this is a shout out to my new friends in the Traveler scene – you’re standing still, doing nothing.  and I need you, we all need you, to stop sucking air. we all need you to do that which needs to be done now. let me explain.

dressing in hippie rags, jamming the d chord, living on the street, has all been done.  it cannot be done again, at least not in the same context it was done by the hippies in the 60’s, or, the way Woodie Guthrie did it, or , the context that was applied to any of the countless movements from the past, in the United States, which contained the element of social diaspora.

what I mean by “done” is this: the Hegelian Dialectic.  It goes, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.  In terms of the 60’s, the restless youth met the status quo as thesis and antithesis.  Then, they merged. Yes, that’s the secret – there was no winner, and no one came out unscathed.  And what the synthesis is, in your face, right now, is yoga gentrification in Washington DC, it’s Whole Foods, that does indeed brings you vegan butter any day of weeks, but also ass rapes you and the People of America on the way out the door, with dense ties to markets share and Wall Street.  Do you see?  It was a synthesis, which means the hippies did not disappear.  It was not a failed experiment that you all need to do again – because it cannot be done again.

If you listen Gil Scott Heron today, you are wasting time.  Because if the Black Panthers marched onto the steps of the White House today with guns, it would be STUPID, right?  Because the President of the United States is Black, and so is his entire family!  Likewise, we don’t listen to James Brown sing about a “Funky President”. Not exactly for the same reason as Gil Scott Heron, but for the same reason as Whole Foods.  Obama is neither the thesis, nor the antithesis: he is a synthesis. That’s right: he’s not just Black; he’s White too.  That’s how it turned out.  The hard thing to see is that, once the Dialectic has run, you can’t run it again because your rally want Nihilism or something.

So back to you guys.  The revolution that is available now is not on the streets of Portland.  Instead, it is on the streets of Mumbai.  Actually, it is in the business colleges of Mumbai.  yes, the revolution that you could take part in is way out there – not in here.  It is in the World, not Haight-Asbury. And here’s the cool thing: it DOES take your traveler skill. What you need to do, instead of drop out and turn in, is to get your IBMA at an Indian University, (because their language of study is English and they are  concurrent, not latent).  Weird, right?  Wow, that’s not as cool as having dreads and listening to Marley. But look, all this  will require that you be able to smoke the chillum before class, and then ride your twin cycle through the streets of Mumbai, whiffing the vanilla smell of brown heroin. And then you need to visualize the Real World, which is this cyberspace concept that rules the minds of all people, but they are unaware.  Do you see this, the new On the Road?  The new Baba Ram Das?  It is so much higher, faster, farther.  Get on it!

Because what you are doing is not hypothesis versus thesis: it’s the past versus the future, and that is actually not a real “battle”, right?  Because no matter what you’ve read, the past ceases to exist immediately. The present is inconceivable, only feel-able.  And so what really exists is a future continuum. There is no such thing as living in the past. Revolution means full circle. YOU ARE STANDING STILL.

Yes.  We don’t need for you to re-enact the 60’s, to relearn how to bop, to deepen your consciousness with acid. Really, it’s kind of like watching Star Wars again.

I’ve been listening to a new (6-month-old) Buzzfeed podcast, called Another Round.  I like it, because it reminds me of my cousin Grant’s podcast, where they sit around and drink, and record the podcast.  I love that idea, and I love how it represents the unwieldy power of the podcast.

Hilary Clinton appeared on Another Round, just before the debate.  NPR’s “The Takeaway” interviewed the Another Round hosts, Tracy Clayton and Heben Nigatu

http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/real-hillary-clinton/

The funny thing about The Takeaway – or not funny; just regular, given the show’s name – is that the show gives you the bullet points. In one particular instance, the Takeaway guy, John Hockenberry, played a clip of the women “nailing” Hilary for evasion of a question. They asked her what she planned to do, if elected President, about the gross inequities that Blacks are subjected to in the prison system.  Clinton replied that most prisons were subject to State and Local law, and not Federal – to which Hockenberry and the Another Round hosts cried out EVADING THE QUESTION!

Now, please listen to the actual podcast, and listen to Clinton’s response in full.

https://soundcloud.com/anotherroundwithhebenandtracy/28-hillary-clinton-for-pos

Did you listen to it?  You see, the problem is the collective ADHD of our culture.  No one takes the time to listen.  Neither did the hosts.  They are from a sound-byte/tweet generation, and to listen to a rather long response, carefully, with the intention of understanding, is not something they were trained to do.

