What happened to your petition

As noted in my post of September 22, I met with State Senator Chip Shields to discuss the foreclosure problem. He noted that two years ago, someone had introduced a bill requiring the banks to meet with a homeowner before they foreclosed on him or her, and to provide documents showing that they actually had title to the home in question. You would think that these are the minimum requirements a lending institution should meet before being allowed to take your home away, but the banks fought the bill tooth and nail, and it went nowhere. He said he was trying to re-introduce this bill.

He encouraged me to write the petition that many of you signed, and intimated that if we got 200-300 signatures, he would introduce legislation in the Oregon State House. I submitted over 200 signatures to him (I would've gotten more, but I came down with pneumonia and was out of commission for a couple of weeks).

I heard nothing back from his office, despite sending emails and making phone calls. MaryAlecia, his aide, did email me to say that he was meeting with Rep. Tina Kotek to craft legislation. After that meeting, I tried reaching the office again to find out what they had decided, and what I could do to help. For instance, did they want more signatures? Again, I heard nothing.

Finally, I told some people from We Are Oregon, and they agreed to call Sen. Shields' office last week. Two days later, I received a call from MaryAlecia, who apologized for not having contacted me sooner. She said that Sen. Shields was going to reintroduce the bill he had described during our first meeting--which in my opinion is too little, too late. He is not going to ask for anything related to our petition, like a moratorium on foreclosures. Why not? I asked. After all, quite a number of states enacted such moratoriums during the Great Depression. She replied that the laws have changed since then, but didn't say in what way. She said that legal counsel to the legislature would have to examine such a proposal. What about taking over abandoned houses? I asked. She said the state couldn't afford to do that.

Then she said that any member of the legislature is only allowed to submit five bills in each session. Three of the ones that Sen. Shields submits have to be co-signed by a Republican member on his committee. The other two were already written up long before I met with him. I got the impression that Sen. Shields will use our petition as support for passing the bill that the banks defeated two years ago. I told MaryAlecia that the housing situation is an emergency--that more and more people are being made homeless. She said that Sen. Shields is a really good guy, that he is on our side, but that he is bound by the rules.

I conclude that we can't expect help from the legislature. If we wait for the government to stand up for us against the 1%, we will starve and freeze. Right now people across the nation are taking matters into their own hands, preventing evictions by surrounding houses when the sheriffs come, or occupying empty houses and moving homeless families in. Of course these actions are illegal and might result in jail time. However, standing by and letting our neighbors be thrown out into the streets is immoral. Those of us who can't risk jail for one reason or another (e.g., health) should support those who are willing to take the risk. To quote a song from the Civil Rights era:

It isn't nice to block the doorway
It isn't nice to go to jail
There are nicer ways to do it
But the nice ways always fail

I met with the Senator. We signed the petition. We did it the nice way. Now let's find an effective way.

Why Joseph isn’t My Hero

Remember the Bible story about Joseph? This wizard of economic interpretation told the king of Egypt that there would be seven good years and seven lean years. Pharaoh put him in charge of taxing the people during the good years. Back then nobody had coins, so the peasants paid in grain. Joseph made sure the grain was stored in vast silos.

Then the lean years came. First Joseph sold the grain back to the peasants for their gold and silver. During the next year he gave them bread in exchange for their horses, cattle, and all their flocks. In the year after that, the destitute people came to Joseph and said, “There is nothing left but our bodies and our lands. Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants to Pharaoh.”

In that way all of Egypt became Pharaoh’s, except for the lands that belonged to the priests. All the Egyptians became Pharaoh’s bondsmen—as the Bible says, “until this day.” And the people thanked Joseph for saving their lives.

The important thing to remember is that the grain in those storehouses was produced by those peasants. Pharaoh didn’t produce it and neither did Joseph.

So why is this legend relevant today? Whose tax money bailed out Wall Street? Why are Americans losing our jobs, our health insurance, our pensions, our homes and any equity we had in those homes—what financial wizards drove the economy into the leanest years we’ve seen since the Great Depression? The more we struggle in this quicksand, the deeper we sink. Get behind on one credit card, and the rates on all the rest go up to heights that would make a loan shark blush. Borrow money to go back to school, but don’t expect to find a job that would enable you to pay it back. You will be enslaved by the banking industry forever.

Today’s Josephs are enthroned on the banks of the Hudson River and the Potomac.

How Sus Domestica Came to Wall Street

Archeological research shows that domesticated pigs first appeared in the Tigris basin at least 9,000 and possibly 15,000 years ago. During the dry season, when other types of food were scarce, our Middle Eastern ancestors slaughtered great numbers of pigs. At some point they began using pigs for healing rituals, or to placate the Mesopotamian demon Lamashtu, or as a sacrifice to the Egyptian god Horus.

Later on the Hebrews stopped eating pork, but nobody really knows why. Verses in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah forbade it. The poor animal is considered so “unclean” that a Jew making a religious pilgrimage shouldn’t touch it, lest it contaminate him. It is permitted, however, to use a porcine heart valve to replace a defective human one. Pigskin shoes are also okay—apparently the tanning process removes the impurities. Mohammad, who initially considered himself the last Jewish prophet, adopted this prohibition, and it is repeated four times in the Koran.

I don’t know why Christians started to eat pork again. I suspect that the various pagan peoples they wanted to convert were reluctant to change their diet. After all, most of us do resist giving up favorite foods, even when the doctor warns us that we are (as the saying goes) digging our graves with our spoons. Maybe the early church thought it would be easier to save souls if they didn’t try to police people’s stomachs as well.

