The foolish ferocity of turkey toms

Sheila and the Turkey part II.

The portion of my column not published in the BHCNews March 27 is continued eight paragraphs below

Montana's militant segment is bent on turning down Medicaid expansion for the rest of us in Montana. These politicians are acting in blind rage to block access to reasonable medical care, access we already paid for with our premium payments, otherwise known as payroll deductions for federal taxes. What turkeys.

As I described in my last column, with the onset of spring our turkey tom has begun to attack our dog whenever he sees her. He doesn't see, or doesn't seem to care, that his beak and spurs are no match for Sheila's quick slashing fangs. But even when injured and bleeding from gashes in his chest, he continues attacking, driven by a blind and instinctual drive to protect his hens. At this point, his injuries are so severe that we are concerned he may not live to fertilize eggs for our summer poultry crop. His life and the future of his potential offspring are at stake.

The same turkey politics in Helena threatens health care for thousands of Montana citizens. Like our turkey tom, our elected representatives don't seem to get it either. They, too, seem blinded by some sort of instinctual, ideological rage.

Don't these lawmakers see that we already pay for Medicaid through our taxes? If we don't expand Medicaid here in our state, then we'll be exporting our Montana dollars to pay for Medicaid expansion in other states. How does that make any sense? Some argue that Medicaid traps people in cycles of poverty. Medicaid doesn't trap people in poverty—lack of money traps people in poverty! Can't they see that most Medicaid recipients are hardworking taxpayers, who simply don't get enough income from their jobs? Don't they realize that the income threshold for denying Medicaid to families is so low that without expanded Medicaid—even with the subsidies that will be available through the health insurance exchanges in 2014—tens of thousands of Montanans will be left uninsured? Don't they recognize that we have more uninsured veterans per capita than in any other state, and that expanding Medicaid is the only reasonable way our tax dollars can be returned to serve some 7000 currently uninsured Montana veterans? What a scandal to refuse care for those who fought and paid in blood for all of us!

Some of our legislators claim that expanding Medicaid expands federal government involvement in health care. But don't they understand that Medicaid is health insurance, not health care? Health care gets provided in the exact same way, by the same hospitals and doctors that provide care to those who have other types of insurance. Furthermore, Medicaid is administrated at the state level, not from Washington: local Montanans taking care of their own.

Don't the folks in Helena know that as a form of health insurance, Medicaid is a whole lot more efficient than the commercial forms of insurance? Since Medicaid doesn't spend money on advertising or trying to deny coverage to people like the private companies do, more of the health care dollar gets spent on providing care! And do they not realize that extending this form of health insurance to 70,000 more Montanans is good for the local economy, too? A recent U of M study revealed that thousands of new jobs would be created with Medicaid expansion.

Perhaps our legislators forget that if we don't cover these Montana citizens, we'll still be paying for their care—only the care will be more expensive, and not as effective. That's because folks without insurance still get sick or injured, and eventually wind up in emergency rooms. Now that's expensive. And who pays for that waste? We do. The cost of their care now routinely is shifted to all of us through higher premiums—$1000 per year per family in Montana, and growing. Why don't our militant Helena legislators address this waste?

Maybe they are looking to states like Arkansas, who are thinking about using Medicaid dollars to buy health insurance from private insurance companies, who will pay doctors to provide care to beneficiaries. How free is enterprise with a law requiring a middleman? Rather than simply paying the health care providers directly, what they really want is pork barrel politics at its worst. Isn't it bribery to require us to buy from private companies who use our money to buy votes from politicians needing more money for their next campaign to make sure they are all on the take from the rest of us? Who is in whose pockets for what?

So when it comes to expanding Medicaid in Montana, I see a lot of turkey toms in Helena. With foolish ferocity, they are leading us down a path to a very questionable future. I suppose we can always hope that they'll come to their senses before it's too late.  

The following is continued from the incomplete edition of my column in The News.

Nearly all media commentary is pro big business, and plays down the cynicism of this push to deprive care and make profit. Here are two of few exceptions, unfortunately:

Sam Hall quotes extensively from a NYT column by Paul Krugman, with nationwide Medicaid economic data:

http://blogs.clarionledger.com/samrhall/2013/03/04/medicaid-expansion-and-the-private-sector/

 
Here's Paul Krugman's article in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/opinion/krugman-mooching-off-medicare.html

Which I quote:

Conservatives like to say that their position is all about economic freedom, and hence making government's role in general, and government spending in particular, as small as possible. And no doubt there are individual conservatives who really have such idealistic motives.

When it comes to conservatives with actual power, however, there's an alternative, more cynical view of their motivations — namely, that it's all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, about giving more to those who already have a lot. And if you want a strong piece of evidence in favor of that cynical view, look at the current state of play over Medicaid (click on the above link to the entire article).

