The Bremo Beacon

During WW II, Navy Yard Puget Sound repaired twenty-six battleships…some more than once…eighteen aircraft carriers, thirteen cruisers, and seventy-nine destroyers. In addition, the 30,000-plus shipyard workers built fifty-three new vessels, including five aircraft carriers, thirteen destroyers and eight destroyer escorts. They also overhauled, repaired, or fitted out another four hundred warships. What a truly monumental accomplishment!

Bremo's Armed Forces Festival in May is the largest and longest running Armed Forces Day parade in the United States. Other events that week in 2005 included: an Armed Forces Festival Golf Tournament, an Advanced Acoustic Concepts demonstration, and a Military Culinary Arts Competition.

It starts in downtown Bremo at Fourth and Chester, goes up Warren Ave to Burwell, Burwell to Pacific, and along Pacific Avenue to Sixth Street. It began at 10:00 AM, and last year consisted of over one hundred and forty entries including bands, floats, military units and much more. Third Street was renamed Burwell Street one hundred years ago in January of 1906. It was named after Rear Admiral William Turnbull Burwell, who as Captain Burwell was Commandant of the shipyard from July 02, 1900 until August 29, 1902.

The battleship USS Missouri, site of the Japanese surrender treaty signing that ended World War II, was assigned to the Pacific Reserve Fleet at PSNS in 1955. For thirty years, she served as the city's primary tourist attraction. Hundreds of thousands of visitors walked the ‘surrender deck’ before the ship was recommissioned in 1985. The Mighty Mo is now proudly established in Pearl Harbor. Everyone here hated to see her go, but realize that she is now where she needs to be.

Despite this illustrious, exemplary and glorious past, Bremo fell on hard times, especially in the past few decades. Not long ago, a husband and wife team of morticians from Bainbridge Island, also a part of Kitsap County along with Bremo, somehow managed to get a permit to operate a crematorium, right here in Navy Yard City behind the beautiful West Hills Elementary School. [Kitsap County has more shoreline than any other county in the country, and a population of about 265,000. It was named after Chief Kitsap, the most powerful of all the Chiefs from 1790 to 1845. As war chief of the Suquamish Tribe he held sway over territory from what is now Olympia, Washington all the way north to the Frazier River in British Columbia. The renowned Chief Seattle was one of his sub-chiefs.]

This crematorium fiasco eventually surfaced and the general outrage was augmented by that of the school’s attorney, the Bremo City Attorney, and many others. The panel that heard the Appeal at the County Seat in Port Orchard ruled that a crematorium at that location would be most illegal, inappropriate, and objectionable in a virtual myriad of ways.

The entire Olympic Peninsular is mostly under populated. Kitsap County is more wilderness, mountain, and water, than anything else. Bainbridge Island…[Adrienne please look up that reverse sexual harassment suit movie w/ Michael Douglas and Demi Moore…and plug in here. Danke!] >>> Disclosure (1994) <<< Michael Crichton's best selling novel was made into a movie that was directed by Barry Levinson. The movie local is Bainbridge Island / Ferry / Seattle. [Ferry: www.wsdot.wa.gov/ferries/] Bainbridge Island has a median home price of $500,000 and is sparsely populated. So, despite hundreds and in fact thousands of square miles of rural area, these unenlightened ones from Bainbridge Island demand to stuff a crematorium into a residential neighborhood in our City by an elementary school…and at last report, despite overwhelming and fierce opposition, were fighting on via their attorney to do just that. As if the long enduring ‘real’ patriots of Navy Yard City deserve any part of such an atrocity.

Bainbridge Island and East Bremo are separated only by the Port Orchard Passage, but to drive you need to go north the entire length of the island, over the Agate Pass Bridge, through Poulsbo, Keyport, and then over and south all the way past Silverdale, Tracyton, and on down to Bremo. These people would travel that far, just to burn human bodies and spew the smoke over a residential city neighborhood and elementary school. The irrationality of people never ceases to amaze me.

Of course the place would itself be cremated by the justifiably enraged local citizenry, I would suspect in rather short order, were these Bainbridge Islanders ever to be successful. The locals say that this woman looks and acts just like Olive Oyl, except that she is mean and nasty. I have no comment.

I backpack past the quietly notorious National Bar…established in 1944, Crazy Eric’s Famous Burger stand, the home of Harvey’s Butter Rum Batter, and the Fleet Reserve Association Branch 29 - Meeting second Tuesday of every Month 18:00 – NAV / USMC / USCG. One could write a book about each of the above.

Took Veh#5, Yellow Dragon: Yellow & Black 2000 Honda Valkyrie Standard six cylinder/six carburetor motorcycle, to the Kitsap Family YMCA [www.ymca.net/] in East Bremo. The original YMCA was dedicated in Bremo on May 01, 1911. I meet with Glen Godfrey the Executive Director and cut him a personal check for $5,000. That makes $10,000 and should put me where I need to be in March when the Teen-Youth Room Expansion Project is dedicated. This is also a perfect way to rub shoulders with a Listee or two.

Amazing what you can do with an unlimited budget. Or almost unlimited…the first quarter mil is pre-approved and that should more than do it, but additional funds are certainly available if circumstances require them. I will not pad…I will not pad…I.

I have dealt with large budgets and big cases before, but nothing like this, not with all these disparate and desperate elements.

It has been raining for the past couple of months. A record rain of 18.69 inches fell in January, second only to 20.02 in 1953. Nevertheless I consider that Western Washington weather is the finest for me in the USA. Great to be back on the Valk!

The Olympic Peninsular however, houses that rarity, a temperate rain forest. The main Union River Reservoir that plentifully supplies Bremo’s drinking water is so clean that it requires virtually no treatment mandated by the State. Reference the Olympic National Park [www.nps.gov/olym/].

One thing about living on Whidbey Island that managed to surprise even an old cynic like me was the division between North Whidbey and South Whidbey residents. I lived on a sand spit in the southernmost bay. There was a most definite island people connection, a we are all in the same boat mentality that was beautiful and would manifest itself in numerous ways. This was most welcomed by us escapees from Los Angeles.

But I was really surprised that this feeling did not extend itself to North Whidbey. At that time in 1994, South Whidbey had no traffic signals or fast food outlets, whereas North Whidbey had a number of each. It was as if they were two separate islands. It reminded me of that cartoon, perhaps a Dr. Seuss where there were two identical sets of odd looking critters except that one group had a star on their forehead, while the other group did not. That was all it took to divide them into opposing camps.

The oldest rule in politics is to divide and conquer. It is hard not to get a kick out of how prisoners will do their damnedest to divide themselves along racial lines; while they are kept prisoners by guards of all races who are working together to keep them locked up. So many are doing time, not so much for being criminals but for being hotheaded and stupid.

Item: Yes, Long Island, NY is longer than Whidbey Island; it just isn’t an island, as was determined by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is a little known fact that to be an island, the surrounding water must be of approximately the same depth. Long Island is in fact a peninsular that has a river cutting across the top of it. The depth of the river is not of the same order of magnitude as the surrounding ocean and sound.

Bremo also has a general hospital, Harrison Medical Center [www.harrisonmedical.org/]. Other popular Puget Sound islands such as Bainbridge, Vashon and further north, the San Juans, are notably lacking in this regard. Harrison is undergoing and planning major expansions over the next twenty-five years. It will draw patients not only from Kitsap County, but also from Clallam, Jefferson, and Mason Counties. The community is also home to Naval Hospital Bremo.

Both auto and passenger only ferries run between Bremo and Seattle. It is a beautiful run that takes one hour on the slower auto ferry. The ferry terminal is part of the new Bremo Transportation Center and is combined with the main local bus terminal.

Our good Mayor Cary Bozeman started his ‘bringing back downtown’ campaign almost immediately after taking office in 2002, cleaning up dusty streets and planting flowers. He has been on quite a roll ever since.

The adjacent area has already been developed as the Maritime Park and Memorial Plaza. This includes the Public Gardens, the Kitsap Conference Center, Hampton Inn and Suites, a marvelous fountain that goes through almost endless patterns of water including cylindrical arcs of water with amazingly distinct and sharply defined beginnings and ends, several interesting eateries, the Open Spaces area and Great Lawn, Galleries, and Anthony's HomePort Restaurant is due to open there this Spring. Another redevelopment project is a countywide Mosquito Fleet Trail. The term Mosquito Fleet requires an explanation. Before Washington State Ferries was established, private ferryboats ran all over the place and were known as the Mosquito Fleet.

The February 12th edition of the Kitsap Sun [www.kitsapsun.com/] reports that Hotel Concepts Inc. of Seattle plans to pay Bremo $930,000 for three parcels near 4^th Street and Washington Avenue and including the old City Hall. This will increase downtown hotel rooms from nada in 2004 prior to the Hampton Inn and Suites, to about 280 upon completion of this new facility.

One of the biggest projects was a new regional government center on Fifth Street, a combined $72 million effort completed in 2004. The Norm Dicks Government Center was named in honor and appreciation for our Congressman for the 6th District of Washington State. [www.house.gov/dicks/]

Next come the Harborside Condominiums [www.harborsidecondominiums.com/] and a new marina. Thus, one will be able to live on the new waterfront in a scintillating Harborside condo, walk on a covered walkway to the ferry terminal…and cruise in and out of downtown Seattle. That is two hours per day not fighting traffic but rather, reading a book, preparing a business presentation, studying for a class at the University of Washington, UW, or sipping a specialty coffee purchased onboard or picked up at the new Starbucks just prior to entering the terminal.

In line with this development is the hotly debated ‘Tunnel Project’. The Washington State Department of Transportation, WSDOT, is designing a tunnel to separate downtown Bremo pedestrian traffic from offloading Washington State Ferry traffic. The periodic surge of ferry traffic through downtown Bremo is interfering with pedestrian and local traffic flow including access to and from the Bremo Transportation Center. This project is in partnership with the city of Bremo, Kitsap Transit, the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration. Other organizations have also participated in its development, including the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and local emergency services.

A tunnel that connects the Transportation Center to Burwell Street will improve pedestrian safety and local traffic flow in downtown Bremo by removing approximately 65% of offloading ferry traffic from Washington Avenue. The final tunnel design will be completed in the spring of 2006. Right of way acquisition will be completed in the fall of 2006, with the construction contract awarded soon afterward. Such a tunnel will mesh nicely with the overall plan to make downtown Bremo a pedestrian friendly place.