Although the Spaniards first introduced pigs to the Americas, the later-arriving Dutch and English colonists no doubt brought their own herds. Free-roaming pigs wandered New York, rampaging through grain fields, until the human residents built a wall along the northern edge of lower Manhattan to keep them out. The street that followed this wall was named…Wall Street.

Well into the 19^th Century, our porcine companions continued to roam the rest of the island. Pedestrians might encounter sows and boars devouring garbage up and down the streets and alleyways. They didn’t join a union or demand a pension plan; the only drawback was that they left a certain amount of their own excrement behind. Eventually, however, this four-legged sanitation department was banished from the city.

But like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, they stood up and achieved bipedalism. And there have been pigs on Wall Street ever since.

If It's Good Enough for Rockefeller

On Sept. 15 I attended a meeting here in Portland about fighting foreclosure in our neighborhoods. Present were representatives from citizens’ groups and a representative from the attorney general’s office. At the end of it, I had an idea about how we can turn the situation around. It depends on a legal precedent set by the Rockefellers. Hey, if it worked for them, it can work for us!

Facing astronomical foreclosure rates, dropping property values, and still-rising unemployment rates, what can we do? What if we get the states to take foreclosed properties that are sitting empty back from the banks—as they do for large commercial development projects—and fix them up for people who have lost their homes in the current economy? Oregon can’t afford to do this alone, but could partner with groups like Habitat for Humanity. Prospective residents who aren’t disabled could invest via sweat equity.

The Situation 

Even if you can’t stand numbers, please bear with me while I throw a few out there, because this will give you an idea of the size of the problem.

At the Sept. 15 meeting, I was told that the foreclosure rate is three times higher than it was during the Great Depression. Yes, it really is. This is according to the National Consumer Law Center.

The Case-Schiller Home Price Index (published by Standard & Poors) shows a decline in property values of 29% for the Portland area, and a 33% decline for the 20 cities they track. This was as of March 31. According to the Oregonian (March 8, 2011) 23.1 % of Oregonians owed more than their homes were worth. It’s even worse in some other states. Per a Bloomberg report on real estate, on May 9, 2011, 28% of mortgages in the U.S. were underwater. Figures went as high as 85% in Las Vegas and 73% in Reno.

The official unemployment rate is holding steady at 9.1%, while the actual total number of unemployed is 16.2% and rising. What’s the difference? The official rate tracks people who are unemployed and actively looked for work in the last four weeks. Total unemployed includes people who were too discouraged to continue looking and those who took part-time jobs or work well below their capacity (for example, flipping burgers instead of doing construction work).  Both figures are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2011. There are five unemployed people for every job opening (NY Times, March 11, 2011).

If you’re out of work, you can’t pay the mortgage. That sends the foreclosure rate up, flooding the market with distressed properties.

The federal government made a lot of noise about a program to help homeowners, but they relied on voluntary action from the banks. I was told at the meeting that only 5% of borrowers have had their loans permanently modified.

At this point, it is important to remember that the banks wrote one fraudulent mortgage after another. They continue to write fraudulent foreclosure documents and have them signed by people who don’t even read them. And the government bailed out those same banks with billions of dollars of our tax money.

Even if you aren't out of work, underwater, or facing foreclosure, the situation has consequences for you and your home. When the banks foreclose on a home in your community, and nobody buys it because nobody can afford to anymore, the house sits vacant. The lawn becomes a waist-high jungle of thistles and dandelions. The building deteriorates. Leaks aren’t repaired, so rain may damage walls and floors. Thieves may break in and rip out copper pipe, appliances, or anything they can sell. They may even use the house as a hideout, meth lab, or base for fencing stolen goods. The value of every neighbor’s property continues to plummet, and everyone in the community is endangered, homeowner or not.

If you rent your home, and the bank forecloses on your landlord’s property, you can stay until the end of your lease. If you have no lease, you may have to leave within 90 days. In either case you will not be reimbursed for relocation costs. (This is according to the “Helping Families Save Their Homes Act,” signed by Pres. Obama in 2009.)

Overall, a grim picture. So what can we do?

The Proposed Solution

Not many people know that the land used for the World Trade Center was acquired by eminent domain. David Rockefeller wanted to build the towers, which would increase the value of his other assets in the area, such as the Chase Manhattan Bank building. As his brother Nelson was governor of New York, Rockefeller was able to get the state to take over the properties that were in his way. Hundreds of small businesses were displaced. Some of them fought the proposal all the way to the Supreme Court, but the Court refused to take the case.

What if our state takes over foreclosed-upon houses, and fixes them up for people who need them?

Nobody likes the idea of eminent domain. Very often it displaces homeowners or destroys thriving businesses, as it did in New York City. But the houses lost to foreclosure aren’t thriving. By evicting residents and leaving the houses vacant, the banks are acting to destroy communities.

The State of Oregon, no doubt like many other states, has no money to restore distressed properties. However, the state could cooperate with partners such as Habitat for Humanity, whose purpose is to build housing for, and with, the people who need it. People who want to live in the houses repossessed from the banks could put in sweat equity.

These houses should be reserved for people who have lost their homes through unemployment, disability, or outright fraud by the banks. They should not be made available to speculators—many of whom are already gobbling up foreclosed-upon homes at fire sale prices.

The banks will oppose this project, of course. They are likely to make exorbitant demands, for instance that the taxpayers reimburse them for the total amount of the mortgage rather than the actual value of the slum they’ve created. The mission and purpose of a bank is to conserve, and increase, its profit. They can't, and won't, let one penny go without a fight. In recent years, we have had ample reminders that a bank has no capacity to care whether Americans live on the street, or whether our neighborhoods rot. We can't expect any cooperation from the banks unless there is some way for them to profit from the project, either directly or in terms of marketing and public relations.