 
--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Sheila, a turkey, and defense of marriage

See the 9^th paragraph below for the rest of the column not included in the newspaper edition.

Marriage is being redefined across the nation. We in Big Horn County are swept into the fray because proponents on both sides confuse the secular and religious implications of law and the Bible. These should have been kept separate. The confusion creates sticky legal and ethical dilemmas. Even the sanctity of marriage is blurred. What business does our secular government have redefining a sacrament already defined and established by God? At the same time, how can government authority impose a religious standard limiting civil rights and important legal protections for some American citizens? Such are the tactics of the Taliban, and hardly American.

Recently twenty states have or are in process of legalizing adult domestic partnerships or civil unions. The pressure to give reasonable space for such to exist won't stay away from Montana. The situation reminds me of a recent development out on the farm.   

Sheila is our Australian Shepherd who normally only defends us from marauding deer at night. I came home from school the other day and found her cowering in my pickup. I opened the door, and she wouldn't come out. I failed to notice the numerous turkey feathers scattered around. After returning home from a meeting later that night, I drove around to the garage, and there was our big turkey gobbler, Lightning, roosting low on a sawhorse beside the door. I wondered why he wasn't up with our two hens in the barn rafters where he belonged.

Next morning we opened the door to check on the animals, and as usual, the turkeys came running and stood their ground for handouts. Sheila romped around the corner of this scene, expecting her usual tidbit. In no time feathers were flying. It took both Bonnie and I to separate them. I laid a full body grip on Lightning and he proceeded to clamp my gloved finger in his beak. He kept his death grip with his body stiff, so I looked him over. The broken wing feathers on one side–he leads with his right–clearly explained his reduced ability to fly.

Then I understood. Now that spring is approaching, the turkey-breeding season is upon us. As Sheila approached the vicinity of the three turkeys, Lightning had forgotten all about possible corn handouts.  He ran at Sheila, courageously trumpeting his version of Garryowen- defending his dominance over our two turkey hens as well as his potential posterity with them. Sheila also stood her ground, defending her right to exist on this farm with full access to sustenance and protection.

We were alarmed.  No doubt this was headed for a fight to the death.  It seemed there could be no middle ground. Gone were the peaceful mornings of opening the back door with handouts to both dog and bird. If we left them to their vices, we feared we would end up having to terminate one or both of them.  What to do?
The final solution was separation: turkeys are sequestered behind an electric fence, free to be turkeys, while Sheila is left to guard the rest of the farm.  I no longer fear we will have to deploy our termination plan.

Perhaps the same wisdom could apply to debates on domestic partnerships.  If the government stays out of the business of redefining marriage, it can focus on protecting citizens.  Any two adults should, for whatever reason, be allowed to form a contractual agreement to share a household and to designate the other as next of kin.  And the Church can maintain its prophetic role to protect marriage and to proclaim freedom in Christ from the bondages of sin and moral depravity decried by Paul in the Bible.  As Jesus advised, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."  Let the government have legal contracts, and the church have marriage.

It's hard for us today to imagine the Greek/Roman cities in the time of Paul where sex and the sword were used interchangeably to enforce human bondage. Rape was non-existent, simply because normal consensual marital sex was not valued.  St. Paul's references to abominations become clearer in the actual Greek words he wrote down. English terms such as effeminate and homosexual in the original Bible language referred to bondage, domination, fear, violence and depravity that tore families apart and caused sickness and death. This is far from the respectful, faithful, caring lifelong relationship God intends for bonding in the human family.

 

The following is continued from the newspaper

 

To Paul, normal human bonding was intended from Creation, where Jesus was present. So in the human community of Christ-followers there was to be none of the huge power differences usually implicit at that time in sexual bondages, slavery, religion, race, politics, and wealth disparity (http://politicaljesus.com/2013/03/06/wealth-inequality-political-power-and-the-bible/?utm_source=wordtwit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wordtwit).

 

Paul learned this from Jesus. Implicitly or literally, Jesus' parables address human bondages and exclusions justified by Pharisaic literal interpretation of Old Testament law. Almost all of Jesus' healings directly destroyed a legally endorsed physical barrier to life, and welcomed an individual to leave bondages and become bonded with (follow) Jesus for life. It's the salvation to which first Christians were called, who "turned the world upside down," as noted by Paul's enemies in Thessalonica

  (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17&version=NKJV).