The Washington State Legislature has not directly allocated funds for this project. The transportation improvement portion of this project is funded primarily by federal funds from the Federal Highway Administration, and the Federal Transit Administration. WSDOT is providing matching funds in the form of ferry toll credits issued to it by the Federal Highway Administration. City funds will only be used to cover 45% of the cost of the associated Combined Sewer Overflow Reduction project.

Moving north along the boardwalk the USS Turner Joy, a Vietnam-era destroyer, is open for tours daily throughout the summer. The USS Turner Joy played a major role in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Actually it was a pair of alleged attacks by North Vietnamese gunboats on two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy in August of 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin that sparked the full U.S. engagement in Vietnam.

The first attack was a heavy gun fired upon the USS Maddox by a North Vietnamese patrol boat. The second attack was originally thought to be perhaps eight torpedoes fired on both of the above ships. Later research, including a report released in 2005 by the National Security Agency, indicates that the second attack did not in fact actually occur at all, but consisted of misread sonar readings by nervous operators.

The USS Turner Joy can even be rented for the evening. There is nothing like having control of a U.S. Navy destroyer to make for a memorable bash!

Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, which occupies much of the Sinclair Inlet waterfront, is something of a mixed blessing, presenting an industrial facade that feeds Bremo's long-standing reputation as a funky blue-collar town.

The shipyard itself is in the midst of an upgrade that would help change its industrial exterior. It has moved historic Building 50 to an area adjacent to the ferry terminal, where it will anchor a new Maritime Park and house the Bremo Naval Museum. In its new location, the building will provide a more attractive first impression for ferry passengers, in stark contrast to the ‘plate yard,’ an outdoor storage area for raw steel that has been greeting arriving visitors.

The city's showcase Louis Mentor Boardwalk, actually a wide concrete walkway, is linked to the new Kitsap Conference Center and will be connected to an expanded marina to provide waterfront amenities.

Also downtown are the Kitsap Historical Museum on Fourth Street [www.kitsaphistory.org/] and The Naval Memorial Museum of the Pacific aka Bremo Naval Museum that has yet to move into Building 50 from Pacific Avenue. The downtown waterfront boardwalk is the site of summer evening concerts and the wonderful Labor Day Blackberry Festival, both sponsored by the Bremo Main Street Association.

Across the Port Washington Narrows from downtown, in East Bremo, a new ice arena opened to much fanfare last year, and has added recreational opportunities to the existing Kitsap Family YMCA, the Bremo Ice Rink, and city pool. A new skatepark is now also a reality in Eastpark.

When the WW II war work ended, Bremo's population plummeted to 27,000. It has ebbed and flowed ever since. Today, there are about 37,500 residents. That makes Bremo, Kitsap County's largest city by far. And if location, location, location, are the three most important aspects of real estate, then Bremo has it all.

But the kicker is that the entire city core is covered with these slapdash homes of every possible description. There is hardly any homogeneity to be found anywhere. Even if you do find a nice house that you like, next door may be one that hasn’t been painted in over a half century; bare wood. How can this city possibly get the total upgrade that it needs and so richly deserves?

Looking at the opposites poles of this dilemma, the yin and yang of it, we have at one extreme the following. An entity buys up the whole city, bulldozers it all down and rebuilds Bremo in the finest manner commensurate with its prime location, bountiful attributes and natural resources. This would in one giant fell swoop, increase the real estate value perhaps tenfold. Who or what could finance such a huge project? Well…you really don’t have to look that far away. How to do it, how to make it fly is another question. As soon as the city began to be bought up, prices would skyrocket out of practical reach.

At the other end of this spectrum, you have slowly expanding waves of demolition and rebuilding emanating out from the newly developed waterfront and the other designated centers of renewal around town. What this basically means is that these local folk, these hardworking, hardscrabble, strong, tough, talented, highly skilled, loyal and patriotic, blue-collar, shipyard workers and their families will be slowly driven out by ever increasing property taxes. This process will be excruciatingly slow and painful, and never will it result in a proper redevelopment.

Either way there are always holdouts that will never sell. I have a favorite photo, an interesting picture that I took in Beijing in 2003. It is on the grounds of a technical university, perhaps the University of Transportation or something like that. My traveling companion and translator, Xiao-Ping, lived there as a child when her father taught there. Just an outline of the foundation of her former home remains. It looks about the size of one regular sized room that was sub-divided into four tiny rooms. A fruit or nut tree that helped keep them alive during the very worst of times somehow survives.

After the Korean War her dad was sent to the Chinese Embassy in North Korea. He later became the head of the China Science and Technology Museum and brought an exhibit on tour to the U.S. and Canada. He gave me the most beautiful Commemorative piece you can imagine. It honors the 15^th Anniversary of the Opening of said Museum, 1988 – 2003, and is a gorgeous hunk of Lucite with engravings, a clock and hydrometer, all packaged in a typically marvelous Chinese case.

At age sixteen, Xiao-Ping, during the so-called Cultural Revolution was sent on a train one thousand miles north to Siberia to work on a manual labor farm. Eventually she escaped that fate, found her way to Seattle, worked five jobs; throwing newspapers, washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant kitchen, tending an old guy, tying wire [construction rebar ~ and she is tiny], and I forget the last one; and simultaneously taught herself English. She saved twenty thousand dollars and talked her way into the University of Idaho at Moscow even though she flunked the language test. There she ended up with a Masters degree in Biochemistry and passed on a doctorate program as she was by then more than ready to enter the fray.

Many years ago this Beijing University needed to remove all of these rural-like dwellings so that it could expand into that area with high-rise buildings of learning. Ms. Zhu’s family had three bedrooms so the University exchanged this humble abode for both a two bedroom and a one bedroom modern apartment. But the picture I took is of a multigenerational family that incredibly is still there. They simply refused to ever move.

A Westerner will be quick to wonder why a totalitarian government that shoots people right after sentencing and then sends the family a bill for the bullet; why such a power could not move this family…and what about eminent domain? But the property is on University grounds and there must have been some loophole in the documents. They are still right there today, with their corral and rural patch, surrounded by new modern buildings. Holdouts can holdout for amazing lengths of time.

Everywhere we went in Mainland China capitalism was rampant. People here still think in terms of Communist China or Red China. Nothing could be further from the simple truth. When you have a totalitarian government and capitalism, that is fascism…the opposite of communism. There is a Bumper Sticker that says, Ever Stop to Think…and Forget to Start Again? But really, that is not the problem; most people are just too busy and overloaded these days to find the time to stop to think about such things at all.

Like the Russians, the Chinese used communism as a means of transition from feudalism to capitalism, but the Chinese never were the true believers in the same way that the Soviets were. One more thought, most people are aware of the one child policy in China to control and reduce population, but how many realize that this means a whole huge country consisting of families that all contain an only-child…and the ramifications of that?

Getting back to the Art Walk, I eventually checked out another gallery and then slipped down around the corner, across from the Ferry Terminal to the funky Westside Burrito Connection, 208 1st Street, next to the South Pacific Sports Bar at 218. I order a huge Regular Burrito and an Alaskan Amber draft. Some fledgling musicians have taken up the vacant tables in the back but I give the pregnant food assembler two bucks and she consolidates them, and frees me up a table.

20:00 and I am at the Admiral Theatre for the Children of Uganda. It is all quite lovely. I missed my siesta and have to will my eyes open. I dig the drums, singing, and dancing and wonder if there is any way that I could possibly steal a small portion of the energy possessed by these marvelous children.

When you come right down to it, we are all Africans, either stay-at-home African, or wandering Africans. Let me explain. Years ago during the Cold War that pitted the two super-powers against each other, the Soviet Union and the United States, it eventually occurred to me that what it really was, was a battle between the Stay-at-Home Russians, and the Wandering Russians.

When humanity moved up into the Caucuses Mountains, hence the name Caucasians, the tribe eventually became so large that it had to split in two like a giant amoeba. Roughly half stayed behind, while the other half left. I think they moved up into what is now Germany and on down into what became Greece, Italy, Spain, France and so forth.

Then about a thousand years later, the original tribe had once again grown to the point where it had to split in two. These wanderers followed the same valley pathways as before and they also descended south into Rome and elsewhere. This time they were described as the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and just plain nasty barbarian tribes.

Later these Caucasians set sail from Spain, Portugal, France, England, and all the rest to populate the New World, including the United States. Despite the time lags and long journeys, they are still emanating from the same original tribe; hence the Stay-At-Home Caucasians vs the Wandering Caucasians; i.e. the Russians vs. the Americans.

Back to the Africans. I sent my DNA to the National Geographic’s Genographic Project and just got back the results. My Y-chromosome shows that I belong to Haplogroup R1b – M343.

This means that my ancestors left Africa in group M168 about 50,000 years ago. By 45,000 years ago they had crossed onto the Arabian Peninsular and the Middle East as M89. 40,000 years ago as M9 they passed through Northern India. Recall that Sanskrit is an ancient Hindu language from Northern India. It is a member of the Indo-European family.

Then 35,000 years ago as M45 they expanded through Central Asia and the Caucuses. 30,000 years ago, now as M173 they migrated across Northern Europe and finally as M343 they ended up in Lisbon. A bit earlier they broke off into a Great Britain Migration, the Magdalenian Culture, the Lascaux Cave in France, and the Altamira Caves in Spain.

Interestingly to me is that when I was wandering over Europe and North Africa is 2002, I surmounted considerable difficulty in reaching the Lascaux Cave and I also found that the food that was most to my liking in Europe, was in Portugal in general and Lisbon in particular.

I have since traced my male French ancestry back to one Noel Blanchette, born circa 1608 in Saint Omer de Rosiere de Santere, Amiens, France. By the mid 1600’s my antecedents had arrived in Quebec, Canada. Later they drifted down into New England to work in the mills of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

And so, we are all either Stay-at-Home Africans or Wandering Africans, or hauled off into slavery Africans. There is only one race…the human race. Differences in skin color are merely a result in the various gradations of melanin.

Melanic pigmentation is advantageous in many ways: It is a barrier against the effects of the ultraviolet rays of sunlight. On exposure to sunlight, for example, the human epidermis undergoes gradual tanning as a result of an increase in melanin pigment. It is a mechanism for the absorption of heat from sunlight, a function that is especially important for cold-blooded animals.