In fact what Clinton said was VERY important, and very educational, especially for these “young radicals”, who cry out for change, and are incensed that somebody doesn’t do something when the yell! Clinton said that the President of the United States has not power over State law.  Wow.  You have to study how this government was designed, which these women haven’t just yet, to see that we are really in a bind – if the States don’t want something, the President can’t make them!

I think Heben is the one who is the active Twitter tweeter.  She says she tweets suggestions to Obama all the time with suggestions.  I may sound condescending here, and maybe I am.  Or maybe I am old and in the way.  But I think she would want to know that she comes across as very naiive and very uniformed.  Whether she is, or whether I am, I will leave to her to figure out.  But here it is: the President is not a King, and there’s is a lot of deeper meaning in that.

Hilary said that while the President can push for Federal laws that radically change incarceration and law enforcement directives at a Federal level, this can only be used an an example for State to follow, if they choose.  So what she was trying to teach these young women is to point your barrels in the right direction!  Don’t interview the President, and demand change. Interview the the Governor of Alabama, for God’s sake!  Interview the Sheriff of Cobb County in Georgia.  Because you will probably discover some racist motherfuckers in that nest, and THEY are making and upholding the laws you hate.

The hosts were very focused as well on Hilary’s meeting with the Black Lives Matter crew:

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/8/19/watch_full_video_of_hillary_clintons

They were again very desperately trying to make her into the enemy of all Black reform.  And let me take the opportunity to state right here that I have NO LOVE for Hilary Clinton, and that deep down inside, they are completely right: she is a white woman’s white woman, and the fact that she protested in the 60’s and was inspired by Dr King is, well, you know, a little bit of Centrist bullshit.  So there.

But this does not give permission to these podcasters and new age Black Panthers to make the argument about the Clintons.  Because to do so has but one effect: nothing will change.  That’s right: if you muck around in angry protest, the Machine will just roll over you.

The Round hosts asked Hilary to take responsibility for the legislation that came about in the wake of the Rodney King mini war in LA in the early 90’s.  That’s it – she wanted to know if her and Bill were going to confess to their “fucked up” legislation, that has resulted in all these young Black men being incarcerated. Wow.  Don’t even know where to begin.

First of all, Hilary was the Wife of the President at that time.  She had nothing to do with any Federal laws that were passed.  Second, that business in LA was a war. Sorry.  It may have had everything to do with horrible injustice to Black men like Rodney, but the result was a fucking war on civilization.  And everybody, including Reverend Al Sharpton, called for the country to stop the violence.

But let’s say that Heben and Tracy are completely right: that the Clintons and all the other White people in government in the 90’s are responsible for the current state of cops killing Blacks.  How on earth does their confession have any effect on the HERE and the NOW?

The deal is this: start a revolution.  But then keep it going.  Hilary kept trying to get them to hear this, but the missed it.  How many new revolutions are started these days, by a round of passion, only to just fizzle out within a few years?  Lots.  Most of them. If Black Lives Matter is going to succeed, and it had fucking better succeed!, then they have to figure this one thing out: they are up against the Big Machine, and they are not going to topple it with tweets.  This will take intelligent, and sustained effort, for years and years to come, beyond the slogans and the popularity of dreads. Dr. King worked steadily for years and years and years, carefully eroding the walls of Big Government.  That’s how it happened.  The Black Panthers walked up the steps of the White House one day with sawed off shotguns.  Test question: which of these two acts, or both, have created any change in the state of engrained racism in the law of the United State?

Psycho Killer
Qu’est-ce que c’est
fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better
Run run run run run run run away

Christopher Harper-Mercer was withdrawn and quiet as he grew up in southern California…

The problem is, this topic is just to difficult, intellectually, for Americans.  It’s a sad state of affairs, but even those American who have had an excellent education, have been systematically deprived of the training in logic and rhetorical analysis to maintain focus in an argument from beginning to end.  And that is what is needed, from everyone.  This problem will not get solved until critical thinking is re-introduced into our laughable “curriculum”.

When I do my analysis, it is non-partisan.  I intend to find the correct answer. I am equally shocked at the flawed reasoning presented by both sides.  While I would like to chide the Liberals because they should know better (because they claim to), and malign the Right, because they “must be” consciously manipulating their arguments, motivated to achieve the goals prescribed by their self-titled “Right-ness”, I can see (can you?) that this kind of underlying pettiness is NOT GETTING US ANYWHERE.  In fact, this underlying juvenile bickering is sorely to blame for the deaths of innocent people, and we ALL should be ashamed for not looking at this problem like ADULTS.