 

The intimidation system of sex and the sword was obvious. Caesar's empire was destined to crumble. Roman law was no better than Old Testament law, and both were transcended by the power of Christ and his new Commandment (http://bible.cc/john/13-34.htm). Paul explains specifically that laws cannot enforce the relational elements of "neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free" (http://bible.cc/galatians/3-28.htm). The oneness in Christ to which Paul refers is not an intellectual agreement, but a oneness which law cannot enforce: "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, patience" (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+5%3A22-23&version=NASB).

 

Much modern Christian agenda follows a philosophy of deontology, where simple unquestioning obedience "as unto God" sets aside Jesus' one commandment in which all the details of the Old Testament law are fulfilled. From the Creation story to the Ten Commandments to St. Paul's institution of communion, abusive bondage power of the other gods is rejected in favor of building human bonds of mutual trust with food and other means of life, in real time and place.

 

We are on the cusp of good changes in the legal system to separate the religious from the secular in the institution of marriage. Montana needs this change. It can happen with respecting the diversity of opinion and practice, without the imposition of religious law by secular government.  Those among us who strongly oppose gay marriage would be relieved from demanding our government to enforce our Bible-based sin definitions. The religious function of exclusion would be relegated to religious institutions, not the secular government.  On the contrary, those whose Bible interpretation asks government to issue marriage licenses to gays would no longer have the power to force religious institutions to allow use of their facilities for gay marriages.  The government would not be marrying gays; marriage is the job of religious institutions. Government would have the job of protecting and recognizing legal human bonding, defining with public consensus such parameters age, mental capacity, and criminal history which can be clearly demonstrated to uphold the common good.

 

In New Hampshire, debates over gender in this sacred institution can continue to take place, but within the religious community instead of in government. This also gives back to God the right as Jesus advocated, "What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."

 

The Roman standard of peace through the violence of sword and sex is all over the Middle East's ancient history sites. Unfortunately, some art historians tend to see nudity in Roman/Greek times as freedom from our Victorian prudery. It's not. It was riddled with bondage, with fear, rape and bloody violence to all those (male or female, bond or free) who would oppose that bondage, through and through. It was not lifelong bonding of trusting equals, but rather, imbedded in some of that art itself, I sense a cry to break from bondage. Our whole Bible advocates freedom for faithfulness, trust, lifelong, respectful human bonding.  In fact, these are precisely the characteristics of the Father Jesus came to emulate, and asks us to do the same. This came vividly apparent to me in our 2013 Lent reading of the Gospels.

 

We in Montana should take note. We also, let alone our Washington legislators, do not need one more ounce of our emotional energy drained on either side of the gay marriage debate (Legislators, check my blog for document links).

 

The government in Montana now has a monopoly on marriage, and government-sanctioned marriages have been disintegrating for years— just look at the divorce rate in the United States. Since all 50 states issue no-fault divorces, it's sometimes easier to end a marriage than it is to end a corporate partnership. Doesn't the above make more sense? Make it a private contract between two individuals. That's where defense of marriage makes sense.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

The 2nd amendment and defending our families

None of us who reads this newspaper wants to give up our right of self-defense. We do not want to see our children or spouses taken by force or killed in front of us because we failed to defend them and ourselves. Jesus, seeing his own impending death, told his disciples to do what they desperately wanted to do: go get swords. And Jesus added, "… that the scripture might be fulfilled." Jesus embodied what God intended in Old Testament history.

 

And yet, we have carnage from guns almost to Old Testament proportions. We are far and away the leader in criminal homicide in the industrialized world, much of it from handguns. "The second amendment is part of the reason our nation tolerates a level of carnage and terror unparalleled in any other nation at peace. The public more or less assumes that the Second Amendment prohibits the kind of gun control regulations that effectively protect pubic safety in other countries." That's the result of extremists having their propaganda believed (UCDavisLawHistory 2nd amendment).

 

A small minority of them want all guns banned except those designed only for hunting. A larger minority, the opposing extremists pumped up by the National Rifle Association's leadership, wants us all afraid our American government will disarm us and make us defenseless. We in the media have allowed extremists on both sides to dominate the stage of the gun debate.  The result has been a boondoggle of billions for a few investors in the huge gun industry in America, and bloody carnage in our classrooms, streets and homes.

 

I suspect more of us want to return to honoring our American form of government, trusting the democratic values in our whole constitution that honor the protection of individual rights—including individual gun ownership rights guaranteed by legislation in virtually every state. We couldn't believe our Supreme Court in 2008 twisted the 2ndAmendment into this purpose with legislation-from-the-bench.  But with research and writing of the legal briefs sponsored by the NRA and the gun industry, and nowhere the investment from citizens for sanity, we got what they paid for.

 

When the dust settles, the best solution would be to have the old restrictions restored as supported by a huge majority of American gun owners then on what guns we can possess, and where in public places they can be carried. I support a return to the regulations the NRA taught at the safety class my father saw to it I attended over fifty years ago.

