I was out running before the rain was supposed to get heavy,
first checking weather.com’s hour-by-hour prediction for my
town. I had been reading about China’s 1980’s Premier Zhao
Ziyang dictating his memoirs while under house arrest,
recording them over children’s songs tapes, and performances
of the Beijing Opera. When Tianamen Square was happening
in May of 1989, Zhao was the Chinese Communist Party chief
who wanted to pursue dialogue with the students, but when
he went to the home of patriarch Deng Xiaoping to talk
about it, martial law had already been decided to be imposed.
Instead of a cordial meeting, Zhao ‘was purged and placed under house arrest
until his death in 2005.’

Interesting. There are supposed to be details about the inner
sanctum of Chinese rule in what will be a book to be released
May 19 entitled “Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of
Premier Zhao Ziyang” via Simon and Schuster – – the book derived
from the tapes secretly smuggled to other friends and eventually
compiled into a complete set by ‘Bao Tong, a former close adviser
to Mr. Zhao who remains under tight surveilance in Beijing.’

This is major revelatory news, so there I was running in my
t-shirt of Chairman Mao himself with a beeg bee perched upon
his nose. I was listening to my music to inspire me and give
me energy, thinking about our wonderful nuclear industry in
the background, never quitting on getting some money. Making
hay while the sun shines. Billions of dollars flying around
and why not get us some too. Senator Murkowski, following
in her anti-environmental father’s shoes, has an amendment that
may be appended to some form of energy bill next week. The
Nuclear Information and Resource Service [NIRS], ever vigilant,
had sent out an alert and 3000 angry citizen responses had
resulted, protesting this amendment to our Congresspeople.

However, NIRS finally figured out that the ‘clean energy bank’
idea is the big whale on the horizon where unlimited dollars
can be garnered for nuclear power. If it can falsely be
determined to be a form of clean energy, like wind or sun or
hydropower. Which of course it is far far from ever being.
So, we must alert our congresspeople to this bigger reality.
You can do this via going to NIRS’ Daily Kos post at:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/14/731338/-Could-A-Clean-
Energy-Bank-Wreck-the-Economy-Well,-yes……
or directly contact your Representative in the House of
Representatives via:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5502/t/5846/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1546
or Speaker Nanci Pelosi at:
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5502/t/5846/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1550

See how YOU can effect change in our country, keep our
21st century course toward clean energy going in the
right uncorrupted direction, adding your own viewpoints
to the pre-written letters supplied by NIRS composers.

OBAMA Not The Brilliant Spectre We Hoped For:

No he’s not. He was vetted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Here’s a few paragraphs
out of an article Bruce Gagnon wrote before the 2008 election, called ‘O-Bummer:’

“David Rockefeller at the Trilateral Commission sent the executive director
of that high-brow organization, Zbignew Brzezinski, out to find a fresh face,
someone who could offer “change” to the public. He recruited Jimmy Carter,
the unknown Georgia governor and peanut farmer, to run for president. With
the support of this hidden elite Carter became president. I fell for the
trap. Brzezinski became Carter’s national security adviser and is the one
who helped us arm the Taliban in Afghanistan so they could give the former
Soviet Union their own version of a Vietnam quagmire. The U.S. has now
built six permanent military bases in Afghanistan.

Zbignew Brzezinski went on to write a book called The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives that was published in the late 1980’s
or early 1990’s. In this book Brzezinski talks about the importance of the
Middle East and Central Asia because of their vast supplies of oil and natural
gas. He says, “… But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian
challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging
America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy
is therefore the purpose of this book.”

He continues, “In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical.
Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A
power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most
advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map
also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail
Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania
geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75%
of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical
wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil.
Eurasia accounts for 60% of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the
world’s known energy resources.”

How though, Brzezinski asks, will we be able to convince the American people
to expend the enormous amount of money it would take to secure Eurasia on
behalf of the American corporate empire? How can we talk the American people
into giving up their favorite social programs (Medicare and Social Security)
so that permanent bases can be established in this region in order to control
the extraction of resources?

He answers the question by saying, “Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly
multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on
foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely
perceived direct external threat.”

Translation – terrorism. The war on terror. Endless war to protect us from the
dark, hard to find, cave dwelling forces of evil.

Today the American people are beginning to suffer from the Iraq and Afghanistan
syndrome. Since 2001 we have been in a perpetual state of war which has been
supported by both the Republicans and Democrats. How can we ever convince the
American people to press on, to keep our feet in “Eurasia” when they have begun
to show such a proclivity to tire of these foreign entanglements?

A new fresh face is needed.

I recently read an interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski that was published in a
British progressive journal. In the interview Brzezinski, who is now one of
Obama’s chief foreign policy advisers, brags that he had early on “vetted”
the potential presidential candidate and was quite certain that he was the
right man for the job at hand.

The official definition of the word vetted: to evaluate for possible approval
or acceptance.

I told my friend that the fresh face of change was a facade. A false,
superficial, or artificial appearance. A trick. A lie. A humiliation.”