Here is one way to reason  it:

1. The argument that mental illness, not guns, is the problem, is muddled on both sides.  Liberals cite statistics like, “Fewer than 6 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.”  
   • In rhetorical logic, this is called a false dilemma: when a problem is presented as having only two causes, when, in reality as we know it, this is rarely the case.  This argument is chock full of false dilemma.
   • First, must it be either mental illness, OR, proliferation of guns? Can’t it be both?  Really.  What a poor excuse for reasoning.  Of course it can be, and clearly is, both mental illness and the availability of guns, than contribute to mass killings.
   • Second, does one have to be completely mentally ill, or nothing?  Certainly there exist many layers of psycho-emotional disturbance that could lead, very quickly, to such rash actions, without first reaching the level of clinically discernible pathology.

   The other flaw with this argument, from the Liberal side, is the use of misleading statistics – this statistic from Vanderbilt U. does NOT give us the number of psycho-killers who were mentally ill; rather, we get the number of psycho-killer who were both apprehended, and then diagnosed.  Please. If you don’t see this, then return to Plato, and do not collect $200.

   So, what’s the answer, Mr. Know-it-All? Well, that’s the deal – it’s not so easy to just get an answer that fits into the Twitter block, and that you can consume along with your Starbucks.

2. The second major problem in a hard one to swallow: it is a long-standing sociological truth that law does NOT function as a deterrent to crime.  Repeat: does not.  Thus, making every single gun in the world illegal will have marginal, if any, effect.  In short, there is no such thing as gun control. But don’t believe me!  You should walk to Powell’s books, and select three Sociology 101 textbooks, and turn to chapter 5.  Am being serious. You can look at a summary here : http://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

Here is a deeper analayis, from and Oxford paper, which claims:

But available social science research suggests that manipulating criminal law rules within that system to achieve heightened deterrence effects generally will be ineffective. (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Volume 24, Issue 2, Pp. 173-205)

In case you don’t have the time, consider these ideas:

In States with the death penalty, the murder rate is markedly higher than in States where there is no capital punishment. This could be taken as an argument against capital punishment, rather than one against making laws against guns.  However, if you actually do your research, you will see that there has already been a large degree of strong gun control legislation, often obfuscated by those who feel that obfuscation serves the common good, and this legislation has had no effect.

What about this?  Does making murder illegal stop people from murdering?  Isn’t there already a law against murder? This hearkens back to the capital punishment example.  Does making the enforcment against and punishment for murder have any effect?  Seriously.  The United States has, on the contrary, become the center of violent murder in the World.

So, is time, finally time, to abandon this path.  This is not to say remove all gun control, nor is it to say that we should not seek stricter enforcement of licensing. It is only to say that this it not the solution, and further debate on the 2nd Amendment, further criticism of the “gun coalition” , further plying of gun toters against tree huggers, is A WASTE OF LIVES.

You wanted the answer, right?  And I mentioned that it is not such an easy one.

It begins with understanding something like what Pope John Paul the II described in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae, which is often referred to as “the culture of death”.

“Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by the common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable,”

Unfortunately for all of those who have died, this valuable document with great insight from a true logician, and empathetic person, has been muddled by extremist Right, and blithering Left, as being an “abortion” document. It does use the idea of abortion in a critical way, by saying that abortion is one of the ways that our society has become desensitized to death. Forget your ego for a second, and try to follow the idea: the more cases in which we say “it’s ok to kill; it is justified in this case”, the more opportunities we provide for people like Christopher  Harper to conclude, with legal and social precedence, that it is justifiable to kill someone. The point the Pope was trying to make was that if we add up the ways in which we “allow” death in our society, including abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, assassination of threats to the United States, warfare of any kind, if we add up all the movies, TV Series, books, social media, that focus on a rich portrayal of violence which leads to murder, IT ADDS UP to a society that is more aligned with DEATH than with LIFE.

The answer is, possibly, to take fundamental steps to unbuild this culture of death. Wow!  It seems insurmountable! It would be so much nicer to fight for gun control.  But unfortunately, a sick society, like a sick person, is a burden to which we must devote our hearts, despite our feelings of futility.