enforcement efforts and for loosening the legal controls that had been put on the banking sector as a result of the market crash of 1929.  All of these things “won,” and the latter two deeply and negatively affect many segments of our citizenry still today.

As her husband’s second term was ending, Clinton ran for a Senate seat from New York State, where the family had expediently established residency for that purpose; she was heavily financially and practically supported by both the political establishment and large financial concerns, and won the election to represent the people of a state in which she had never before lived.  She served from 2001-2009.  While in this elected office, she worked for many efforts consistent with her current campaign’s preferred storyline, including creating an acute focus on assisting with recovery from the 9-11 attacks.  But she also supported now-problematic national security items like entry into the Iraq War and the “Patriot Act.”  She supported bailouts for various American industries – particularly the banking sector – that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and from which we still have not recovered.  On the 2016 campaign trail, she verbally justified the banking bailout and a variety of pro-bank, pro-lending, pro-speculator legislative work by asserting that Wall Street was part of her constituency (some assessments of her success with that constituency can be found at Haberman, M,. & White, B., April 28, 2014).

In 2008, during her last year as a Senator, she ran a determined and occasionally vituperative campaign (sometimes accused of racist implication) for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, increasing her reputation as a negative political actor who would, as Obama himself said in that campaign, “say anything” to get elected.  This reputation was reinforced by years of flip-flops and determined de-emphasis of her problematic votes.

Obama asked her to be his Secretary of State, and trusted her and other established Democrats to help him select Cabinet members and agency appointees.  During this time many pro-corporate leaders were invited into the Administration, including lawyers and business leaders with ties to various Wall Street firms (Kiely, E., March 1, 2012, is a balanced look at this charge) and agro-giant Monsanto (Sager, J., October 1, 2012).  Most of these were known as at least friendly acquaintances of the Clintons and many had donated to various Clinton campaigns, or to the Clinton Foundation they established after Bill left office.

During this service, Clinton ignored the advice of White House security experts and used Blackberry communication devices; it was also established later that she had a dedicated server built in her house in New York, which was vulnerable to foreign.  A 2016 investigation by the FBI concluded that “there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” (Comey, J. B., July 5, 2016); a State Department investigation is currently in progress.  Also during this service, American military operations in the Middle East had been expected to wind down; instead they are still continuing as Obama ends his second term, and insider articles have frequently included portrayal of Clinton as a hawkish force during her time in the Administration.  As a final offense to the general ideals of her party and the potential good she could have been doing in office, Clinton spent significant time in office advocating for increased fracking both here in America and during deliberate propaganda trips to other nations around the world, even as evidence for vast geological and environmental damage was becoming apparent.

She left office in January of 2013 and embarked upon speaking and fundraising junkets for the Clinton Foundation, often speaking to her traditional donors from Wall Street or other business interests for amounts around $200,000.  None of those transcripts has been released, despite heavy pressure during this Democratic primary season.

She stepped off the board of the Clinton Foundation when she took up her primary campaign and proceeded to rapidly and repeatedly falsify her voting record, her federal-level advocacy record, and the permanence of her Fall-2015 “stances” on many social issues and environmental issues.  And many problematic Foundation donors became major donors to her campaign (Rubin, J., February 18, 2015).

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) set up a technically legal but deeply misleading and unethical money-laundering scheme called the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) late in 2015 that allowed Clinton’s major donors to donate the federally allowed amount several times over by donating to certain state Democratic committees which had agreed to send the money to the HVF for the primary, with the expectation that the DNC would help them out with money from national donors (which has not materialized).  It was revealed by a recent Wikileaks release that the Democratic National Committee unethically considered sabotaging her rival, Bernie Sanders’, campaign, which there had been on-the-ground evidence of since at least February.  And although there is not yet a paper trail found, the statistical anomalies between the exit polls and the voting results – only for the Democrats and nearly exclusively benefitting Clinton in the final vote count – are at levels statistically unsupportable; in past elections in other nations, America, the UN, and other concerned parties have called out nations for dirty elections in this situation.  (The Republican Party polls aligned cleanly with their results this year.)

And yet when the DNC emails were released two days before the Democratic convention, and party leaders forced DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to step down, Clinton reached out almost immediately (and even more insulting the convention, the day before the convention officially convened) and invited Wasserman-Schultz, implicated beyond doubt in pressuring the primary process, to be the honorary Chair of her Presidential campaign!