It affords concealment to certain animals that become active in twilight. It limits the incidence of beams of light entering the eye and absorbs scattered light within the eyeball, allowing greater visual acuity. It provides resistance to abrasion because of the molecular structure of the pigment. Many desert-dwelling birds, for example, have black plumage as an adaptation to their abrasive habitat.

Stay-at homes seem to be generally more into the status quo and authoritarianism, while wanderers are, not surprisingly, more open and flexible. Next time you go to a high school reunion, compare those that never left the old hometown with those that moved about the country and the world.

The African Continent is a toughie. We have so many images of those emaciated starving children. To be honest, after the first sympathetic reaction, many feel that they shouldn’t have babies that they can’t feed and if others feed them; that will just produce even more starving babies than before. It is far from being that simple but the reaction is understandable.

Couple that with such enormous atrocities like the Rwandan Genocide, which was the slaughter of almost a million Tutsis by Hutus during a period of 100 days from April 6th through mid-July 1994. But then you read, Left to Tell a book by Immaculee Ilibagiza about discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, and you have to think that this beautiful young girl who survived against all odds is a living saint.

Africa is such a contrast in beauty and ugliness. The HIV/AIDS situation is another monster. Many African men for misguided reasons of so-called purity, prefer that their women be dry during intercourse. The females can accomplish this with one powder or another but this naturally leads to vaginal tearing and that is HIV’s best friend. Even more grotesque is the disgustingly ignorant belief that if you have AIDS you will be cured if you have sex with a virgin. It is obvious where that leads. In addition they still have such barbaric practices as female genital excision, often called female circumcision; a procedure that is as uncalled for as it is painful and risky.

Twenty-three of the poorest twenty-five countries in this world are in Africa and getting poorer all the time. Extreme poverty is killing minimally thirty thousand daily…that is one child every 2.88 seconds. The death toll of the Great Tsunami of December 2004 was around a quarter of a million people. That is about an average week’s death toll from extreme poverty!

Regarding that Tsunami, can anyone actually believe that those who died were all bad people who had it coming? Or must one see all these deaths for what they were, a statistical occurrence arising from an act of nature. In this case a monstrous wave generated by a great undersea earthquake. No more and no less. True the dead were mostly Muslims and it occurred the day after Christmas…what does that mean? It means nothing, absolutely nothing.

People die when churches collapse or catch fire and Muslims have a penchant for trampling each other to death during their mass pilgrimages to Mecca. None of this is the work of a higher power; this is man making his usual mistakes.

All life on Earth collectively is known as Gaia [www.gaia.org/] and she is hurting right now. One could think of her as an aspect of Mother Nature. Can you be healthy if your body is perfect except for one leg that is terribly ill? Can our planet be healthy if one continent like Africa has such severe problems? Worldwide, eight hundred million people are living on less than a dollar per day. Meanwhile every cow in the European Union is being subsidized at $2.50 per day.

Above I mentioned Lisbon. That is what we call that city but its real name is Lisboa. This is a real pet peeve of mine. Why in this day and age do we not call and teach our children the true names of other countries and cities? Habit? The world is quite small now, and many will travel. There is no Rome, Florence, or Venice; they are Roma, Florencia, and Venezia. Those are not that far off, but how about Vienna? If you are waiting for a train to Vienna you will have a long wait…the name is Wien. Prague…no such place, it is Praha…and so on. What sense does it make to teach the names of major world cities by deliberately misspelling them, sometimes beyond recognition?

The same thing occurs with other words like the Muslim holy book the Quran, or Qu'ran, or Quoran, why do we call it the Koran? Just to confuse ourselves? And now that it is so much in the news we are forced to start at least trying to spell it correctly. At this time I do not know which spelling is correct. Then there is the misuse of words. The absolute worst is the use of the word miracle.

In my sixty-four years I have never seen or heard of an actual miracle. But it is used more and more often in the media to describe anything and everything. Well let me correct that, all existence and life is a miracle. How about this entire world arising from nothing? Talk about a free lunch. Everything about life should be seen as the miracle that it is.

But let us say a busload of twenty-nine kids goes over an embankment and one survives. It is guaranteed that this survivor will be called a miracle. Excuse me? What about the law of averages? The above is no more a miracle than if you drop a dozen eggs and one or two don’t break. If you want to pretend that some divine power personally altered reality and the laws of nature in order to save that one child…if you want to put the credit for that there, than you must lay the twenty-eight tragic deaths at that same doorstop. You can’t reasonably expect to have it both ways.

Another word used a lot is decimated. It comes from deci as in decade and decimal, and it means ten. It has been said that the Italian Military performed so poorly in WW II because they were too civilized. Well, they used to know how to do it. Decimated was the term for a brutal but effective practice of the Roman Army. When the boys really screwed the pooch they were decimated. They were formed up and every tenth man stepped forward. These men were then put to death. It didn’t matter what they had done or not done, or how good or bad they had performed as soldiers. They were slaughtered. An army of 100,000 was now only 90,000; but after that demonstration they didn’t hesitate to fight boldly and to work together as a team.

But now it doesn’t matter what the loss is, it could be 1% or 90% or anything and the talking head newscasters will go on about how this or that was decimated. These same mindless newsreaders will also misuse language and reel off numbers that are off by orders of magnitude without batting an eye.

Adrienne, I feel another rant coming on. But if I understand your feedback correctly, you are tripping on these streams of consciousness. They certainly help me on these lonely surveillances out in the cold and dark. You know how I feel about waste and cannot even think about leaving the motor running. Besides, it would attract too much attention. Just as time can pass quickly when you are absorbed on a computer, so too with organizing thoughts and recording them. It works great and has a cathartic effect by getting this stuff off my chest.

Yes, you are right about the lack of humor. Humor is such a part of my everyday existence, and my writings are often a scream, but I too have noticed how that is lacking here. Sitting in a cold vehicle may have something to do with it, but it is more than that. Obviously I am venting but that too could be done with more humor. To tell you the truth, it is more like I am, I don’t want to use a New Age word like channeling, it is more like this stuff is coming to me from a muse and that this particular muse is really pissed-off at current events and the state of humanity. My job is basically just to speak these messages out as they come to me.

I lived in the black community in Los Angels for thirty years, although the last five were spent mostly in Mexico. I have a great love and affection for black folk in general. They are a very gifted and generous people. In Africa, a hungry man with only a piece of bread to his name will often share half with you if you are in need, even though you are a total stranger. Nevertheless their grasp of public relations and introspection is often tragically lacking.

Let’s take the stereotype of the lying, stealing, non-working, ghetto Black male. What is this all about? Imagine that very powerful extraterrestrials have taken over the Earth and are enslaving the human race. What would we do? Well the best of us, the strongest, bravest, and most intelligent among us would form an underground resistance movement.

At every opportunity we would steal whatever we could from these oppressors. We would habitually lie to them. We would whenever possible not work for them. In short our ideal behavior would be to lie, steal, and to not work. Once those well-justified and practical ideals became an admired facet of our culture, how long would it take to undo those aberrations once the threat was removed? It would take many generations, and then only with much introspection and great effort. Is it any wonder that the horrors and oppression of slavery in this country had the same effect on some African-Americans?

Add to that the enormous and lasting damage done by welfare systems that required the man to leave the home in order for the woman to be eligible for AFDC, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. These forces made the woman the most powerful person in the family as she controlled the purse strings. The men were damaged beyond measure.

The black community in the U.S. is comprised of so many individuals of great talent and accomplishment, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, as well as musicians and athletes. Yet how often when the news media want a ‘black perspective’, do they produce some inarticulate, hostile, total ignoramus from the streets? This situation does seem to be getting better over time, but it still happens. Were the media doing this deliberately to make African-Americans look bad? It sure looks that way but then the media is supposed to be liberal leaning.

Certainly no other group would stand for it. Can you image a major news event that called for a White or Asian perspective, where the media would interview some smuck off skid row and advance this numb-nut’s mutterings as gospel? Such a travesty would never be tolerated, but it happens all the time with Black Community issues.

There is also a continuous perversity by the Black Community to make cause celebs out of the worst possible material. A young girl who gets shot while stealing from a mom and pop store, a retarded axe murderer, an underage killer, a wife-murdering ex-football star, the list goes on and on. So self-defeating. The broader community could care less about such people. What about the good Black Americans who are the victims of horrible injustice? They seem to get passed right over.

And the ‘n’ word thing. Blacks demand that we not use that word…give me a break, anyone can say any word that they want to. It reminds me of when my little sister would demand that I not do or say a certain something or she would get very upset. Who could resist that? Even if I had no intention whatever to do or say that thing that would get such a rise out of her…I was compelled to do so. She was begging for it.

The ‘n’ word is used in many different ways by many different people. The range is from a term of endearment to a vicious epithet. Even at its worst use by Whites, except for a few hopelessly ignorant crackers, it refers not to Black people in general but to characterize a lazy, lying, thieving type of character. In this regard there are plenty of White people that it can be and is applied to.

Blacks have also managed to bulletproof themselves to criticism. Almost no non-Black will criticize a Black person to their face. The attitude is that if you criticize me, we will gather and protest you or boycott you or whatever reprisal is in vogue. All that accomplishes is to deny them constructive criticism…and we can all at times sure use some of that. The result is that they are often treated like dangerous children, not reasonable adults.

The same sort of thing is happening with the Great Muslim Cartoon Riots going on. They riot and demand that we not make cartoons of Mohammed. Again, anyone can draw whatever cartoons they want to. The results of the riots beyond the death and destructions is that the whole world is now transmitting Muslim cartoons in print and on the Internet. That, plus unfortunately the world now views Muslims more than ever as mindless morons. The above arose in part because Islam does not allow any physical representation of Mohammed. If you think that is strange, Orthodox Jews don’t even allow the name of God to be spoken.

Respect is not something that can be demanded, it must be earned. If you demand respect in an infantile way, what you get is ridicule, hardly the desired outcome. If your religion or culture prohibits certain words or pictures, that is fine for you, just leave the rest of us out of it. You simply give away your power by allowing anyone to control your reactions to a word or a cartoon. It is also considered a really big insult if you show a Muslim the bottom of your feet or shoes. Oh really, how quaint. And do they expect the rest of the world to take note and observe this particular eccentricity?