 

The point is clear: gun regulations worked in America then. Australia, Finland and Canada prove they can work again. Removal of those regulations led to proliferation of the very weapons we the people back in the '50's couldn't have imagined then being manufactured and marketed by our gun industry across the world, propagandized with the notion that the more guns we humans have the safer we will be. We teenagers also didn't imagine the NRA would trash their support for regulations to keep children safe from guns.

 

Now is high time to learn the history of the 2nd amendment ratification missing in our public school history curriculum. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia. Slave states were concerned states should have this right, at least equally.  They were afraid abolitionists would use this law to disarm or remove state militias. This was not to be. Hundreds of substantial slave rebellions had already occurred. To handle this threat, states like Georgia had issued a universal mandate for all family heads to own at least one gun to be used in local militias to search slave quarters and proactively end a potential slave rebellion. Virginia representatives to their ratification convention bitterly opposed the word "nation" in the first draft of the 2nd Amendment. It was changed to "state" amid vigorous debate over states' rights to manage and support local armed militias.  That's how it was ratified, saving our United States Constitution.

 

Thus we got the second amendment originally to guarantee what? Can it be the right of state governments' militias to break into family slave quarters at night to confiscate self-defense weapons? —Weapons that could be used to defend a spouse or child from being sold away never to return? —Or to be used, of course hopelessly, to struggle for freedom from this tyranny? This astounding history, echoing down from the Gospels of the Bible, needs further examination.

 

Is it possible our Supreme Court and nation could have drifted so far from the original intention of our 2nd Amendment? Could refusing to read this history bring a repetition in our homes of what our great-great-grandfathers' slaves suffered from government-supported raids in their homes then?

Check the following links:

 

Here's the peer-reviewed law school research paper with documents quoted and sources given:

http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm

 

This is a summary of that research paper: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery

 

Another perspective on this information:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/01/14/169164414/lack-of-up-to-date-research-complicates-gun-debate

 

Here's a quick sketch connecting to the gun controversy heating up again

 

http://civic.moveon.org/nradoesntspeakforme/share.html?rc=testmail&id=62736-9663000-w05CElx

 

also this

http://www.alternet.org/environment/myth-human-progress?akid=9947.144927.iQeNYT&rd=1&src=newsletter780389&t=2

 

An issue connecting to the same hyped emotion behind the gun issue:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone

 

My further comments (not in the column):

High school history instructors don't know this history in the constitutional ratification debates of 1780's because, as I was informed, "the texts don't go into this detail." But why are these documents and proceedings transcripts deleted from our US history texts?  The debate over the 2^nd amendment when our constitution was finally ratified by the state of Virginia in 1789 is an astounding and crucial history. It's in the details that our children get interested in history, so we have a chance not to repeat past mistakes.  When we are helpless old people we don't want our children repeating a history no one wants repeated.  The history we don't want repeated (at least that's my bias) is in the documents from the late 1700's in Virginia and the other states where constitutional ratification conventions were held, amid great controversy.

 

It's already been repeated. The US government did it in Waco Texas in the 80's. Well-organized militias did it routinely, as an arm of state governments, to force entry into homes and disarm people of color in the United States well into the 20^th century, a practice originally designed to abort slave rebellions that remains with us in our fears and dreams.

 

Significantly, the landmark legal action of the Black Panther Party in California has become the foundation of the individual's rights to join in a group collectively bearing arms in public. They did so in a remarkable standoff in a courthouse in California years ago. First of all, the public display of loaded weaponry discouraged officials from apprehended disarming and arresting the Black Panthers. Secondly, the ensuing court challenge to the Black Panthers was so conspicuously against the recent constitutional 2^nd amendment interpretation that the state judiciary had to back down.  Sources of this are cited in the UCDavis lawreview paper above.

 

We just don't get it any more. Partly it's because the history of the 2^nd amendment's role in the constitutional ratification assemblies 1779 – 89 has been expunged or relegated to insignificance in modern high school history texts. That's worth examining again.

 

Slaves did not have a right to marriage or family bonding, unless granted for a time by masters, usually for breeding purposes. The prospect of giving slaves freedom, access to weapons and the right to organize to defend their homes and families, threatened the very foundation of Southern gentility.  That's what was read into the original wording of the 2^nd amendment, and blocked the whole constitutional ratification process, until the word "state" was entered in place of "nation." Controversy seethed as ratification assemblies repeatedly failed to reconcile the constitutional language granting "equal rights" with the 2^nd amendment wording granting the federal government oversight of all organized militias. With the change from "nation" to "state" in the 2^nd amendment draft, the slave state of Virginia came on board with the ratification assembly and voted for ratification of the Constitution of the United States. Thus the right of government (state government) to forceably enter sleeping quarters of certain human beings with children and confiscate weapons including guns was upheld by the 2^nd amendment to the constitution as written.  Any historians out there, gun owners like me, with comments?