During the primary season Clinton spent significant time obfuscating or lying outright about what she had and hadn’t said in her past public life, in service to the current electoral cycle, but activists consistently dug up countering footage and posted it on the internet.  Clinton’s speech accepting the official nomination of her party reflected many beautiful ideas, many of which were part of Sanders’ stump speech but not hers mere weeks before – renewable energy development, a focus on jobs creation, making sure “Wall Street” never again tanks “Main Street,” funding for public college education, a further push for universal health care.  She celebrated Black Lives Matter and the real service law enforcement officers do for the nation, and she celebrated LGBTQ gains, not acknowledging a checkered political past in those areas.

I have never liked Hillary Clinton.  She flip-flopped and said whatever was convenient from day one on the national stage, and the only two things she has remained consistent on at the national level are abortion and increased government health care.  She was hawkish, favored banks and chemical agriculture, and cultivated financial and arguably quid-pro-quo relationships with Wall Street and banking concerns and perhaps foreign governments.

She is smart and strong and amazing – and that only, in my mind, made her all the more dangerous to leave near the reins of power (as long as she remains so deeply compromised).

What Tuesday night finally communicated to me was why and how she, her family, her support teams, many of the people she’s had a direct interaction with, and her citizen fans around the nation (some of whom are my good friends) could see her in a positive light.  I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to understand this until I ‘got’ it.

The problem now, though, which will continue to vastly handicap her success as a leader and her legacy as a human being, is that it is not clear that she nor any of her supporters ‘get’ that the other side of the story, the side they are so fond of claiming the Right Wing invented to smear Clinton, the side that is the only side I and many other people watching the national dramas unfold could see all these years, is actually also true and valid.

She really has lied.  Flip-flopped.  Pushed militarism. Supported policies that wore away at our rights (Patriot Act), our economy (bank bailouts), our security (Iraq War, favors granted to some foreign powers, insecure email server), and our global environment (fracking, chemical-focus agriculture).  She shows a capacity for denial and an avoidance of taking responsibility that many Americans can’t imagine, since she is clearly so intelligent, isn’t purposeful dissembling.

I hypothesize that she and the people around her know and understand the real good that she has worked for and achieved.  I hypothesize this is the work of her heart, and how she understands her “success” and her effectiveness and goodness as a political actor.

I hypothesize that she does not understand how her high-end political actions actively injure and long-term doom the heart-work she achieves on the ground.  I hypothesize that she sees the high-end policy work and the (probable) collusion as merely ways to fund, and fund generously, her “real” work.

I finally understand why people can love her, why she can be confident in herself.  And I am willing to believe, in fact I find I do believe despite 20 years of seeing only the opposite, that she really does have a good heart.

If she and her people could take a step back and, first, see, and, second, admit to themselves, the big picture, I think she is very capable of aligning future big-picture decisions with her heart vision of what is good and true.  She needs to align all of her actions to her heart-instincts.  In order to be believed for what looks like yet another adoption of convenient things to say only in order to get elected, she probably needs to come clean about the real and significant errors she has made her service to our country, and she probably needs to overtly apologize.

Coming clean about the damages she has done – to America, to America’s poor, to the world, to the world’s poor, to herself, and to America’s ability to trust our most powerful politicians – would take enormous courage in the buzzsaw world of politics.  However, doing so would give millions of Americans who currently consider her someone who cannot be trusted a reason to view her in a new light.  This would increase her chances of being elected and being supported by the nation.

I think she could save her historical legacy, become a morally integrated person of honor and integrity, and, with her smarts and determination and savvy, possibly become one of our legendary Presidents, if she can see and face the whole picture.

If she and her people choose the easier-feeling, more comfortable path, and refuse to consider that all those millions of people who see Clinton primarily as a liar might actually be thinking humans basing their negative reaction on historical facts, Clinton will, if elected in November, be at best a deeply compromised President and at worst a very efficient destructive force for our nation.

“Action is the true measure of character.”