Blacks have a great potential advantage in their skin color. New immigrants to the U.S. have traditionally spent their money within their close-knit community as much as possible. The Koreans who settled in Los Angels around Olympic Boulevard, New Seoul, are a case in point. In three short decades they have built that area up from nothing, to shopping malls and high-rises. All of this was accomplished by hard work and doing their darndest not to let their money out of that part of town.

But as time goes by, the immigrants become second, third, and beyond generations and that cohesiveness is lost as the subsequent generations join the mainstream. They no longer even recognize each other. This is where blacks would have the advantage. They can always instantly recognize each other by skin color. So if only they had the common positive trait of trading with their own, ethnically speaking, they would always have that advantage. The tragedy is that in fact, Blacks at many levels traditionally go out of their way not to give their business to other Blacks.

That is why the Black ghetto corner stores have been traditionally operated by outsiders. In Los Angeles it was first by Jews, then Koreans, and now some are from India. I mentioned a young Black girl, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, who was shot dead by a female Korean shop owner, Soon Da Ju, for stealing a small item. There was massive Black outrage when Superior Court Judge Joyce Harlin gave probation to the shooter. The judge ended up being recalled. The actual facts are quite interesting.

Many of the Koreans who enter the New Seoul Community in Los Angeles are in fact from North Korea, not South Korea. When they escape from North Korea and arrive in the South, their extended families ship them to Los Angeles. Talk about a culture clash. If a North Korean shopkeeper shot a thief, they would probably be given a medal and a village celebration.

At the other end of this tragic event, the small shops in the ghetto overcharge so much for everything, that it is all but the shoppers duty and obligation to periodically ‘pocket’ some items in order to help even out the relationship. Both the young Black girl and the Korean woman thought that they were doing the right thing.

So inner city Blacks continue to eye each other suspiciously and their predators prey upon their own community. Meanwhile other groups get off the boat not knowing English, and by working together for the common good, soon sail right by some African Americans who have been here for centuries. How tragic.

I never did quite get Jesse Jackson. But he is right-on about pushing for the economic side of the problem and that the only color that really matters is green. I do know the Black community. I rode my BSA 650 Lightning Rocket from New Haven to Los Angeles in September of 1964. I had been a Repo Man in the New York Region for GMAC. I thought that I was doing really well when I quickly got a job as a bill collector in South Central with Watts as my territory. The first Watts riots were in ’65.

I attended the 1967 Watts Festival featuring H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and others, with James Brown entertaining. I lived the civil rights movement in Los Angels, in the Black community. I was there. In fact I drove to that festival with a black coworker. Just because we were a vehicle with a Black man and a White man in it, we were pulled over by the LAPD and thrown over the hood of my car.

Another time a Black friend named Melvin had his head shaved for medical treatment. Unfortunately for him there was a militant Black group at the time called US that shaved their heads as a symbol of membership. One night Melvin was driving to work in his caddy, minding his own business when his bare head was spotted by the LAPD. They beat him so severely that he ended up in the LAC USC Medical Center on the jail ward. As the saying on the street went, “LAPD don’t play.”

I was originally negative on Reverend Al Sharpton but have come to respect his intellect, savvy, and good sense of humor. But why are the most talented and developed Black leaders in the public eye so few and far between? Why in 2006 do Black kids have mostly gangsta rappers and the like to idolize? Is this more fallout from the slavery experience? Children are afraid to do well in school lest they be called acting White or being oreos.

As if knowledge should be White and ignorance should be Black. This inverted sanity must be taken head-on across the board. It is all fallout from the slavery era. Bill Cosby has gone out on a limb to try to deal with it and has run into all kinds of flak. As if ignorance, stupidity, and self-defeating tactics must be preserved at all costs. Ignorance needs to be eradicated, not protected.

Minister Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Black Muslims, for all his faults has many things correct. He stresses the economic development side of the divide and the Black Muslims are known for shunning alcohol and tobacco, good personal hygiene and being well dressed. They used to sell the most healthy and delicious pies on the streets of LA, especially near the Mosque on Crenshaw Boulevard. The vendor would be all but formally attired. The last time I was in LA I scoured the ghetto looking for one of these mean bean pies, but to no avail.

Then you have Black English as a major problem. I lived long enough in the Black Community that I speak Black English. Actually I often prefer it, and it is slowly seeping into the main stream via White kids due to its expressability, but that is not the point. Unless you are going to be the one in a million that becomes a pro ball player or a rap star or the like, you are most probably going to go nowhere unless you can speak mainstream English.

The whole notion of doing well in school being White is ludicrous. Who invented basketball, baseball, football, golf, or tennis? White people did…so what? Black youths don’t shun them. Black people invented jazz and blues, and rap. Do you see White people avoiding them because Blacks invented them?

There is no time to waste. Our society is spending many, many times the amount of money needed to provide splendid inner-city schools and associate support, in order to incarcerate Blacks and Hispanics. Worse yet, prisons are universities in crime and brutality. When you expect people to act like animals…you can be sure that many of them will do just that. But you can’t spend the money on the schools if the students think that learning is dumb and refuse to apply themselves.

There are many signs of deep progress. Blacks in movie roles is one of them. Originally their depiction was horrible and humiliating at best. Then during the Civil Rights struggles the Blacksploitation flicks came along. As bad as they were, it was a great leap forward. Today many Black movies are being made with excellent role models. These movies are fun and entertaining while still transmitting healthy attitudes and outright wisdom to their viewers.

Decades ago I was riding the ‘extra car’, the RTD, the bus. I noticed an ad along the inside top row where they string them. I will always remember what it said. It was sponsored by the Los Angles Times and it read, “If the Truth Hurts…It Should”.

17:00 ON
02-04-06 Saturday - I arrive again at the Amy Burnett Gallery. Judith Kay, a transplanted New Yorker via Southern California, is doing a splendid job on the piano. A raffle is underway in support of the Opera Guild. This is the staging area for the Kitsap Opera Guild’s presentation of A Night in Italy. It starts at 19:00 across Pacific Avenue at Filippi’s Pizza Grotto.

The evening begins. A buffet is laid out. The Chianti flows and the music begins. Hannah Blackburn is on this piano. Linda Mattos is the Lyric soprano and Froiedrich Konstatin Schlott the Bass-baritone. I am in a perfect groove.

At the break, the raffle tickets are drawn. Various offerings including beautiful baskets of goodies, some prepared perhaps by Amy, are won and received. Then comes the main prize, an Art Talk by Amy Burnett in your home for up to twelve guests. Topics are: Home Design, Artwork Critique, Art History, Painting, and Feng Shui.

Man do I ever need a Feng Shui. The bidding begins. I am the second bidder and the two of us go a few rounds and then I jump the bid and take the item. This goes over very well as Amy is so well liked and her Herculean efforts on behalf of Bremo very much known and appreciated. I am urged to join the Kitsap Opera Guild. I will of course, do so. I am suddenly quire popular with these total strangers. Not as popular perhaps as the only guy with jumper cables at a Kabul wedding, but I do go over.

Adrienne: Find A Night in Italy program in your inbox. Run names on Lists A & B.
17:00 OFF

Super Bowl XL – What a rip. Worst officiating I have ever seen in a major game, let alone the Super Bowl with the world watching. Final score: REFS 21 HAWKS 10. I have yet to hear that the refs rigged the game…but my ear is to the ground.

02-06-06 Monday - USA Today reports that the largest U.S. long-distance carriers had cooperated with the NSA’s, National Security Agency's, wiretapping of international calls without warrants, according to a published report that cited unnamed telecommunications executives and intelligence officials. MCI, Sprint and AT&T grant access to their systems without warrants or court orders, and provide call-routing information that helps physically locate the callers.

This has been going on for a long time. The old time switchboards, PBX and other equipment of AT&T and the Bell Systems were designed to enable surreptitious monitoring of telephone calls. We even spread this system around the world often without the knowledge of the receiving countries…the knowledge that we could listen in.

The Bush Administrations states that FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is too outdated to handle the monitoring of all international calls to and from Al-Qaeda. This is probably true. Doubtless they are using supercomputers to filter every international call being made, looking for keywords and such, in order to home in on and give more attention to those calls that raise red flags.

To process millions of calls through a court, whether before or within seventy-two hours after the fact, would require tens of thousands of judges. Not workable. But it has to be made legal with congressional oversight. Checks and balances to unbridled power are absolutely essential.

Item: Recently it was revealed that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! complied with Justice Department subpoenas to turn over search data. Google has made a very high profile statement that it will not do so without a fight. Good for you Google!

I woke up this morning to find that Teddy ‘The Wonder Dog’ has flown the coup! Teddy, a Black Lab had promised me that if I left one of the gates ajar, he would stop dumping on my gravel walkways and trot across the road to relieve himself by the edge of the forest. This he did for about a week but now he is gonzo. I drove around looking for him, nada. On my morning walk to the post office I covered the immediate area, nada.

About noon I notice messages on the answering machine. One is from Janet with the City of Bremo. She is at the Public Works Yard up on Oyster Bay Road and so it seems is Teddy. The maintenance crew has accomplished little so far today as Teddy has been running them ragged all morning with a fetch the stick game that he has improvised. Teddy is an obsessive-compulsive ball player, but any port in a storm.

Janet has read the rabies tag number on Teddy’s spiked collar, called our vet and thereby obtained my home phone number. They love Teddy but he is a distinct impediment to their mission. This is one more reason why I love Bremo. The common sense and good will in this town is viscerally palpable.

I pick up a small package of 61%, now deemed healthy, cocoa chocolate disks from the just opened Amy’s Decadent Chocolates shop in Charleston. If you want to see my face in your establishment, just work the word decadent into your logo…and sooner or later I will be there. I gave Janet the chocolate, picked up Teddy, took him home…and gave him what for.

Muslims are still rioting, burning, and killing worldwide because they object to those cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. It is a mistake to think that these people are like us, just of a different religion, or culinary tastes, or lifestyle. I was in Morocco, in a rug shop in a souk in the Casbah in Tangier, when I was apparently too slow to make a purchase. Someone then dropped a large rolled Berber carpet down upon me from the floor above.

I sprung up with the expletive, ‘Jesus Christ’. In retrospect, that may not have been the wisest utterance given the location. The merchants then attempted to inform me that getting pounded like that was ‘good luck’. Yeah…good luck and good-bye! The upside was that I was sufficiently agitated that I ended up eating couscous with the most lovely Kanako Oya traveling alone from Osaka-City, Japan, at the tender age of twenty-two.