At the foreclosure meeting on Thursday, I proposed the idea—of acquiring foreclosed houses by eminent domain and working with Habitat for Humanity—to one of State Senator Chip Shields’ aides, Mary Briggs. She was enthusiastic, and has arranged a meeting for me with Senator Shields on October 12. I will also be sending this proposal to my local Representative, Tina Kotek, and trying to arrange a meeting with her.

What Can You Do to Help?

If you live in Oregon, send an email to Senator Shields at sen.chipshields@state.or.us and tell him you support this idea. Send another to Rep. Kotek, at rep.tinakotek@state.or.us. The more people who support it, the better chance it has of becoming a reality. If you live in another state, meet with one of your legislators and propose something similar.

Our Bodies Our Selves?

A recent article in the New York Times reported on transgender women, born male, who couldn’t afford the surgery they so desperately desired. They paid “pumpers” to inject silicone into their cheeks, buttocks, and chests so that they would look more like women. The injections might cost up to $20,000.  The pumpers, of course, were not licensed medical professionals. The equipment wasn’t always sterile. The silicone was sometimes industrial rather than medical grade, and because it was not encased in an elastomer shell it began to migrate throughout the body. (Even medically-approved breast implants can rupture and the silicone can migrate.) Some of these people died. Others were left disfigured, permanently disabled, or in constant pain.

Although the Times didn’t mention it, I’m fairly sure that transgender advocates would say that health insurance should cover the surgery as it is a medical necessity and should be available to everyone who needs it, not just the wealthy. In other articles appearing around the country, transgender prisoners are suing their states for this purpose.

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, an FTM is suing his insurance company. He has undergone some medical procedures and self-injects with testosterone, but still has ovaries. As a result, he is at high risk for ovarian cancer—the deadliest of gynecological cancers—and wants the insurer to pay for removal of those organs. Portland's mayor is backing a proposal to have the city pay for sex reassignment surgery for its employees.

The last article I’d like to mention appeared in Just Out, Portland’s LGBT newspaper. The story is about a little girl who started calling herself a boy and played only with boys. When she was ten, the mother took her to a “trans therapist", who said, “You have a little boy there.” As a result, the child was given a boy’s name and allowed to use the boys’ bathroom at school.

I don’t want to see desperate people dying at the hands of pumpers or from ovarian cancer. I believe we all have the right to decide what to do with our own bodies. However, I also believe that “transgender” is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and calls for cultural change, not a medical solution. Even with the best medical care, there are long-term consequences to removing healthy organs and injecting yourself with estrogen or testosterone.

In my youth, in the 1950s, I rebelled against a society that valued women only insofar as we measured up to the standard of beauty set by Hollywood and the advertising industry. We were expected to torture ourselves with extreme diets, girdles, nylons, spike heels, hair curlers that you had to wear throughout the night, eyebrow tweezers, razors, and deodorants. The ideal was to look and smell like a Barbie doll.

Women who could afford it tried to match their bodies to the cultural standard via plastic surgery. Jewish women of my generation were pressured to mutilate our noses so that we would look more like gentile women. Most of those who had nose jobs said they felt much better about themselves afterward.

Even more important than her appearance, a woman had to behave in certain ways:  don’t be too assertive, don’t be better at math than your brother, and don’t apply for an executive position.

In the 1950s, the concepts of male and female were grounded in a philosophical notion called essentialism. (I always hated philosophy in college, and I expect that some of you readers will, too. But please be patient with me here, because this turns out to be important.) Essentialism meant that you born with certain characteristics. A woman, for example, was naturally endowed with psychological passivity, and a preference for frilly pink blouses and secretarial work. If you didn’t express those characteristics in your behavior, you weren’t a real woman.

In the 1950s and for most of the 1960s, anyone who didn’t dress and behave in a gender-appropriate manner risked social ostracism, loss of employment, imprisonment, electroshock therapy, rape, and even murder. These days, people aren’t imprisoned or committed to psychiatric institutions for their sexuality, but gays are still vulnerable to all the other consequences. Transgender people suffer more than any other group from the cultural fear and hatred of sexual difference.

A generation ago, the child who was taken to the trans therapist might have turned out to be a butch lesbian. Now I expect that when she hits puberty, she will be considered for surgery and hormones. (I can’t bring myself to use the pronoun he in this situation.)

As a parent, I am frightened by this kind of early pigeonholing, and even more frightened by the medical consequences of early intervention. But I also remember the child that I was—a little girl who liked science. There were times when I wanted to be a boy, because I didn’t fit in with the girls, and because the options for women were so limited back then. Female relatives often said, “You should have been a boy.” If I were growing up now, I might feel pressured to accept a transgender designation. Instead, with the support of the women’s movement, I helped create space for women like me.

The feminist rebellion of the 60s and 70s was grounded in an opposing philosophical notion called constructionism. That is, all the characteristics society has attributed to women are constructed by the culture we live in. In plain English, feminist ideology said that someone born with a female body is a real woman no matter how she presents herself, who she does or doesn’t have sex with, or what she does for a living. The same is true for someone born in a male body.

The popular culture, though, is still wedded to essentialism. Liberal columnists—including female ones—went after the first female presidential candidate in language that reeked of sexism. For example, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times said that Hillary Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating” and the Times news staff spent some time analyzing the “Clinton cackle.”

Despite the economic downturn, women are still paying doctors to “improve” their looks, whether by implanting silicone packets in their breasts or paralyzing their facial muscles with Botox. (Men also pay for cosmetic surgery, but in much smaller numbers.) Per the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 9.5 million cosmetic procedures were performed in 2010. This is down from 11.7 million in 2007, but the Society expects these numbers to rebound if the economy improves. Please note that this does not include plastic surgery for birth defects or deformities resulting from accidents.