References

• Comey, J. B. (July 5, 2016). Statement by FBI Director James B. Comey on the investigation of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system. FBI. Retrieved July 30, 2016, from https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clinton2019s-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system
• Democratic National Convention (July 26, 2016).  Mothers of the Movement at DNC 2016.  Retrieved July 30, 2016, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWF_9CYI9fc
• Haberman, M,. & White, B. (April 28, 2014).  Wall St. Republicans' dark secret. Politico.com.  Retrieved July 30, 2016, from http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/wall-street-republicans-hillary-clinton-2016-106070
• Keith, T. (July 28, 2016).  Taking on a U.S. Senator as a student propelled Clinton into the spotlight.  NPR Morning Edition.  Retrieved July 30, 2016, from http://www.npr.org/2016/07/28/486799201/taking-on-a-u-s-senator-as-a-student-propelled-clinton-into-the-spotlight
• Kiely, E. (March 1, 2012).  Obama White House ‘full of Wall Street executives’? factcheck.org. Retrieved July 30, 2016, from http://www.factcheck.org/2012/02/obama-white-house-full-of-wall-street-executives/
• Maxwell, J. C. (2003).  Ethics 101: What every leader needs to know. New York, NY: Center Street.
• Rubin, J. (February 18, 2015). Foreign donations to foundation raise major ethical questions for Hillary Clinton.  Retrieved July 30, 2016, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/02/18/foreign-donations-to-hillary-clintons-foundation-raise-major-ethical-questions/
• Sager, J. (October 1, 2012). No matter who wins the presidential election Monsanto benefits. theprogressivecynic.com. Retrieved July 30, 2016, from https://theprogressivecynic.com/2012/11/05/no-matter-who-wins-the-2012-presidential-election-monsanto-benefits/
• Wellesley College (n.d.). Hillary D. Rodham's 1969 student commencement speech. Retrieved July 30, 2016, from http://www.wellesley.edu/events/commencement/archives/1969commencement/studentspeech

Publishing this under the "you can publish the link to this but you have to keep the original link and authorship credit" copyright.

Lincoln High School fee request sheet, 2015-2016

on the Hobby Lobby decision: two alternative lenses and two additional thoughts

Granted that the decision itself is apparently preposterously non-specific, and from what I have read I am totally willing to believe it opens the courts and the law to all of the "religious exemptions" that are now being asserted (jokingly and seriously).  I have (so far) two basic alternative angles (not fully explicated, just *directions* of perception) from which to consider this decision.  (I am partially in favor of and partially against it myself, probably in a non-resolvable way, and so have been working on sorting out what it is I'm thinking/reacting to.)

1) It's an interesting question whether the right to physical autonomy or the right to autonomy of the mind (decision making and immediately derivable action or refusal to act) is in fact a more definitive human right ... perhaps particularly because there is clearly, when one gets down to brass tacks, no such thing as physical autonomy (probably there is no such thing as true autonomy of the mind either, but it is somewhat easier to ignore or theorize away psychological/emotional interdependence). 

I think a lot of the same people who are screaming foul right now would usually argue (and have historically argued) for the right of mind as *the primary* human right -- certainly until recently most of the moral choices now being espoused were not considered any kind of legally or even intellectually defensible in the first place: "opening minds" to conceptualizing a different moral basis and to making real concrete choices based on those changed intellectual constructions was a primary goal.  Certainly the nation's founders were pretty hot to trot about freedom of thought (including religious beliefs or lack thereof).  It's my impression that just about all revolutions-toward-liberty, worldwide, start with the right to have and express non-establishment *thought* ... and physical expression is a derivation of that right, once acquired (so, it is secondary).

From this point of view, the decision of the court might be leaning toward protecting the more fundamental human right as established in American legal (and social) thought, however fundamental a right to bodily autonomy is (and the latter is definitely not a universally agreed upon "truth," whether among women regarding childbearing or among men regarding other sacrifices of body/life for others, even just in America ... if we open to other cultures, indigenous or invasive, the possible variations increase).

I do note that such a prioritization of rights, even if historically and/or philosophically justified, does not imply that the specifics of the decision are necessarily reasonable, even if they are logically derived (I am under the impression they are at least logically derived -- but one can logically derive many things from any social assertion; Naziism is one logical social descendant of Romanticism).  But the fundamental *direction* of the majority is, I think, less screamingly indefensible than many people are currently busy asserting.