I recall a scene outside that souk in the street on a steep cobblestone hill. A very heavily laden cart was going by. The brakes for this monstrosity was a huge guy in the back wearing large thick rubber boots. He was hanging on, and dragging his feet on the roadway. I began to wonder what century these people were living in. Hard to tell but it was many many centuries ago. I keep hearing lately that they are living in the seventh century. That sounds a bit early to me, but then a Theocracy that lops off hands and heads is way back there somewhere. Either way we are in living in different millennia.

While modern man is urged to think globally but act locally, in furtherance of the common good…These Arabs are thinking locally and acting globally, to the world’s detriment and horror.

There is an item circulating on the Net regarding Muslim outrage. It lists many outrageous and horrendous acts committed by Muslims that provoked in them no outrage; from 9-11, to Muslim officials blocking the exit where schoolgirls were trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed, to Muslims slaughtering hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia, and so on. But when newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed…Muslims are outraged to the point of worldwide rioting and destruction! Hello?

And these very same people who are burning and killing over what are not only quite innocuous cartoons, but also accurately relevant cartoons; these same people conceive, create, and publish, practically on a daily basis…the vilest, most disgusting, and untrue cartoons depicting Jewish people that you could possibly imagine. They are even now running a worldwide contest to see who can come up with the dastardliest anti-Jewish and anti-Christian cartoons. Do they really think we will riot? Or even give a damn.

What a shame! It was Arabs that gave us Arabic numerals. Did you ever try to multiply and divide Roman numerals? The Arabic numerals along with the essential concept of the Hindu zero allow us to function as we do. They also gave us algebra, and that beautiful Moorish architecture you see in Spain and elsewhere. The word most used in the Quoran, after God, is ilm. Ilm means knowledge and was so very highly respected. Mohammed was first motivated to act by being distressed at the treatment of women, slaves, and the down trodden. Muslims originally helped to liberate and raise women up.

What happened? In general they are in desperate financial shape. But have you ever heard of an Arab car, or boat, or train, or plane, or TV, or computer, or anything modern? Globalization is not passing them by; they have lain dormant for well over a thousand years. They often fight against progress, when everyone knows that you cannot stop progress. Whose fault is that? According to the Quoran: “God does not change the condition of a people unless they change what is in themselves.” Amen to that.

Mahatma Gandhi showed the oppressed people of the world how to overcome their situation. Martin Luther King Jr. used these same techniques to successfully lead African-Americans to full citizenship. It is a shame that Osama or Usama Bin Laden didn’t have the wit to follow their examples. He might well have already been successful in his mission. Instead he chose hate and death and hate and death is what he reaps.

People are basically good. Expose a grievous injustice and the world will come together to right it. If all of those suicide bombers were doing what the Buddhist Monks of Vietnam did, that is to say, if they were committing suicide publicly to protest policies that they objected to, and not killing or harming anyone else…they would probably have accomplished their goals before now and had the entire world on their side.

Adrienne, I hope all the yammering is not putting you over the edge. But with all this surveillance time and these DW-90s, what’s a guy to do? I keep trying to stay off religion but now accept that I cannot.

I can tell that a lot of religion bashing is struggling to break free and come forth. Let me say right now that I am not against religion per se. If you pay attention you will see that what I will be examining is what so often happens after a beautiful spiritual movement is launched by a wonderful prophet. What happens is that the more the movement is organized into a religion, the more it becomes incorporated and bureaucratized, the more it accumulates power and feels the need to control its practitioners and to expand; the more likely it is that it will then turn into something that is not only often counterproductive but it becomes the exact opposite of what its founder would have wished for.

I realize that religion is transformative for culture and the people living within that culture. Religion has transformed primitive societies from matriarchal to patriarchal. Religion has transformed societies from polytheistic to monotheistic. All of that has probably been necessary for our development and evolution into what we are today. But I see no reason why we need all the lies and horrid practices today to reap the beneficial results of religion.

Today we may well be transitioning back to more of a matriarchal scheme of things, if in fact we really ever changed that much. Certainly we are becoming feminized in the developed western societies. Have ever you noticed that the Fundamentalist, whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Mormon, that they all make a major effort to suppress their women? They are well aware of the natural power of women and fear it.

Frankly, I don’t think I have ever met a married man in this country that I can recall who wasn’t at a fundamental level, petrified of his wife. This is not as surprising as one might think. Men in our culture are raised by their mothers. Once grown, they marry and their new household is again ruled by a woman. Little girls are naturally bossy, at least in the U.S. They get an early start, and practice wrapping their fathers around their little fingers from about age three if not before.

When elderly men die, their wives generally live on for many years. When elderly women pass-on their husbands often join them in short order.

President Lyndon Johnson, a master intimidator if there ever was one, once said, “There are only two things you need to know about your wife. First you have to make her think that she is the boss. Second you have to realize that she is the boss.” It may be a cliché that, “Behind every successful man there is a woman”, but there is a lot of truth to that.

Sure some young and macho guys demand to be in charge and are very jealous and controlling. To do so they have to beat their woman until either she leaves, kills him, or he kills her or is incarcerated. Naturally there are exceptions and permutations of this but I am sure that you get the cut being made here.

If your society is polytheistic as the Greeks and Romans were, how do you control behavior? There is a God for everything. One God may have you doing something that the rulers want you to be doing but suppose you want to go up into the hills and get drunk at a wild orgy? No problema, just follow the God Bacchus and that is definitely the way to go.

But once you introduce the concept of only one God, now you have full control. One God can be extremely sexually repressive and that tremendous energy can then be sublimated and directed to the ends that the leaders want. Of course there is no free lunch. When you suppress a prime mover like the sexual urge you are going to get a lot of mental and physical fallout, illness, and crimes.

The USS Ohio has returned to service at the nearby Bangor submarine base. This sub is the first of four ballistic-missile subs now known as SSGNs, G means Guided. They now carry up to 154 mid-range guided Tomahawk missiles, and up to 102 Navy SEALs or other Special Forces. Before conversion they were SSBNs, B is for Ballistic, and carried nuclear ballistic weapons for the Cold War. Under the START II Treaty, four of our 18 SSBNs had to go. This was an alternative to scrapping them and fits in nicely with anti-terrorism plans.

The three year conversion was accomplished in Bremo at the PSNS. PSNS is also converting the USS Michigan. Both will operate in the Pacific. The USS Florida and USS Georgia are undergoing conversion on the East Coast and slated for stationing in Europe and the Middle East.

13:30 ON
02-09-06 Thursday - Veh#5 - It is finally time to see Greta at Affinity Massage at 532 5th Street, just west of Pacific Avenue. Every two weeks is too long to wait. Some doctor made up a Death Calculator wherein you start with age 79 and add one year for good things that you do and you subtract a year for no-nos. Having a pet like a dog or cat gets you another year added to your lifespan. The same with a regular massage, it adds a year to your life. Greta points out that Bob Hope had a weekly massage and lived passed one hundred. That works for me.

I am in heaven for one hour. At my age this is better than sex. Greta is great. Surprisingly to me, she likes old movies like the Bob Hope ~ Bing Crosby On the Road stuff, black and whites. These Bremos are endlessly full of surprises, as is the whole town.

It has been said that only two strata of a society really know what is going on. One is the President, the other are the prostitutes. Well, I have found that much is also said to one’s masseuse. I go to Greta for the best massages in town and someone else there for much local intel.

The building housing Affinity Massage has some interesting antiques, books and wall paintings. Just west of this building is the downtown Bremo branch of the Kitsap Regional Library system [www.krl.org/]. It was once the main library but that distinction moved to East Bremo to a new 35,000 square foot facility on Sylvan Way in 1978. This 1930s building has undergone $400,000 worth of improvements since September and will reopen in March as the Martin Luther King Branch.

I walk over to the Amy Burnett Gallery. The lady operating the adjoining Made in Bremo store advises me that Amy is only scheduled full time on Tuesdays. Her assistant, Stewart, is not on the premises. I continue on over to the Patriot newspaper office on Burwell. No one is there, and a Will Return Clock has its hands pointing to some really oddball time.

Back on the Valk, I rip over to the YMCA and drop off two XL magnetic knee tubes for Director Godfrey. These things saved me about eleven years ago. I could not walk without them. After exhausting medical treatment in Los Angeles and Seattle, including the UW Bone and Joint Clinic, a nurse at a Whidbey Island Clinic in Clinton told me, “The doctors have told us not to mention this as they say it is quackery, but many of our patients swear by magnets.” They made all the difference in the world for me. I even sold them on the Net for a few years in order to share the relief.
16:30 OFF

My knees have been shot for over twenty-five years. I started running marathons at age thirty-eight. It was all the rage at the time and running in general was widely touted as the path to good health. Big mistake. That, plus arthritis and a torn meniscus pulled me to the curb. Some years back a Swedish masseuse on Whidbey Island told me to try cold-pressed peanut oil on them. Well I did once or twice, probably months apart.

Then a year ago I picked up a bottle of HAIN 100% Expeller Pressed Peanut Oil, and began using it twice a day. What a marvelous result! My knees no longer crack so badly when I bend them. I noticed an immediate increase in my stationary bike performance numbers. In 2000, before purchasing the Valk and to aid my being able to hold that big baby up, I had three shots in each knee to lubricate the cartilage. Originally the material was made from rooster combs, but by then it was synthesized and sold as SYNVISC®. It worked fairly well but only lasted about a year. In some the ways peanut oil is better.

To keep going I spend most of each and every morning exercising. It begins with yoga and weight lifting. Then a half hour on the recumbent bike, followed by a daily walk to the West Hills Post office. Cool-down periods are spent on the computer.

At noon I eat my first meal of the day. I am a confirmed contrarian. I collared over a million in the stock market with one stock that way. Every diet or nutritional plan that I have ever heard of emphasizes that the most important meal of the day is breakfast. I have found that eating breakfast is the absolute worst thing that you can do.

Maybe if you get up at three AM to start plowing the back forty you should eat a big breakfast, but not us sedentary people. Do animals get up, go to the refer and eat breakfast? I don’t think so. More likely they have to go out and work and hunt down their daily meal. With some luck they will be successful by midday. They eat then and leave a little for their supper.