I have met transgender people who were much happier after surgery. From a psychological standpoint, they were better adjusted. Like the women who had nose jobs and breast augmentations, they felt better about themselves afterwards. Each of them has only one life, and I would not want to deny them their chance at happiness. The question remains, though: what kind of society are they adjusting to? An essentialist society—one that says some dress and behavior is inherently male and other dress and behavior is inherently female—is profoundly anti-feminist. And that’s the society we have, despite some superficial changes in the last forty years.

Essentialism says that if your personality doesn’t conform to the cultural norm for someone with genitals like yours, change your body.

Constructionism/feminism tells us to learn to be at home in the bodies we have, and demand the right to be the kind of persons we are. It means that we throw our energy into changing the cultural norms. And since nobody can accomplish these tasks alone, feminism also tells us we must organize to transform society rather than seek individual medical solutions to our discomfort in the world.

As Evanescent as a Cloud

Sometimes the Devil offers you a bargain.

Lately I’ve been seeing ads for cloud computing. At first I wondered if it was a new way to predict the weather, or maybe something really abstruse like quantum mechanics. My geek brother said it means that your data is “up in the clouds somewhere.” Finally I figured it out. Businesses and research institutions use it to get more computing power. It is the way your email works, if you use a web-based email program like Yahoo.

What happens is that all your data—and the fancy applications you use to manipulate them—are stored in a cluster of computers owned by somebody else. You pay the cloud computing company for this service. Your machine only stores a simple program that accesses their computers. You save a lot of money, because you purchase a very simple machine without much memory. A large organization doesn’t have to buy expensive computers for each employee and make sure their software is licensed to each computer. They don’t have to spend a wad to repair their computers and keep them up to date.

Kindle is very similar. You own the little machine, but the book is stored on someone else’s computer. You pay Amazon a fee for the right to read an author’s work on your Kindle. It’s a lot cheaper than buying a print copy and you don’t even need a bookshelf. My publisher and my local bookseller tell me that everything is going digital these days.

I didn’t think much about it until I read that Amazon had removed some books from Kindle because the publisher decided they no longer wanted to offer those items in e-book form. (Naturally enough, they were works by George Orwell.) So if you happened to be in the middle of such a book, all of a sudden your screen went blank. You got a refund—but that’s just the same as if your local bookseller came into your house, took a book they’d just sold you off your shelf, and gave you your money back.

Not only that, your payment to Amazon (or any other digital book company) only allows you to read a volume a certain number of times before you no longer have access to it. You’ve got to pay up again. That’s fine if it’s just another silly mystery, but I maintain a small research library that I refer to over and over again.

Now think about all this in the light of our vanishing civil liberties. Imagine a future where physical books have all but disappeared. Where people own computers that are just one step up from dumb terminals. All their personal correspondence, receipts for tax purposes, business records, and databases are kept by cloud computing companies. If the corporatocracy doesn’t want you to read a book, they don’t have to ban it or burn it—they just stop making it available on your digital reader. If they want to put you out of business or squelch your little community organizing group, they just have the cloud computing company refuse to carry you or “inadvertently” erase your data.

So be warned, dear reader. Don’t get sucked up into the world of cloud computing, even at bargain prices. If you think you might care about a book, buy the print version. Otherwise you’ll find that economists like John Maynard Keyes, historians like Howard Zinn, radicals like Emma Goldman, or even novelists like John Steinbeck—or me—have disappeared. And if you try to organize your neighbors into doing something about this “brave new world,” you’d better communicate by carrier pigeon, because if you try the phone or the computer:

Every move you make

Every step you take

They’ll be watching you.

Fun with Oranges and Arabs

The funniest story I read in the past week was the one about a massive dust storm in Arizona. The weathermen dared call it a haboob, which is an Arabic term. Some Arizona residents were outraged. One even wrote, “How do they think our soldiers feel coming back to Arizona and hearing some Middle Eastern term?” No returning soldier has complained thus far, but perhaps they are temporarily preoccupied with other issues, such as PTSD, learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, or even finding a job in this economy.

They are bound to notice sooner or later, however. In the interests of making our troops—and civilian Islamophobes—comfortable, we probably should purge the language of Arabic influence. After all, we called sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” during World War I, and when we were miffed at France for not supporting the second Gulf War, we poured French wine down the sink and ate “freedom fries.”

Since we’re starting with food, we need to scrap marzipan and call it almond paste with sugar—uh-oh, sugar comes from Arabic, so let’s say evaporated cane juice instead. That way it even sounds healthier. Oranges are out—yes, it’s also from Arabic. I have no idea how to replace that word, or what to call the color in your child’s crayon box. And speaking of children, you’d better change the sign on your kid’s lemonade stand before you corrupt their little minds with foreign terms. Lemons, limes, and tangerines were named by Arabs.

We’ve got to rewrite our cookbooks, and get rid of artichokes, apricots, caraway seeds, saffron, sherbet, spinach, and tarragon. Hey, we didn’t like spinach anyway. It will be harder to do without coffee and alcohol.

Out of the kitchen and into the living room:  junk the divan, and stop calling that other thing a sofa. Use the word couch, even if it’s from (ugh) French. Check your closets, too. Clean out the sequins, sashes, your damask tablecloth, the gauze in the medicine cabinet, and anything made of cotton or muslin. That last word is a real no-no—it even sounds like “Muslim.”