--
David Graber
RR 1 Box 1211D
631 Woodley Ln
Hardin, MT  59034

406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com

Stumbling in the fog

In the foggy drizzle just past the Blue Angel speakeasy in black North Gulfport, Mississippi, we saw the stumbling figure in the glow of our van headlights. We decided to stop. The young white soldier from Keesler Air Base was spitting blood as he explained through his inebriation fog someone had taken his gun, beaten him, and dumped him out. He didn't know where he was. He said "take me back," but couldn't tell us where. We drove back to the Blue Angel, but he wouldn't get out of the van. In his haze, he thought we knew where he wanted to go and accused us of playing mind games with him. His belligerence rose as some of us laughed at his unintelligible predicament. We ended up stopping to let him out right in the middle of black North Gulfport, as his agitation was rising into violence.

 

That happened one steamy night as I was returning with a group of volunteer reading teachers who had been celebrating their teenage students' accomplishments at their headquarters, the "North Gulfport Good Deeds Association." At that time in the mid 60's, Mississippi was not funding public education for blacks. This is one of the overwhelming needs we volunteers were addressing under the leadership of my father-in-law, The Rev. Orlo Kaufman.

 

I saw no connection at the time between this event and my daytime work as a Bible School teacher in the piney woods just up the highway from North Gulfport.  I had ten teenage black girls who were present every morning on time at a rough-sawn table under a large live oak beside the red dirt road. They were children of pine tappers, blacks who cut V's in the bark of long leaf pines of the national forest for the sap to run, which they sold for a pittance to the mill that processed the sap into the turpentine and wholesaled it to paint retailers across the country.

 

A grandma warned me when I started teaching: "Don't let those girls talk. Make them read the Bible." I couldn't stop their talk. It was about North Gulfport, the Blue Angel and other speakeasies, beatings, escapes, and The Man.  I tried to follow Grandma's direction. The girls were obedient, sort of. But I still didn't get it. My father-in-law did, and he explained: "Those girls' families cannot survive on pine tapper pay. Some of them are sent to the speakeasies of North Gulfport to service soldiers and tourists who come from the north to gamble and drink off the coast and visit the speakeasies across the colored line in North Gulfport. These girls haven't gone yet."

 

I protested, "Isn't that illegal?  Mississippi is a dry state, and prostitution is a crime."  He replied darkly, "That's why the sheriff of Harrison County, Mississippi, has the highest income of any publicly elected official."

 

"Including our president?" I demanded. "Absolutely; way more," he said.

 

At his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Sweden, Barak Obama dismissed the power of Dr. King's dream of peace, only accepting his message of racial tolerance.  Since his Inaugural speech in January 2009, Obama has pursued policies that epitomize King's grim warning in 1967: "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men." He was concerned we would trust drones more than his dream of trusting the moral foundation of our nation.

 

Our nation is lost in a fog of drone inebriation. We are misguided men stumbling along trying to subdue perceived hatred of us among the world's nations without our moral or scientific moorings. No one has confronted us to disarm us; in fact, we are deathly afraid of being disarmed. While overseas I learned we are now confronted by a worldwide consensus that we are the most dangerous nation on earth, most likely to start or facilitate violent conflict. This happened since we started bombing Iraq.

 

With virtually unanimous support, even from the Tea Party, Obama has acted upon the weakness that is strong only in its power to destroy. He continues our nation's enormous gamble. There are few political risks for Obama's use of drones in our defense against terrorism. But our own amazingly strong moral and scientific heritage says we are stumbling, armed and dangerous, in a fog of confusion, spending trillions facilitating technologies of death and destruction around the world since Hiroshima.

 

Dr. King had the answer, but Obama cannot help us listen to it. We must listen on our own. He knew where we as a nation were headed before he died. He gave his life to urge us on a track to true national strength, founded upon the best democratic and Christian ideals to come out of our 1776 revolution.

 

We as a nation have a right to be proud of our heritage. But we will only find the sorrows of the empires that have expired before us if we continue choosing drones over the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That seems to be President Obama and the nation's consensus stumbling in incoherent inebriation in the fog of perpetual war.

 

David Sirota at Salon.com: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/25/actually_obama_does_advocate_perpetual_war/

 

Norman Solomon's blog:

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone

"Obama has not ignored King's anti-war legacy. On the contrary, the president has gone out of his way to distort and belittle it.

 

"In his eleventh month as president -- while escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, a process that tripled the American troop levels there -- Obama traveled to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. In his speech, he cast aspersions on the peace advocacy of another Nobel Peace laureate: Martin Luther King Jr.