I lost forty pounds in 2004, and the key was not eating before noon. That plus exercise and my special evening drink. The drink was basically, spirulina from the deep waters off the Kona Coast, flax seed from North Central Dakota, bee pollen from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, all put in a blender with apple juice and a banana.

An appetite grows when fed. The more you eat for breakfast, the hungrier you are at noon. The more you eat at noon, the more you want for supper. Eat as much as you want, but only healthy foods at noon, then in the evening a light supper. Forget breakfast…that is one major reason why this country is so obese. This advice is for adults, children are another story.

It is simply about Mother Nature. As Jack LaLanne, the fellow who swam pulling boatloads of people at age eighty-four or something like that says, “If man makes it…Don’t eat it! That covers cakes, pies, cookies, candy, and a plethora of products ubiquitous in the U.S. All Mexican restaurants offer either corn or flour tortillas. The traditional corn is whole grain and healthy, the flour is usually of unhealthy bleached white flour. The status trend now in Mexico is to switch from corn to flour. How sad. A good rule of thumb is, do what the old people used to do.

Another health factor for women is their bras. Bras can lead to breast cancer, especially the ones with wire in them. They cut off the proper blood flow. Once again it is a matter of spending money to be unnatural. Trust me, I have made a very careful and extensive hands-on study of this subject!

I have lost almost all faith in the AMA and doctors in general. I say that despite the fact that I have had some wonderful doctors in my life and for my children. I have an excellent doctor that I really like right now. A few years back my blood pressure was way too high. I went to doctors in Los Angeles and Seattle. All attempted to put me on medication, i.e. pills…drugs. Drugs that later proved to be highly dangerous. None suggested that what I should do was simply improve my diet and exercise more. But that is what I did and the blood pressure problem vanished naturally.

All day long now on TV there are these terribly annoying drug commercials. They have gone beyond, if you are sick…take drugs. Now they show a healthy woman who eats properly, jogs daily, and appears to be the picture of health, but no, not quite good enough, she also should be buying and ingesting their drugs. And our children, put them on drugs whenever possible as well.

The new Medicare Drug Program is deemed necessary because so many older people can no longer afford the ten, twenty, or thirty prescription drugs that they have been put ‘on’. They can’t afford their hundreds or thousands of dollars a month ‘nut’ for drugs.

The conservative Bruce Bartlett who worked for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush 41 the Elder, has now written a book, Imposter, in which he rips the current President George W. Bush. The final straw for him was the Medicare Drug Program. He states that the White House deliberately withheld statistics on how much it would really cost.

The unfunded liability for Medicare Part D is now computed at eighteen trillion dollars! That is seven trillion more than Social Security’s eleven trillion in unfunded liability. So even if W. had been able to accomplish his mission to ‘save Social Security’ completely, he would have already made the situation far worse than it was…had he done nothing.

This year, 2006 is the tipping year for Medicare; the first year in which more money will be spent then comes in. Last year the Medicare Trust Fund was predicted to last another fifteen years. This year they say it will last only another twelve years. I wonder what they will say next year?

This legislation makes the drug companies and stockholders rich, while making it so much easier for the elderly to be frightened onto a plethora of drugs. Before the War on Drugs you didn’t hear about drugs all day long. People were not organizing busses to go to Canada to purchase them. If you interview people who have lived to be over one hundred years old, what do they most often say? Avoid doctors and hospitals! Work, be useful, be curious, and stay connected.

When Social Security was enacted, the life expectancy was sixty-five years for a male. On average you would draw very little before your ticket was punched. These drugs are not to prolong our potential normal lives. What could be more unnatural than filling our cells with all these foreign chemicals?

Drugs are still very crude. Someday they will be perfected and actually just solve your genetic flaws or whatever. But that is not the case today. Yes, they accomplish their main goal but create numerous deleterious side effects. So you first get on one drug and the side effects lead you to a second drug, and then the third. By now your body chemistry is so altered and screwed up that you must continue to add more and more drugs until you are a total wreck, heading for a stone wall.

I know someone whose policy is, “Just say no to drugs…unless they are recreational.” At first that seems outrageous, but when you come right down to it, occasional street drugs are probably safer than daily taking all this crap that the drug companies are pushing. And pushing is indeed the right word. They push far harder than anything going on along Pusher Street in the Christiania section of Copenhagen. If you can handle the truth…follow the money. Always follow the money!

The naïve perception of what makes a medical doctor tick is often of an individual who wants to help their fellow man. I’m sure this is true in many cases, but a more realistic appraisal is often of someone who as a kid, liked to take things apart. Someone who likes to see how things work, an engineering type.

A very cranky gent in a local tavern recently advanced a rather shocking theory as follows: “The human body is comprised of trillions of living cells. Each day we lose billions of red blood cells to maintain ourselves. Do we care that they die to keep us healthy? Not really. Moving up a level, a society is comprised of living people. Do doctors care that some must die to maintain a healthy society? Not really. Well, that is the nature of things. The health of the overall community is what really counts.

The more old retired people there are who live longer and longer, the less robust and sick the overall society becomes. Cigarette smoking used to be the perfect answer. About the time one’s useful working life was over, lung cancer would frequently finish you off. Recall that the AMA invested heavily in tobacco stocks until public knowledge and outrage brought that to an end. It wasn’t the government that pushed the current non-smoking environment. The government happily subsidized the tobacco industry. It was public opinion in the U.S. that pushed the government. Now we export more of these coffin nails to cover the domestic loss of consumers. If we can’t kill more of our own citizens, by all means let us kill more foreigners.

The only way to stop the drain on the economy, Social Security, and the health of the nation caused by the ever-expanding longevity of the senior citizenry is to bump them off. What better way then by making billions while drugging them to death?”

The above is certainly harsh, cynical, and possibly paranoid, but still he has a point. When I was a kid, the old folks would do just about anything to avoid going into a hospital. Why? Because they knew that would probably mean curtains for them. And very often it did just that. Twenty years ago while living in Mexico, it was the same situation. When an elderly citizen living in San Felipe could no longer hold off a trip to a Mexicali hospital, the family figured they had three days to plan the funeral. Just like clockwork, in about three days, back would come the corpse for the wake. No longer a productive unit…zap!

But even aside from these drug issues, in my lifetime the accepted medical advice has time and time again been through 180-degree reversals. First one was suppose to put hot packs on new injuries and later that was changed to cold packs. We were told not to eat butter but to switch to margarine. Now we are told to not eat margarine but to switch to butter. Fat was bad and carbohydrates were good. Now carbohydrates are bad and fat is actually all right.

Drinking was bad but now it is seen as healthy in moderation. Running and jogging was wonderful exercise in the 70’s but now it is seen as destructive to your joints. The pyramid depiction of what constitutes the proper food groups has just been changed radically. A doctor now is telling me that the best thing to cook with is pig fat…lard! One can only conclude that despite the authoritative pronouncements that thunder forth, that they really don’t know what they are talking about a great deal of the time. Better to listen to your body and do what the old people did. Doctors call what they do practice, for good reason.

We have had the War on Drugs now for decades. After years of wasting untold billions of tax dollars on this so-called war, what do we have? Illegal drugs are more plentiful, widespread, cheaper than ever before, and corruption is rampant everywhere, including politicians, the military, law enforcement, the judiciary, and elsewhere.

A few years ago, my son Tommy and I returned to our spot on Punta Estrella, Point of the Stars, below San Felipe in Baja California. It had been more than ten years since either of us had been there. Young soldiers were everywhere. Our friends told about smugglers dropping off large stacks of bails of white, shrink-wrapped marijuana, and storing them in vacant structures in the campos. It seems that the U.S. gave the Mexicans some beautiful new boats, ostensibly to interdict drug smugglers. But you guessed it, these very boats were what were being used to haul in the drugs. In fact the Mexican Army frequently violates our southern border to protect their drug traffickers.

The Mexican Drug Czar is widely known to in fact be the head trafficker. The Mexicans used to simply be paid by the Columbians to transit the cocaine and other drugs to the U.S. Eventually they woke up and realized they could make a lot more as a principal. Today it is estimated that Mexico receives about US$30 billion from Mexican workers in the U.S. sending money back to their families and about US$300 billion from the drug trade. This consists mostly of cocaine and marijuana but now also the output of super-meth labs in Mexico and both Mexican black tar and higher grade Chinese white heroin.

Combine this availability of illegal drugs, with the increasing push by Big Pharmaceuticals to start our children out on prescription drugs at an early age and it is not difficult to predict future trends. Our entire culture is now awash in harmful drugs, both prescription and otherwise.

Kids who have trouble paying attention in class are put on drugs. Having trouble paying attention in class is normal. Children want by nature to be outside running around. To sit at a desk for hours and pay attention to whatever irrelevant uninteresting material is being promulgated…that is what is not normal.

Certainly the onus is not entirely on the medical community. The thing that a doctor can legally give us that we can’t get elsewhere is a prescription. We pay to see a doctor…we want a prescription. They know that…and they give us one.

In the 1970’s Robert Mendelsohn, M.D., an early advocate of the natural approach to health and the author of Confessions of a Medical Heretic, stated in a medical speech, “When you are looking at any medical study, don’t just look at what the authors want you to look at; always look at the funeral rates, too. It doesn’t just matter if blood pressure or cholesterol levels went down more on the drug group than the placebo group. It also matters whether more people died in the drug group than in the placebo group. If they did, then who cares if the blood pressure or cholesterol was lower? The mortician?”

I really do not want to leave the impression that I am dumping on all medical doctors. I have needed them in the past and will probably again in the future. Many are the most splendid human beings among us. They run the gamut from a veritable saint like Doctor Albert Schweitzer to a true monster like Doctor Joseph Mengele. There are really good doctors and those that perform unnecessary operations in order to make their Mercedes’ notes. We have excellent physicians and those that specialize in Medicare fraud.

The ones I am thinking of are the garden-variety doctors who took the Hippocratic Oath with the best of intentions. I had thought like many others that said that the Oath required doctors to at the very least do no harm. But I have just read the Classical version and wouldn’t you know it, there is a new modern version updated by the Declaration of Geneva, and I don’t see that provision in either one of them. What I did find was: Some doctors who recited the Hippocratic Oath as medical students now call it the ‘Hypocritic’s Oath’.