I’m sure you know that algebra was invented by Arabs. It means “the ciphering,” but we can’t use the term cipher either. The Arabs even invented the numbering system we use, including zero. We should scrap it and return to a good old Western system. Try a problem in long division:  DLXXXIV ÷ XXXII. Oops, the result isn’t a whole number. Anybody know where to put a decimal point in Roman numerals?

The brightest stars in the sky were named by Arabs, but just because astronomers all over the world use those terms doesn’t mean Americans have to. We can auction off the naming rights to the highest bidder:  heavenly bodies such as Altair, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Fomalhaut, and Rigel (the list goes on) might come to be called Exxon, Walmart, Ford, Disney, or even—Goldman-Sachs!

On the other hand, maybe I’ll stick to haboobs.

There’s a Job for You

Are you a school teacher? Real estate agent in a dead market? A sales clerk whose store went out of business? Laid-off warehouse worker?

Despite all the talk about cutting government spending, Uncle Sam is hiring. You’ll get good pay, and good benefits if you’re salaried, and I’m not talking about jobs where your primary duty is to dodge bullets. And this is all on the taxpayer’s dime!

I did a little research and found thousands of openings in places where you won’t be put in harm’s way—not just in the U.S., but in cushy locations around the world, like England and Germany. There were also openings in a couple of dicey places (Egypt, Bahrain), but you don’t have to go there unless you want to.

Your job will be (putting it a tad impolitely) to service the military.

An army travels on its stomach, and if it runs beyond it supply lines, it starves. It brings cooks and supply wagons, and lives off the surrounding countryside (translation:  despoils the peasants). The military also travels on its gonads. Prostitutes have always been required to service soldiers, from the time of Rahab the harlot to the Korean “comfort women.” And not just prostitutes—military wives often accompanied their men. Roman officers stationed in England were allowed to marry and reside with their families on base. Ordinary soldiers didn’t have this privilege. Now they do.

Of course, many of the openings I found require very special skills, like doctor, nurse, physical therapist, civil engineer, etc. But others don’t.

Can you write Happy Birthday on top of a cake? Are you handy with the whipped cream? The Defense Commissary Agency is looking for 35 Cake Decorators. There are openings in Germany, England, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, and Turkey. Pay is $14.31-$16.70/hour.

Military families need to shop. And the Defense Commissary Agency says its mission, among other things, is to “encourage an exciting shopping experience” and “deliver exceptional savings.” To that end they are hiring everyone from sales clerks ($21,840-$28,392) to warehouse workers ($15.75-$18.38/hour). Jobs are in all the above countries, plus Japan and Egypt. If you’re having trouble stretching your unemployment check to feed the kids, consider these opportunities.

Did you know that the military operates hotels for both active and retired personnel, as well as Dept of Defense employees? They enjoy very nice lodgings at bargain rates, again paid for by your tax dollar. There are 12 current openings for Hotel Desk Clerk, most in the U.S. but four of them in Germany and one in Korea, at $7.25-$14.14/hour.

The Child and Youth Services dept of the military says it “supports readiness by reducing lost duty time due to conflict between parental responsibilities and unit mission requirements.” So while Daddy is dodging bullets in Afghanistan, he can be sure Junior is still getting a decent education. If you’re a teacher and tired of being blamed for the failure of your underfunded school, consider applying for the curriculum development and teacher training position in Germany, at $34,498-$43,827, with full benefits. If you don’t have those credentials, there are teacher aide positions in the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and Belgium, at $9.50-$16.84/hr.

Finally, the military always needs to acquire more land. Real estate agents who can’t make sales in these times can find salaried employment ($40,093-$165,391) in Japan, Germany, Italy, and Bahrain.

For all of the above, check out the listings at www.usajobs.gov. The only catch is that the government won’t pay travel expenses, unless you are a highly-skilled professional. This isn’t a big problem if you’re looking for work on a military base back home. If your unemployment has run out, and your relatives are tired of supporting you, ask them to stake you to a ticket overseas. Good luck, and remember where your tax dollars are going while Grandma’s Social Security and Medicare are being cut. It’s all in a good cause, isn’t it?

A leg to stand on

I was conducting a survey of prosthetic limb makers for a client. One of the prosthetists I called told me the following:  some health insurance companies state up front that they will only cover $2,000-$5,000 for an artificial limb. However, a really functioning limb can cost $10,000-$40,000. If you call other health insurers, the agent will tell you what your coverage is--but only after she plays a recorded announcement to the effect that they “can’t be held to any statements that are made over the phone, and that the actual amount of benefits will be determined at the time the claim is submitted.”

So you order the best device that you can get within the amount that the agent says they will cover. Then when the bill comes in, the insurance company says they will only pay half, or even less. According to my source, this happens over and over again. You can't stiff your prosthetist, because the device doesn't last forever and you're going to need adjustments, new parts, and even a complete replacement in two to five years. What can you do? Mortgage your house (if you're lucky enough to have enough equity) so you have a leg to stand on? 


The prosthetist had a French name, so when I got good and angry, I mentioned the situation in France in 1789, and the fact that Thursday is Bastille Day. After I calmed down somewhat, I thought further back into history.... The first known prostheses were big toes, one carved from wood and the other made of linen, glue, and plaster, and found on Egyptian mummies. They date back to somewhere between the 7th and 13th centuries BCE. Both showed signs of wear, although the wooden one appears to have been more functional and the other more cosmetic. My sources didn't say what they cost back then.

Orwell springs eternal, but so does the spirit of liberty

Rulers of nations and upper crust people in general have always been good at creating propaganda to justify their positions. On Friday night Sylvia and I went to a showing of "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," a movie about how Liberian women banded together to end the war in their country, get rid of a bloodthirsty dictator, and institute democracy. That was in 2003. I recommend the movie to everyone--inspiring, uplifting. At one point the dictator, Charles Taylor, made a speech about how he was holding the country together and it would descend into chaos without him. We've recently heard the same speech from the dictators of Egypt, Syria, and Yemen.