 

"The president struck a respectful tone as he whetted the rhetorical knife before twisting. "I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naive -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King," he said, just before swiftly implying that those two advocates of nonviolent direct action were, in fact, passive and naive. "I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people," Obama added.

 

"The real foundation of the "Arab Spring" was countless workshops and teach ins across Tunisia and Egypt based prominently on research from the Albert Einstein Center

 

"Moments later, he was straining to justify American warfare: past, present, future. "To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason," Obama said. "I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

 

"Then came the jingo pitch: "Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms."

 

"Crowing about the moral virtues of making war while accepting a peace prize might seem a bit odd, but Obama's rhetoric was in sync with a key dictum from Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

 

"Laboring to denigrate King's anti-war past while boasting about Uncle Sam's past (albeit acknowledging "mistakes," a classic retrospective euphemism for carnage from the vantage point of perpetrators), Obama marshaled his oratory to foreshadow and justify the killing yet to come under his authority."

 

The Arab Spring did not happen with a sudden spark to ignite the demand for democracy. It was founded with decades of teaching and disciplined drill at university campuses and training camps in nonviolent combat.  Gene Sharp, professor emeritus at Dartmouth, contributed American scientific research and wrote the manual on how to destroy a dictatorship and to prevent the rise of a new one, with weapons more powerful than those that tear up skin, flesh, grey matter and bone.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dictatorship_to_Democracy.

 

In his 80's, he still is active with the organization he helped start, The Albert Einstein Institute

http://www.aeinstein.org/.

 

This side has many links to research on the power of nonviolent warfare.

 

Harvard University Law School has a large department named Program on Negotiation, with volumes of reliable research into how peace is built in human cultures averting the fog and bloody tragedy of violent conflict.  Many diplomats worldwide have graduated from this program. It is easily accessible online. Their high school/college curriculum for teaching the science of peace building is the same source I used to teach English at XiHua University in China: http://thirdside.org/

 

Much of Dr. King's work reflected his belief that Jesus was far more concerned about proper economics than he was about proper prayers. He felt that the solution to the violence in our nation at that time must include addressing the problems of ungodly economics.

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14005-a-mighty-stream-martin-luther-king-jrs-faith-guided-him-to-a-commitment-to-economic-justice

 

A short explanation of Dr. King's nonviolent strategy, its power, and how we as a nation reject his message and his understanding of what makes us a great nation: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14034-dulling-down-dr-kings-message

 

Nearly all of Dr. King's recorded speeches are available online, on youtube and other sources. Just use a search engine with words like "Dr. King nonviolence Vietnam economic justice."

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

guns vs doctors

 

 

-- Doing the math

THE FOLLOWING CONTENT BANDIED ABOUT IN THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IS NOT ENDORSED BY THIS WRITER, AND IS OFFERED ONLY FOR READERS' CONSIDERATION

Doctors

(A) The number of physicians in the U.S. is 700,000.

(B) Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.

(C) Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171

Statistics courtesy of U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

  Now think about this: Guns

(A) The number of gun owners in the U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million)

(B) The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500.

(C) The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188

Statistics courtesy of FBI

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

So, statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.'

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

FACT: NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT Almost everyone has at least one doctor.

This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor than by a gun owner!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Please alert your friends to this alarming threat.

We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 

Out of concern for the public at large, We withheld the statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention.

 

THE WRITER OF THIS BLOG DISCLAIMS ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENT OF THIS OR ANY OTHER LINKS OR IMPORTED MATERIALS

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

2nd language immersion and the bilingual bonus

 

The recent meeting critically examining the $877,000 three-year funding of the Apsaalooke Preschool Language Immersion Program revealed misconceptions (see Big Horn County News January 2).

 

Late spring of 2002 I sat with a Buddhist monk in his tiny bedroom in a Tibetan village in the Eastern Himalayas.  He was proud to write in Tibetan script the name of his family house where we were guests for the night (I still have the page). He explained that houses in this small village had a spiritual life, and that their names were more important than the names of the individuals who lived there.

 

He also explained that his writing had only recently become legal. We had just walked to his bedroom from his tiny temple. It had been the only one in the village for years, since the Communists had destroyed the old temple. Here he had persuaded local Communist authorities for permission to teach children to pray. Inside the round domed hut hardly eight feet across was a brass/gold prayer wheel with a trench worn into the dirt floor where little feet had packed down the dirt while little hands rotated individual small prayer wheels. I imagined, as I spun one of the little wheels, the whole apparatus turning, wheels in a wheel. Undetected by the authorities' periodic inspection were the papers tucked between stones in the walls where children, between prayers, had practiced writing in Tibetan and had hidden their treasured work.