The point I am trying to make is that an awful lot of harm is being done to patients by doctors who are putting them so readily on all of these Big Pharmaceutical drug products. According to the VIOXX legal trials, that one drug alone actually doubled, that is correct it doubled the risk of having a heart attack!

It is estimated that during the five years that VIOXX was on the market, it was related to somewhere between 88,000 – 139,000 heart attacks and strokes! Other NSAIDS including many sold over the counter can also increase your risk. Even worse may be deaths attributable to drugs commonly used to treat Type II diabetes.

Item: Bremo’s Olympic College is beginning a new era with groundbreaking on February 11, 2006, today, for a new $22 million Science and Technology building. This is part of a $75 million dollar campus overhaul. Originally designed in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was created for easy convertibility into elementary schools in case the community college concept failed.

This is as good a time as any to touch upon the Bremer Trust. A Google search produces the following from the local Chamber of Commerce: Profile: Bremer Trust - Golden Anchor Member - no picture - no info provided - Rich McDonald, General Manager - member since 11/7/1950. Seems a bit mysterious doesn’t it? Further digging reveals: 409 Pacific Avenue - Suite 301, in Bremo: bremer@telebyte.net : tel 360.377.5533 : fax 360.373.7098

The Bremer Trust’s role is to annually contribute its proceeds to Olympic College. The Trust’s $20 million portfolio includes nine office buildings and a three-story parking garage in downtown Bremo. In December 2005, the trust gave $300,000 to the college. Much of that came from this Burwell Parking garage.

Many failed proposals were made at redevelopment in the early '70s, including discussions of a waterfront hotel and the erection of a large canopy over the central business district. Meanwhile, most of the city's office and retail space remained in the hands of Edward Bremer, son of the city’s founder William Bremer and the sole remaining heir to his wealth.

Incredibly, to receive their inheritance, William Bremer's three children were honor-bound to never marry. Bremer began to neglect his properties; never increasing decades-old lease rates, and failing to make necessary maintenance upgrades. In 1978, the Bremo City Council passed an ordinance declaring that the entire downtown was legally a blighted area!

Upon the death of Edward Bremer in 1987, the Bremer properties were placed under the complete control of The Bremer Trust, a trust held by Olympic College. Not being in the real-estate business, the college did not actively market its holdings and downtown was composed almost entirely of very large empty storefronts.

Recently the Bremer Trust hired a commercial real estate firm and an asset manager to handle the details formerly managed by a staff member. Bradley Scott Inc. was hired to manage the Trust’s real estate holdings. Jim Smalley of Smith Barney was hired to manage securities. Adrienne, please see what else you can unearth on the Bremer Trust.

A big hometown welcome was in store for Bremo native, Marvin Williams. He was the number two pick in June’s NBA draft. He had just played his first pro game in Seattle. His Atlanta Hawks lost to the Sonics 99-91. Locals are very proud of those who have gone on to big things. Another is jazz legend Quincy Jones who moved to Bremerton at the age of ten. As a teenager, he first met up with Ray Charles when he began frequenting the nightclubs in Seattle.

Four area school bond issues just passed by a large margin. These people are so well grounded that no doubt the local schools are well run. Bremo’s Early Childhood Program was named Tops in the State. Bremo is one of only six districts in Washington State to be recognized by the League of Education Voters this year.

I am forever ruined concerning U.S. school financing after my experience in Mexico. I raised my youngest son, Tommy, in Baja California and he attended grades one through five at an Escuela Federal in San Felipe, the Professor Domingo Carballo Felix.

One year the peso had by then lost nearly half its value and thus the teachers had no choice but to go on strike. The local fishermen donated a huge amount of fish and we gave as many kilos of chicken as we could. The kicker is, that while on strike, the teachers painted the entire school and made various improvements. Can you image that ever happening in the U.S.?

The total administration consisted of a Director who was often seen building and repairing playground structures, pruning trees and doing whatever else was required. The teachers had virtually absolute authority. If a boy was acting-out she would merely have to point to the door and he was suspended. He would sit on the doorstep for days. He got back in when the teacher decided that it was time. In this way, disciplinary problems were kept at a minimum.

Some years we hauled down a truckload of paint from a Home Depot in Los Angeles. The teachers and students would paint the outside of the various buildings, the inside of the classrooms and the desks. Even the first graders would paint their own desks. Sure they ended up covered with paint, but there was such a pride of authorship that I knew of no incident there of defacement of school property by a student.

The State of Baja Norte did have oversight responsibilities. They inspected the facility once a year and provided a monthly-standardized test. This test both provided the basis for the students’ monthly grade, using the European system of 1-10, and allowed for statistical monitoring by the State.

Contrast that with what we found when we left Baja to retuurn briefly to Los Angeles County. Tommy completed the sixth grade under the gargantuan beauracracy of the Los Angeles Unified School District. I got involved as there was suppossedly a major improvement project underway.

It all turned out to be an extrordianrily expensive and wasteful farce. In downtown Los Angeles there was an administrative building filled with people bent on undermining any possible changes to the system. Soon I was receiving daily mail from them. Talk about a snow job, this was a blizzard.

Oh they had elaborate meetings including one gigantic one where Willie Brown, still the major force in the California Legislature and prior to his becoming the Mayor of San Francisco, was the main speaker. But the upshot of everything was that absolutely nothing constructive ever happened.

The best thing that could possibly have happened would have been the firing of everyone at the central administrative building and then having that building razed. Meanwhile the answer to all the school problems was always the same. Throw more money at them.

The real problem was too much money supporting a bloated bureaucracy that sucked away the teacher’s authority while at the same time requiring the classroom completion of ever more data sheets so that these same bureaucrats could make charts and reports to justify their own destructive existence. Charts and reports that would naturally be documenting the decline of the school system….that of course would require…more money.

Meanwhile students were so alienated and undisciplined that they were smashing brand new tennis rackets on the way to PE class, and defacing property at every opportunity. When I compared this to what the Mexican schools were doing with almost no money at all by our standards, I was absolutely disgusted.

Adrienne, please see what the requirements are for me to join the Bremerton-Olympic Peninsula Navy League.

NASCAR has become the big buzzword hereabouts. On November 30, 2005 ISC, International Speedway Corporation, released its financing proposal for a $345 million motorsports facility in Kitsap County on 950 acres near the Bremo National Airport. The plan is for an 83,000 seat stadium and luxury boxes, with a 1.2 mile oval. It would host two major and one minor race annually, along with other smaller racing and non-racing events.

While the County has not yet received a formal proposal from ISC, the Board of County Commissioners is revving up. They are sorting through what they do and do not know, formulating a list of questions and soliciting the opinions of residents and businesses in other parts of the country that have been impacted by NASCAR. NASCAR operates at thirty-two speedways, raceways and motor sports parks nationwide.

The financing plan proposes a public-private partnership where Great Western Sports will pay $166 million, or nearly half the project costs, plus any construction overruns and all costs related to the regular maintenance and operation of the facility. Kitsap, Pierce and Mason Counties will form a tri-county Public Speedway Authority, PSA, and will issue bonds to help finance track construction. The bonds will be repaid through a sales tax credit issued by the state to the PSA, and from a local tax on the facility. The remaining $13 million would come from event ticket taxes.

The biggest drawback with NASCAR is that it will create very few permanent jobs, one estimate is sixty, but have a substantial negative impact, particularly on the local highway system, at least twice a year when the racing actually comes to town. The Pacific Northwest International Trade Alliance just approved a resolution endorsing the NASCAR project.

The USS JOHN C. STENNIS - CVN-74 is a dual nuclear reactor powered multi-purpose aircraft carrier that is home-ported to Bremo. It will be featured on a Navy sponsored Busch Series car on February 25 at the race in Fontana California. The Navy began sponsoring a NASCAR team in 2004 for a full season. The 88-Car is owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr. The name of the USS JOHN C. STENNIS will be on the hood. It is considered to be an excellent recruitment and motivational tool by the United States Navy.

The Home Builders of Kitsap County have just now also endorsed NASCAR, concluding that the economic benefits to the county would be enormous.

The racetrack would be in an area known as SKIA, South Kitsap Industrial Area. The 3,400 acres have 1,690 designated as an Urban Growth Area. 9,350 jobs have been envisioned and the purpose is to diversify the economy with less dependence on defense industry employment. Both the SKIA and NASCAR developments would put tremendous pressure on the currently inadequate local area traffic systems.

02-11-06 Saturday - I attended the Stand-up Comedy at the Admiral Theater. The second and final hour was performed by the headliner, an obese female comic named Jen Kober [www.kobercomedy.com/]. Her act revolved around a Skinny Bitch routine. She began by picking out at random a lady seated at a front row table. It turned out to be Kathryn Quade, the Mayor of the neighboring City of Poulsbo. Jen was good and funny but her Skinny Bitching the Mayor all night was hilarious.

Everyone should do stand-up at least once in his or her lifetime.

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02-14-06 Tuesday – I rode the bike to the Amy Burnett Gallery and spoke with Amy about five prints. Three were there. The other two should be at the new shop in Charleston at 322 Callow Avenue. The Grand Opening is Sunday, March 5th, but she will be there this Sunday, February 19^th from 11:00 to 18:00. I agreed to be there.

I brought up the Art Talk in Your Home that I had taken at auction with the Opera Guild. She was a bit stunned, as she does not do Art Talks in private homes. Yikes! I have already invited my neighbors! She mentioned an upcoming Art Talk she would be giving at Olympic College. We talked it out. She knows two of my neighbors sitting Judge Anna and her husband, former City Councilman Dave. We agreed it would be fun and scheduled it for about 6:30 on Sunday, March 12, 2006.

She will come right after closing the Callow store at 18:00. She confided in me that she had just that day successfully concluded negotiations to move her downtown gallery next door where the Naval Museum now is. The museum is moving to their new home in the remodeled, with the help of $750,000 in federal funds, Historic Naval Building 50. That will become a centerpiece of Maritime Park. Once she vacates her current gallery location, it will be the new home of a major antique enterprise.
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02-14-06 Tuesday - Fleet Reserve Association Branch 29 - Meeting second Tuesday of Month 18:00 – NAV / USMC / USCG
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This winter has been unseasonably warm but that ended last night when frigid Artic air came roaring in. I found an ice cover on Dragon Pond. I have a small bird sanctuary in the northeast corner of the backyard. A waterfall keeps everything moving. The goldfish that I bought as four-cent feeder fish are now humongous and hibernating out there. They love it so much outside that they have begun breeding.