In the U.S. we keep hearing propaganda about cutting taxes on the rich--that this will create jobs for the poor and lift up the economy. Herbert Hoover cut the tax rate to the lowest in modern history, and the Crash of 1929 followed. Tax rates for the rich have been going down almost to pre-Depression levels, and we've got the highest unemployment rate since the Depression. It doesn't seem to matter that the facts contradict the propaganda--it just gets repeated and repeated over the airwaves.

Of course the art of propaganda is a lot older than broadcast media. If you want to get real historical, check out the song for the carriers of a palanquin, which appears on the walls of the tomb of Ipi, a nobleman of the Egypt's Old Kingdom (2613-2181 BCE): "O palanquin of Ipi, be as heavy as I wish/It is pleasanter full than when it is empty!" I don't know who wrote that song, but I bet it wasn't the guys who had to carry the palanquin.

Another lie that's as old as history is sometimes called the "divine right of kings." The earliest mention of it that I can find is from the Sumerian king list, which says, "After kingship descended from Heaven, the kingship was in Eridu." (Eridu was one of the oldest cities in the world, founded around 5400 BCE.) The divine right lie lasted until the American and French Revolutions, but it never really went away. As late as 1909, a judge condemned New York factory workers who wanted their hours reduced from 65 or 75 per week to 52 per week, saying, "You are on strike against God." In other words, the existing social order was ordained by Heaven.

The abovementioned Charles Taylor insisted that he was in his position because God put him there. I'm sure that some form of the divine right lie serves to buttress the absolute monarchies of Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf States.

To which I can only counter by quoting the 14th Century English priest John Ball:  "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?...cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty."

In my next incarnation, if there is such a thing

I want to be a biologist. The infinite variety of life on this planet is wondrous to me, and who knows what we will find on other planets if we ever get there. Just watching the chickens in the yard is deeply satisfying, and a source of wonder. The design of chicken feet. The fact that they excrete everything out of the same cloaca (including eggs), instead of having three different orifices. Maybe I wouldn't be so astonished if I had been brought up on a farm instead of a city block in Brooklyn.

Insects are also astonishing. I learned recently that the household pest they call the silverfish can live for 11 years. That's as long as a chicken, assuming you don't butcher it once it stops laying eggs. The desert scorpion (an arthropod, not an insect) has another solution to the problem of waste. In order to survive in an arid environment, it extracts every tiniest drop of water from its food, and excretes only powder. Unlike the chicken (or other birds), it has a separate orifice for reproduction.

I've had cats for decades, but never really looked inside their mouths. Only when a veterinarian told me to apply an enzyme paste to their gums did I discover that they have no space between their lower lips and gums. So I have to apply it in the under the upper lips alone. I felt like a fool. On the other hand, Aristotle never looked inside human mouths either, and pontificated that men had more teeth than women.

Right now I'm starting a chapter in the sequel to my novel, in which a scorpion features prominently.

I found the Answer!

Yesterday I was reading West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-American. On page 122, he recollects a conversation with his kid brother Riaz. Riaz has become a devout Muslim, and explains his conversion by saying, "I realized that Islam would work.... If everyone followed these practices, none of today's problems would exist. Families would be rock-solid. There would be no warfare, no injustice, no division between the rich and the poor."

This sounded very familiar to me. In my novel (page 307) the teenage Elijah has also been seeking an answer to the injustices of the world. He falls in with the Rekhabites, a back-to-nomadism cult. The leader explains that all the wickedness of 9th Century BCE Israel is due to dividing the land and taking up farming instead of herding flocks. "If we all owned the land together, the strongest couldn't steal it. You can run your sheep on it, but you can't buy it or sell it or borrow against it. Right there you eliminate greed and envy.... Women are a problem. But we still don't have to behave like animals. A father should marry his children off young, before lust drives them to sin.... A man without a mate is a torch in a haystack. Though when men fight over a woman, she usually provoked it. You've got to teach a girl to cover up...."

It seems that every generation has its cult groups, political or religious, that offer simple rules to cope with the complexities of life. And there is never a shortage of young people (and some not-so-young) who are ready to follow the demagogue of the day.

More avian tales

We spent yesterday in the hot sun, working on our chicken coop. It is about 90% finished. Sylvia researched what chickens need and got together with our neighbor Don, who is an architect. Don designed the coop, and his design was corrected by his father-in-law Dave, who is a contractor. As you can imagine, this is a rather fancy residence for the creatures. (We have 12 of them, shared between 3 households, and expect one or two to become roosters. We'll have to get rid of the roosters, since we're not allowed to keep them in the city.) We're trying to decide what color to paint it, and also what to call it. I've suggested Avian Arms or Henrietta Hilton, but Sylvia says those are hotel names, not permanent residence names. I know there used to be all-female residences in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but I can't remember any of their names. Any suggestions?

As I understand, chickens originated in east and southeast Asia. Per Wikipedia, they were used in Egypt for cock fighting as early as 1400 BCE, and were known as "the bird that lays every day," but not widely bred until around 300 BCE. I recently went to an exhibit on ancient Egypt at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and in that exhibit it said that the ancients didn't raise chickens. The Egyptians painted all kinds of scenes of daily life in their tombs--baking bread, hunting wild birds, brewing beer, even circumcising a guy--and we haven't found any any tomb paintings of chickens. Still, it seems odd that the ancient Egyptians, clever as they were, would just use "a bird that lays every day" for cockfighting for 1700 years.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I have the characters in my novel eating duck, goose, pigeon, roasted song birds, wild turtle eggs, and wild bird eggs, but not chicken or chicken eggs.