So, the Prez is going to close Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but will not eliminate
military tribunals, a la GW Bush after all. He is increasing our troopage in
Afghanistan, which may be a war that cannot be won (as the Russians well know),
and will step up the spending on military hardware. He has taken on
individuals who were in favor of warring on Iraq and Afghanistan to council
and lead the country into more trouble and much less change.

But then, are human beings, and Americans, so smart anyway? We take animals for
granted as being part of nature, but they know things we don’t. Have you
ever read any Montaigne? He provides us with such great information from way
back a few centuries ago, before there were antibiotics, television, Viagra
and the cellphone:

“The philosopher Cleanthes saw some ants leave their anthill bearing the body
of a dead ant toward another anthill, from which several other ants came
to meet them as if to speak to them; and after they had been together
for a time, the second group returned to consult, you may suppose, with
their fellow citizens, and in this way made two or three trips because
of the difficulty of coming to terms. Finally the late-comers brought the
first ones a worm out of their den, as if for the ransom of the dead one,
which worm the first ones loaded on their back and carried home, leaving to
the others the body of the deceased. That is the interpretation Cleanthes gave
to it, testifying thereby that those creatures who have no voice nevertheless
have mutual intercourse and communication, in which it is our fault that we
cannot participate, and for this reason we are meddling foolishly by
expressing our opinion in the matter.”
– – from pages343-44 of Collected Essays – ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’

Then: “As for domestic management, not only do the ants surpass us in their
foresight in piling up and saving for the time to come, but they
also possess many parts of the knowledge necessary for it. The ants
spread their grains and seeds outside their threshing floor to air
them, freshen them, and dry them, when they see that they are beginning to
molder and smell rancid, for fear they may spoil and rot. But the caution
and foresight they use in gnawing the grains of wheat surpasses anything
imagined by human prudence. Because the wheat does not always remain dry
and sound, but grows soft and soggy and dissolves as in milk, when it is
on the way to germinate and produce; for fear it may sprout and lose its
nature and property as a storehouse for their food, they nibble off the
end by which it usually sprouts.” – – from page 347 of Sebold, Apology for

And why not: “Of all the predictions in times past, the most ancient and the most
certain were those drawn from the flight of birds. We have nothing like
it and nothing so wonderful. That rule and order in the flapping of
their wings by which men draw conclusions about things to come, must
certainly be led by some excellent means to so noble an operation; for
it is playing with words to go and attribute this great effect to some
natural ordinance, without the intelligence, consent, and reason of
the creature that produces it; and this is an opinion evidently false.”
– – – – page 344 ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’

As proof of this, the torpedo [electric ray] has the property, not
only of putting to sleep the limbs that directly touch her, but of
transmitting through nets and seines a sort of benumbed heaviness
to the hands of those who move and handle them. Indeed they say
further that if you pour water upon her, you feel this sensation
which climbs uphill to the hand and numbs the touch through the water.
This power is marvelous, but it is not useless to the torpedo: she
senses it and uses it in this way, that to catch the prey she seeks,
you see her hide under the mud, so that the other fish, gliding
past above, struck and benumbed by this chill of hers, fall into her
power. – – – next paragraph on page 344 ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’

Vandana Shiva talks about calling peoples or animals ‘natural’ in the
beginning of her terrific ‘Biopiracy’ book thusly:

“Columbus set a precedent when he treated the license [granted by the Pope]
to conquer non-European peoples as a natural right of European men. The
land titles issued by the pope through European kings and queens were the
first patents. The colonizer’s freedom was built on the slavery and subjugation
of the people with original rights to the land. This violent takeover was
rendered “natural” by defining the colonized people as nature, thus
denying them their humanity and freedom…

These Eurocentric notions of property and piracy are the bases on which
‘Intellectual Property’ laws of the GATT and World Trade Organization
(WTO) have been framed. When Europeans first colonized the non-European
world, they felt it was their duty to “discover and conquer,” to “subdue,
occupy, and possess.” It seems that Western powers are still driven by
the colonizing impulse to discover, conquer, own, and possess everything,
every society, every culture. The colonies have now been extended to
interior spaces, the ‘genetic codes’ of life-forms from microbes and
plants to animals, including humans.”

Ms. Shiva is talking about patenting genetically altered plants, crops, and
yes, even human genomes (doctors and government officials have already
indeed done this). Her vision of depicting indigenous people as natural
goes with what Montaigne shows us we humans do concerning animals – -to our own detriment. Columbus came a couple of centuries before Montaigne.

When I run my miles along beaches and inlets few people see, I think about
the wisdom of the geese and birds I am so lucky to perceive, relatively
undisturbed, out of the main heavy flow of human traffic. Bees on his
nose, Chairman Mao, and Zhao Ziyang himself needed to be tweaked out of their
complacency to suppress human nature and intelligence. The Ziyang book
should be an interesting read when it gets into our hands, tho nature waits out there for all of us to enjoy right now, morning, noon or any ole time…