 

Now, he said, the children learn in two languages in school, Tibetan and Hanyu (Chinese). They can pray now at the larger, newer temple. But children still were coming to his tiny temple, and he relished his opportunity to continue teaching them their heritage ways, singing the chants while rotating the prayer wheels, continuing to tread their bare feet in the depressed circle in the dirt.

 

Tibetan language has become generally more acceptable to party bosses in Western China, but they are still prone to crack down, reflecting the worldwide tendency of hegemonic cultures and nations to denigrate minority languages and culture. We in Big Horn County are, with the new immersion program at Crow, forging an exception.

 

But we need a better understanding of the research on 2^nd language acquisition and its benefit for academic success. We need to know that ethnic minorities do access a unique benefit for academic success in the dominant language when their heritage language gains the respect of the dominant culture. It works by promoting 2^nd language immersion instruction for five-year-olds in their minority culture. A most crucial finding is that recovery of a heritage language is a boon, not a distraction, from learning the dominant language.  And such instruction improves chances of successful entry into the larger culture.

 

When we visited Tibetan regions of Western China, ethnic minority language teaching was just being discovered as useful for learning Chinese. Focusing on Tibetan in those tiny dirt-floor huts really did help those children learn how to learn Chinese, contrary to most Chinese Communist Party bosses of the Tibetan region. Needless to say, the battle is not yet won, especially in Tibet proper, where a rebellion against Chinese domination is ongoing.

 

It's not won here in Big Horn County either, where the report in the paper reflected the prevailing error that learning Apsaalooke in head start will somehow interfere with Crow Indian children learning English, and ultimately retard their academic progress. This is also still a battle in Arizona and California, two states where a sizeable and powerful segment tries to control the research information and the debate.

 

Fortunately tribal education officials listen to people like Janine Pease, whose research was crucial to win this grant. Her experience and scholarly background helps promote the primary focus of immersion: so that Apsáalooke five-year-olds are grounded linguistically in their heritage language enough to grow and flourish in English skills beyond their peers by age 12. This is the age where the well-known "bilingual bonus" usually kicks in for children learning in two languages at age 5. She knows that successful bilingual instruction is having high quality models of both languages available to children. Adults speaking with children in immersion programs need fluency in both languages used for instruction. They need instructional materials in both languages to make instruction in all subjects a source of language growth. Teachers well trained in skills of 2^nd language instruction are essential for five-year-olds to reach their bilingual bonus potential when they are twelve.  Even more important is leadership healing from a deprecatory attitude toward Apsáalooke language in our schools, as reflected in the report on this meeting. So yes, we have some real challenges in Big Horn County in achieving the bilingual bonus all our children deserve.

 

Extending the concept further leads me to wish my own grandchildren, now in elementary school, would have had the benefit of head start instruction offered with immersion in Tsestsestáhes (Cheyenne) or Apsáalooke (Crow). Those are the languages that cry out from the soil of this county. This is where we live, and those languages can become the beneficial 2^nd language for children of any ethnic background born and raised here. I'm assuming some parents would join me taking up the offer, but hope no one would promote rigidly mandating a 2^nd language immersion instruction for all children, as is now done in China with English, taught by caring teachers with miniscule English language knowledge.  

 

Further information and hundreds of links to online sources can easily be found by searching online or in a library. Use these search words: L2 language acquisition research bilingual bonus.

 

--
David Graber

Hardin, MT  59034

graberdb@gmail.com

Useful Panic

Panic is a natural human reaction to danger, whether it is real, imagined, or imposed by the fears of others.   Panic can cause foolish fast choices that are downright dangerous. Panic can also be useful to motivate observation, avert real dangers, and save lives.   We've all experienced plenty of both types in our lives.

An example of useful panic happened to me during a recent hike with my grandkids.  Even though it occurred quickly, the details are etched clearly in my mind.   We could see the sun sinking into the distant Beartooth mountains as the five of us walked along a pine ridge near Hardin. We were soaking in those last warm rays of a beautiful summer afternoon as we walked along a high slippery cliff of sand rocks sloping toward the west. Unbeknownst to us, we weren't the only ones enjoying those warm rays.  There was a young rattler on a flat expanse of rock tilted toward the setting sun directly in our path.    

I was alerted to the "e-eek!" of my daughter mixed with the hiss of panic-activating rattles. It was time for us to respond to the panic with reason, not foolish jumping off the cliff. We retreated a few steps and adjusted to a safer route as the rattler slid off in the opposite direction (see greenwoodback40.blogspot.com). It was done. No one was hurt, and we continued immersed in the setting sunlight along that sand rock cliff east of Hardin.