2) Second major alternative lens: There is some sort of fundamental difference I haven't gotten quite formalized yet between "my religion objects to non-human blood transfusions because I sincerely believe makes a human into something unable to attain heaven" and "my religion objects to abortion because I sincerely believe it actively kills in real earth-time an individual, living human" ... this doesn't necessarily make Monday's Hobby Lobby decision legally sensible, but it's not reasonable to compare debt forgiveness, or pig blood derivatives, to "I refuse to participate in active murder or even potentially active murder, particularly of an innocent and dependent human."  That's really a very different level of moral concern than "I think you are hurting yourself" or "I think you should be less meanspirited" or "I don't like how you think children should be raised."  The only "joke" I've seen so far that might approach the seriousness of the concern is about Christian Scientists denying medical treatment to their children (another area where there is *no* correct legal answer, although I recognize that people who have not experienced medical miracles would perceive it as a clean-cut legal decision to make).

Anyhow, our nation has a very spotty record of being actually logical about human rights, even on the occasions where we've at least manged good-sounding rhetoric; I doubt we will suddenly start being perfectly logical today (if it's even possible), and I doubt that there is an answer that will work for both sides in this division because we think and work from quite different moral priorities (individual "freedom" is a verrrry sketchy "absolute," and many cultures don't value it highly -- America is an extreme case sociologically, as has recently, and fascinatingly, become the in-thing to scientifically and statistically assess). 

I do believe abortion murders a human being (and the most innocent, most defenseless type of human being), and it is a real and concrete problem for me that anyone can be coerced into being party to financing it (yes, including "contraceptive" methods that probably aren't but might be abortifacient).  I'm also pretty damn horrified that we can't solve hunger and environmental destruction, not even in our own country(!), that we watch foreigners die as if they aren't extensions of (and measures of) our own humanity, and that people watch demeaning (to both sexes) pornography.  I am human-centric enough to consider human life a particular kind of sacred, and all of these forms of dehumanization are, to me, different facets of disrespect of the sanctity of human life.  I can't be surprised that a nation that is largely OK with migrant workers taking their chances with weather, farm equipment, and pesticides in order to justify cheap food prices for the convenience of citizens is not interested in considering a zygote as a human individual that deserves protections of any sort (and, yes, I am extremely offended that many who scream about the rights of a zygote are somehow OK with non-citizens being abused, poisoned, and starved ... talk about "arbitrary"!).

There are no yes/no, "simple" answers to any of these, and there are many partially right, partially messed-up answers.

I can't be against a decision that allows people like me to not support abortions in any preventable way.  I celebrate the concept that there would be a large, even an extreme, degree of freedom-of-conscience around this issue (as I also celebrate conscientious objection to military service and some other related things).  But I'm not at all sure I'm "for" Monday's decision either.  I wish that the justices had been clearer about why this line was somehow legally pertinent, and what they then assert the lower boundary should be on the now-allowed exemptions.  My sense is that the life/death issue'ness of it affected the outcome of the deliberations ... and I haven't heard that they captured any such thing in the ruling.  I wonder if they know themselves why it came down this way -- or if maybe they do in fact realize and consider it the Right Thing to blow open the doors of religious exemption just as much as most commentators think they have done.

So, yeah.  I don't have a lot of conclusions there, but two lenses that might cast a different color on the paths to the decision.

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As a side note, I don't think most pro-choice people are conscious that, at 40+ years, most people who are for one reason or another against abortion have spent the vast majority (or all) of our lives on the losing side of this question (and many years on the minority side, although I know the first 10 or 15 years were transitional and the last few years have been hotly argued by different statisticians).  The victim(/oppressed minority) storyline was fundamental to energizing the "right to abortion" fighters, ironically similarly to the odd psychological construct many Bible Christians live within, that conservative Christianity is a heroic minority viewpoint in America (self-fulfilling prophecy?)  ... so it's not like most pro-lifers/anti-abortion activists haven't confronted the questions of the defensibility of, or the potentially incorrect nature of, our belief(s).  It's not like many of us haven't dealt with the baby-or-abortion decision ourselves (I have) or with friends (that too).

While there are definitely admit-no-doubt pro-lifers, I don't think they are anywhere near the majority, and I don't think any of the Supreme Court Justices are among them, especially nowadays when one has to be both extremely politically savvy and very, very legally literate to even get nominated to the SCOTUS.  If your reaction to Monday's decision was any version of "they weren't thinking well," you probably need to examine your reactive psychological assumptions for interpretive reasonableness.

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Eden Organics has apparently filed for an exemption.

I am interested in whether this will bring more conservative Christians into the organic-food fold, to try to support Eden Organics by counteracting the boycott which was pretty much instantly called.
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