I've got the feather!

That's the name Sylvia gave to a game our chicks play. (They are young ones--we got them on April 14 and 15.) If a chick loses a feather, another chick will grab it in her beak and run around making a peculiar noise, not like the other cheeps they make. The other chicks chase her. Eventually one of the other chicks grabs it, and then she runs around making the noise. Sylvia twisted a piece of brown paper bag and gave it to a chick, and they played the same game with the paper twist. My friend Marion, who was raised in the English countryside, says that chickens also have a game called Kick the Twig, which is kind of an avian soccer.

Human games are of course more complicated. While I was researching my book, I came across descriptions of ancient Egyptian games. Game sets and paintings of Egyptians playing were found in their tombs. The ancient Tyrians and Sidonians left records on papyrus (which they imported from Egypt), and those rotted in the damper climate. So since the people of the Levant copied their art from Egypt, I made the assumption that they copied Egyptian games as well.

Since I'd never raised chickens before, I didn't know they were playful. But now that I think of it, mammals play and birds play. Do marsupials? I don't know. I've never seen cold-blooded creatures play (lizards, amphibians, insects, fish), but maybe someone else has and can enlighten me.

More kings

IreneF commented that " there are two circumstances that must be in place before the institution can arise. The first is sedentarism and the second is metallurgy. The first kings arose once large populations were committed to farming as a way of life, and when it was no longer possible to make your own weapons. Farmers also supply a surplus of young men, which is the group of people most prone to violence."


This is perfectly true. What puzzles me is why people who aren't forced to submit to kings continue to worship them, in a slavish way. I think it is related to the same psychological trait that causes people to worship at the feet of gurus, athletes, etc. Is it related to the human necessity for operating as social beings, rather than as lone hunters like tigers? Or some distortion of our capacity for love and idealization of the beloved? I remember the crush I had on a gym teacher when I was 18, and the way I idealized her. (Maybe that's one of the reasons they recruit kids that age.)

Why the Lust for Kings?

A nation that fought a revolution against monarchy and organized itself as a constitutional republic--that's us, my friends--now finds itself supporting absolute monarchs around the globe. We supported the Shah of Iran. We support the hereditary kings and sheiks of Gulf States, like Bahrain and Arabia. Note that I say Arabia rather than Saudi Arabia. Sa'ud is the name of the royal family. Calling the nation by that name implies that they own the whole country.

Part (but only part) of this support is explained by political convenience:  U.S.-based companies extract oil at bargain prices in return for keeping a royal family living in luxury. Democratic governments in these petro-states would not be so compliant. They might nationalize the oil fields and distribute the wealth among the general population.


The other part is that slavish trait in the human psyche that makes people create kings and worship them. It's what explains the American fascination with the recent British royal wedding. I mean, who cares about these useless creatures? None of them wrote a great book or great music; none of them invented a useful gadget, taught school, or even cured a wart.

The institution of kingship goes back a long way, at least to the 4th Millennium BCE in Sumeria. According to their writings, "When kingship descended from Heaven, the first king was in Eridu [their oldest city]." So not only do we create kings, we insist that a god or gods foisted them off on us. And ever since then, royalty claims to rule by divine right. The Israelites did the same thing, only a couple of millennia later. I talk about it in The Throne in the Heart of the Sea, when Elijah's uncle Reuben retells the story from the first Book of Samuel (Shmuel):  "The people said we want a king, just like every other nation. Shmuel told them all kings were tyrants. Did they listen? No, and we've been suffering ever since. One thug kills the next, installs himself as master, and everybody rushes to kiss his feet, give him their daughters, and die in battle to glorify him."

Every now and again, human beings get up off their knees and establish some kind of democracy or republic, however limited or imperfect. The Greeks did it, the Romans did it, the French did, and so did we. But for some reason the slavish trait oozes up again, and the new state succumbs to a tyrant, a Nero or Caligula. We seem to be headed in that direction, as our most recent thugs-in-chief have asserted the royal privilege of detention without trial, torture, and assassination, on their word alone.

I goofed

The original report said that bin Laden was buried at 2:30 am, but it didn't say what time zone. He was supposedly killed at 1:00 am Pakistani Standard Time. Now the newspapers are saying he was buried at 2:00 am Eastern Standard Time, U.S. This would give the Navy Seals 10 hours to wash, wrap, read prayers, transport the body, weight it and deep-six it. So that's certainly doable. Some of the other issues are still unanswered. The government is apparently deciding whether to release a "gruesome" photo. Photos can be doctored, of course. They say they made a DNA verification, but nobody knows where they got the DNA of relatives to check on. So there are still unanswered questions.

I couldn't stand Ronald Reagan, but I did appreciate it when he said, "trust, but verify." However, when it comes to the government, I don't really trust all that much either.

Something spooky

I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature. Mostly I try to follow the rule known as Occam's Razor--always choose the simplest explanation for your data. My impression is that conspiracy theorists tend to rather convoluted explanations of events. However, when a simple explanation doesn't work...

I'm talking about Osama bin Laden, and wondering what really happened yesterday. The Special Ops people didn't take photographs--there were photos of Che Guevara after he was killed. A guy who tweeted from Abbottabad, Pakistan, reported the helicopter attack without knowing who the copters were after-his first tweet was at 1:00 am. The U.S. government says that our troops buried bin Laden at sea at 2:30 am, and that between the time he was killed and the time he was buried, they washed the body and had someone read prayers over it.

It couldn't have been 2:30 the following night. They said they buried him in a hurry, because Islam requires burial within 24 hours.