Through this past election year our media has been pervaded with a different kind of panic—panic designed to cloud our reason and distract us from meaningful action. We watched our usually credible media flooded with wild charges of conspiracy theories and hoaxes, usually attributed to our president, Big Government, environmentalists, the CIA, etc. We are still hearing panic-peddlers proclaiming they're taking away guns, coal plants, jobs in Big Horn County, ranch land, freedoms, our minds via CIA-engineered controls, etc.

 

It's amazing that people are ready and willing to panic over these non-existent threats, while denying the reality of very real changes happening to our planet.  Evidence of serious climate crises continues to mount, with faster than expected changes being reported every day.   Arctic ice is melting at a higher rate than initial projections, while ocean levels continue to rise, and increasing numbers of destructive storms pummel our country's shores.  In 2012, extreme weather and other climate-related events cost the U.S. a billion dollars. Our biggest insurance companies, our defense department, and even our major corporations are already retooling for lower fossil carbon consumption.

Climate change is not a hoax. It's as real as that rattler coiled ready on that rock beneath my granddaughter's footfall. The Bible also calls us to pay attention to our environment. We humans have been placed on this planet and empowered by our Creator to tend it.

 

Jesus commands us to pay attention to our surroundings in the latter days, and have a firm grip on reality as we trust in God and his way. Like false prophets then, today we let our media lull us away from responsible observation of our God-created planet. They give us blinders so we see only false assurances that every little thing is all right, and life will go on fine without changing our path.

 

It's past time for us to experience some useful panic over this issue, while we can still take some action to mitigate the consequences.   There are certainly steps we can take short of leaping off the cliff or denying that change is occurring.   Let's listen to the 97% of scientists who are saying that humans play a role in these observable changes.   While it's hard to hear about the implications, maybe it's time to stop hoping the most devastating consequences will occur after our time on this earth is finished.   Maybe folks of my generation have the luxury of retreating to fatalism, but this won't help my grandchildren or their children.

 

As the new year approaches, let's consider the long term future of our home and the role we should play in preserving it.  For 2013, let's resolve to engage in some useful panic and let the other kind go.

 

A good place to start researching climate crisis is Kivalina, Alaska, a town about the size of Hardin on the NW coast along the Bering Sea:

http://truth-out.org/news/item/13505-engulfed-by-arctic-waters-residents-on-the-frontline-of-climate-change

These American citizens, in spite of struggling to keep their citizenship, are suing the biggest oil companies to force them to pay for their resettlement because their forced removal from their village is because their energy use industry caused the loss of protective sea ice and the rising of waters of the Arctic ocean. Also check out the book by Christine Shearer, Kivalina.

 

Here is the story of Richard Muller, a Koch-funded scientist who has recanted from the hoax of the climate crisis ignorers and now admits global warming is real and human-caused: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/2/climate_skeptic_koch_funded_scientist_richard

After years of denying global warming, physicist Richard Muller now says "global warming is real and humans are almost entirely the cause." The admission by Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, has gained additional attention because some of his research has been funded by Charles Koch of the Koch brothers, the right-wing billionaire known for funding climate skeptic groups like the Heartland Institute. "We could make the scientific case more solidly than had been made in the past," Muller claims. "I think this does say we do need to take action, we do need to do something about it."

 

Here are two more links:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/chasing-ice-time-lapse-cameras-capture-rapidly-melting-17744758
http://guardianlv.com/2012/12/global-warming-10-myths-and-facts-everyone-should-know/

 

Here's some commentary on what we as citizens are up against to address the climate crisis, and what to do about it. http://sojo.net/magazine/2013/01/come-hell-and-high-water

It's the fossil fuel industry itself—not the members of Congress they buy in droves each election season, but the real powers that need to hear our cry of panic, even from Big Horn County, to change their course instead of focusing on the rosy sunset of fossil fuel profits. "Ignoring the damage they've already caused, these people spend hundreds of millions of dollars each day looking for new fossil fuels. And they spend hundreds of millions each year making sure no government stops them. They're like the tobacco industry at this point, except that instead of going after your lungs they're going after the lungs of the planet."

 

http://sojo.net/magazine/2012/11/divest-fossil-fuels-now
"…it's the underlying business model of the fossil-fuel industry that's the problem. They're making more money than any corporations in the planet's history, and they're doing it by altering the chemistry of the atmosphere. They're outlaws—not against the laws of the state (given their financial might they get to write those), but against the laws of physics. You can have a healthy fossil fuel industry or a healthy planet, but you can't have both."

And this from a conservative source only recently coming around to the reality of climate crisis: .

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-01/its-global-warming-stupid

 

 

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David Graber

graberdb@gmail.com

Hardin, MT