The raccoons were quite the problem. They are of the bear family and a whole lot smarter than your average critter. I grew up being taught that animals can’t think, that only man can reason. What rubbish…these guys did a very good job of out-thinking me! We went back and forth in an ever-escalating war over the fish. Finally I sunk a large plastic underground electrical cable box. It has a mouse hole at either end for a cable, holes that the fish can use as doorways. On top of this I piled four large round concrete and pebble stepping-stones. The combined weight makes it seem permanent. The raccoons don’t realize they could possibly topple it and the goldfish know enough to take cover within.

A family of small rats insisted on living under this pond. I ended up running a four-inch flexible perforated drainage pipe from the pond over to the fence. This allows them to come and go without undue pressure from the various predators whose list they are on. This includes, cats, hawks, owls, and eagles. My splendid cat Gravity will only drink from this pond. Squirrels abound here and some will eat from my hand.

Damn! Read yesterday’s paper today and saw that Black stand-up comic Dave Chappelle is to appear at the Paramount in Seattle this Sunday. Tickets went on sale at 10AM yesterday. I go online and call immediately but it is Sold Out. No surprise there. Dave Chappelle had signed a massive deal with Comedy Central that would have returned the comedian's hit the Chappelle's Show to the network for two more seasons. Sources familiar with the deal indicate it could be worth about $50 million, vaulting the 30 year-old Chappelle into the rarefied realm of television's top earners.

The new contract is believed to mark not only a steep increase for Chappelle as star, writer, co-executive producer and co-creator of Chappelle's Show, but more significantly, reward him with a hefty chunk of the series' robust DVD sales. Chappelle's Show has become an important series for the Comedy Channel, scoring a trio of Emmy nominations last month and ranked as the highest-rated cable program for the network's demographic sweet spot, men 18-34, who comprised much of the 3.1 million total viewers that the series averaged in its second season.

Dave is brilliant, insightful, and tells it like it is. What really makes this fellow interesting is that he ended up turning down the $50 million. He felt they were trying to control him and he said that he felt like a whore. How ravenous the younger generations are for wisdom and truth. If it weren’t for stand-up, where would we get the real truth? Not newspapers, not regular TV, not politicians, and not normal classes.

On the subject of schools, either the shipyard or the naval station seems to have regular whistles. One is 07:15 in the morning, one mid-day at 12:115 and another at perhaps 16:20.

Many years ago I read somewhere an analysis of the K12 school system as it has existed since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Never since have I ever seen this ‘take’ repeated or mentioned…but it makes perfect sense.

This is a classic example of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message. The children have to get to school Monday through Friday and arrive before the final bell rings. They must obey the teacher and line up and eat lunch peacefully without fighting. They then continue on until the final bell, when they may return home. It is recorded whenever they are tardy or absent.

After years of this conditioning, the grown child then gets a job in a factory where they must show up for work Monday through Friday before the final whistle, obey the foreman and line up and eat lunch peacefully without fighting. They then continue on until the final whistle, when they may return home. It is recorded whenever they are tardy or absent.

This Pavlovian conditioning is what it is all about, most of the class content, which varies form country to country, is by and large, irrelevant. Now a Presidential Commission is considering standardized testing for college and university students. When the focus is on passing standardized tests, true learning plummets.

I was just reading an article that listed some Collage Dropouts: Bill Gates, Soichiro Honda, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Barry Goldwater, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Ted Turner, David Geffen - DreamWorks SKG, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Lawrence Ellison, Michael Dell, Ralph Lauren, Woody Allen, Julie Andrews, Steve Martin, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Dan Aykroyd and the Grammy winning Kanye West, among many others.

Another thing is the repeated uproar over child labor in developing countries. Certainly there are abuses but do we not recall that England and the United States also used child labor at the beginning? The plain fact is that at the onset of industrialization, only the children will do repetitive, indoor, highly supervised, and boring work. The adults who grew up in an agrarian society, who worked outdoors, in fresh air, on their feet, and at their own pace, refuse to do these jobs.

Sure they have quotas or get paid based on their production, but within that framework, they are on their own. It is only after future generations are conditioned by the schools as above, are these programmed adults willing to work in a plant, on an assembly line.

Additionally, when the sweatshops are closed, the kids are forced into far worse situations like slavery and child prostitution. Either provide a better option or keep your nose out of it.

The cover of the January 30, Newsweek is The Boy Crisis. It claims that boys are falling behind at every level. A lot of material is presented. Most of it struck me as so much bullshit.

The first boxed stat is that the number of male undergraduates on college campuses is down from 58% thirty years ago to 44% now. That means simply that more girls are going to college. This is a good thing, and nothing against the boys. When my youngest son was in middle school I noticed that the girls where making major efforts to win regional sports competitions of all kinds. And they were doing much better in the rankings than the boys were.

This is to be expected, as the opportunity to participate was much newer for the girls. Like in boxing, first the champions were White, than Black, and then Latino. Just as in Los Angeles ghettos, the homes were first occupied by Whites, then Blacks, and now Latinos. No mysteries anywhere here.

After endlessly being relegated by the sports world to being cheerleaders for the boys, is it really any wonder that the girls have all this momentum to strive now that they finally have the opportunity to take to the field themselves? And now even the cheerleaders are doing ever more daring stunts and routines, to the point where injuries and even deaths are occurring in this pursuit.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission reported an estimated 4,954 hospital emergency room visits in 1980 caused by cheerleading injuries.  By 1986 the number had increased to 6,911 and in 1994 the number increased to approximately 16,000. The figure I have for 2004 is about 24,000.

Does this mean boys are lazier or dumber? I don’t think so. When you realize how many men today are hobbling around on bad knees and other injuries sustained in High School sports, it could well be that the boys are just getting wiser.

Another highlighted finding: “Boys love video games because when they lose, the defeat is private.” That is just horseshit…pure and simple. Humans and particularly males are all about hand and eye coordination. Video games are a wonderful way to organize young minds for the new millennium and at the same time, engage in primeval slaughter that is in itself, harmless to their surroundings.

The original Atari games were compatible with my generation. A player was almost always gunning for the other guy, like our Cowboys v Indians, or Cops and Robbers…all two-player games. But when the Japanese entered the market with Nintendo, it all changed completely and became more right brain then left, more random than linear. These were highly suited to single players.

I recall back in the 70’s when my kids were cadging quarters to go to the local liquor store to play the video games that were then making their appearance. It eventually dawned on me then that the end of the Cold War was in sight. Our youth were spending their own money to in effect, train themselves for future combat, while at the same time the Soviet Union not only had no such thing going on, but they were actively restricting computers as an internal security measure. Game over.

My youngest son was raised on Atari, then Coleco, followed by Nintendo, Sony Play Station, and so on. He started making web pages at age thirteen and could solve computer problems in minutes that had me baffled for hours. When I would ask him how he knew what to do, he would simply say, “I know how programmers think.” Now with no formal training, he makes very good money in Los Angeles as a computer wiz.

I recall a neighbor on Whidbey Island once bragging about the great education his child was receiving at a private Waldorf School. He was particularly impressed that the school not only didn’t use computers, but also forbade its students from using them at home or anywhere else. I noticed that some of these Waldorf School advocates seemed to have almost a cult or religious attitude toward these theories. Now I agree that book reading and acting in plays and classical training is a very good thing, but to keep kids away from computers during their formative years is an unredeemable disaster.

Naturally they want to do what their friends are into, like video games and computers. Totally crippling their computer literacy in this day and age is horrid and largely irreversible. It would almost be better to just cut off a finger rather than to deliberately handicap them for life. Waldorf or Steiner Schools were inspired by Rudolf Steiner. I agree with much of what he was all about but let us keep in mind that he was born in the small village of Kraljevec, Austria, now in Croatia, in 1861 and died in Dornach, Switzerland in 1925.

On the bright side, a very bright side indeed, is the development of a computer for less than one hundred dollars. Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, was on Charlie Rose with a model of it. This laptop will be tough and foldable in different ways, with a hand crank for when there is no power supply. He came up with the idea for a cheap computer for all after visiting a Cambodian village.

His non-profit One Laptop Per Child group plans to have up to 15 million machines in production within a year. Children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, and South Africa will be among the first to get one. The following year, Mitt Romney, Massachusetts’s Governor, plans to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school pupils in his State.

Professor Negroponte predicts there could be 100 million to 150 million shipped every year by 2007. It is virtually indestructible and encased in rubber. The Linux-based machines are expected to have a 500MHz processor, with flash memory, instead of a hard drive that has more delicate moving parts. They will have four USB ports, will be able to connect to the net through wireless technology, and will share data easily.

It will also have a dual-mode display so that it can still be used in varying light conditions outside. It will be a color display, but users will be able to switch easily to a monochrome mode so that it can be viewed in bright sunlight at four times normal resolution.

The project has some big-name supporters on board, including Google, which is working on a system where these machines can share programs when linked to a central server. He said that he is committed to the idea that children all over the world should be equipped with this technology so that they can tap into the educational and communication benefits of the Internet.

This marvel can also act as a light source in homes or huts without electricity. Further it functions as an electronic book. The funds saved by these updateable books alone will allow developing countries to finance them out of their normal school budgets.

Who knows what remote village will produce the next Einstein? Now he or she will have an electronic highway out of there to the world at large. Will many Muslims forego this marvelous technology and instead concentrate on teaching hate in their madrasas? I hope not.

Returning to the Newsweek article: “Middle-school boys may use their brains less efficiently than girls.” The nimrod that wrote that didn’t even have the conviction to state his conclusion without the weasel word ‘may’. In fact there are two distinct schools of thought on the nature of intelligence.

The proponents of one general intelligence have a theory that explains the biological reasons for intelligence. Given that they see neural processing speed as the root for intelligence, their theory has an effective causal explanation. A drawback to the general intelligence school of thought is that it is heavily dependent on psychometric evaluations. Consequently, it cannot take into account the vast array of different talents that people have. As for multiple intelligences, there are many theorists who believe in that school of thought.

Sure when I was a youngster we did better on school tests, but we never even dreamed about doing things with our basketballs or bicycles that they do now, and skateboarding and snowboarding had not even been invented. All of these things require the use of one type of i