The driving distance from Abbottabad to the nearest seaport, Karachi, is 1570 km or 975 miles. A helicopter would take a straighter path--let's say it cut 1/3 of the driving distance and flew 650 miles. The cruise speed of a Blackhawk helicopter is 173 mph; maximum speed is 183 mph. At maximum speed, it would have taken 3.5 hours to fly to Karachi.

If they loaded the body on a Boeing 737, flight time is 1.5 hours, because the 737 flies at 491 mph. This still doesn't allow time to wash the body, pray over it, drive it to the airport, etc.

The government story doesn't make sense. I don't know what really happened in Abbottabad, and I don't think the American public is likely to find out.

Hospitality, then and now

Yesterday's NY Times had an article about Libyans fleeing the violence in their country, and finding shelter across the border in Tunisia. Residents of the town of Tataouine have opened their homes to total strangers, even moving into less comfortable parts of the house and giving the best rooms to the refugees. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/29/world/africa/29refugees.html?scp=2&sq=Tunisia&st=cse.)

One of the homeowners "described his gesture as a matter of obligation and pride. 'This is how it is, these are our customs,' he said. 'If there is something to eat, we will eat it together. If there is nothing to eat, we will have nothing together.'"

I am pleased but not surprised. These customs arose from the struggle for survival in the desert. Any stranger might claim three days of hospitality, simply by putting a hand on the guy ropes of your  tent, and if you were in trouble, you could claim it at another encampment. The three days were "greeting, eating, and talking." As host, you were expected to feed the stranger as well as your means allowed, even if your own family went hungry. You couldn't ask his business until the third day (it was almost always a him). And if pursuers came after him, you were expected to defend him with your life. It was a matter of honor. Often that hospitality extended well beyond the initial three days.

This tradition originated in the pre-Islamic Middle East and spread via Islam to North Africa, Central Asia, and east to Indonesia. It explains why the Afghans refused to turn Osama bin Laden over to the Americans, even though their country suffered terribly for it.

This is no doubt why the Afghans refused to turn Osama bin Laden over to his American pursuers. He was a guest, and had to be defended

My 15 minutes of fame

I'm in a movie called Stonewall Uprising. It was broadcast on PBS this past week, on a program called American Experience. The producers did a good job--they even interviewed the cop who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn, and who now regrets being on the wrong side of history. I think you can still watch the movie on your computer, or you can purchase the DVD.

Assyria and Us

Before going on about how we compare to the ancients, I should say that people were having a problem commenting on this blog. The link has been fixed now, so comment away.

Let’s start with us:  I’ve heard many times that the U.S. spends more than any other country on the military. We’re responsible for 43% of the world total. Now I find—in time for tax day, when it is most likely to gall me—that our military spending has nearly doubled in the last nine years, from $379 billion in 2001 to $698 billion in 2010. And that’s in real dollars, not inflated ones. (http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/factsheet2010)

Meanwhile, the country is going broke. I feel like I’m married to a junkie, watching him drain the family budget, wondering how long it will be before we’re out on the street. Back in 2001 the Neocons began talking about American exceptionalism, as though this country was exempt from the historical forces that affect other nations. I don’t know if they’re still promulgating that theory, but it’s been taken up by the Mad Hatters of the Tea Party.

Every empire seems to delude itself in the same way, but the one I studied while researching my book was Assyria. At the beginning of the 9^th Century BCE, the Assyrians lived on a tiny strip of not-very-fertile land—about 2/3 the size of modern Israel. Hostile tribes surrounded them and controlled the trade routes. Initially they fought a war of national liberation. In the process they developed military skills that overwhelmed their contemporaries. The now free nation metastasized into a predatory state, conquering its neighbor in order to devour their resources. Their shock-and-awe techniques were the ancient equivalent of carpet bombing or napalming. In those days it wasn’t necessary to pretend you were bringing democracy or civilization to your victims.

By 640 BCE the Assyrians controlled their world from Egypt to the Persian Gulf. Originally the Assyrians were farmers and citizen-soldiers. Those citizen-soldiers became aristocrats, turning over the dirty work of farming to lesser people, and hiring mercenaries to do the soldiering. The end came shockingly fast. Egypt regained its independence, the Babylonians revolted, the Medes attacked, and by 610 the empire had ceased to exist.

I feel like I'm looking in a very scary distant mirror, and wondering what we can do to change course.

Welcome to my first post. I'm rather excited about it.

I've been thinking about the veil this week, ever since the French government banned it. The Koran prescribes modest dress for both sexes, but doesn't mention any specific item of dress. In my research on the ancient Middle East (from over a millennium before Islam), I found that people started to conceal more and more of their bodies over the centuries. Women always covered more of their bodies than men did. So when the appropriate garment for a man was a short kilt, a woman would have to wear a longer skirt. When men began to wear some kind of shirt, women had to cover their breasts and shoulders.

I'm puzzled by the French Muslim women who insist on wearing the niqab, or full face veil. France has a history of oppressing its Muslim minority, so I can understand why the women are in rebellion. But when I last went to the DMV to get a driver's license, the clerk took my picture in front of anyone who happened to be walking by. If I get pulled over for an infraction, the cop is going to want to see if I look like the photo on the driver's license. I don't sign my credit cards--on the back I write "see driver's license"--so shop clerks look at the license and at me, to make sure I haven't stolen the card. I can't walk into a bank with my face covered. How are those Muslim women going to drive or conduct business?

Of course, in Saudi Arabia women aren't allowed to drive, and they have segregated banks where they can remove their veils and be served by female tellers. If the French government wanted to be reasonable, they might allow the niqab in the public street, but forbid it while driving, banking, or paying by credit card.