"Be my guest. . .(worker) 

Krugman's take on the "Immigration Problem" *

* Uke Man comments at the end.


March 31, 2006

The Road to Dubai
By PAUL KRUGMAN
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

For now, at least, the immigration issue is mainly hurting the Republican Party, which is divided between those who want to expel immigrants and those who want to exploit them. The only thing the two factions seem to have in common is mean-spiritedness.

But immigration remains a difficult issue for liberals. Let me say a bit more about the subject of my last column, the uncomfortable economics of immigration, then turn to what really worries me: the political implications of a large nonvoting work force.

About the economics: the crucial divide isn't between legal and illegal immigration; it's between high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants. High-skilled immigrants — say, software engineers from South Asia — are, by any criterion I can think of, good for America. But the effects of low-skilled immigration are mixed at best.

True, there are large benefits for the low-skilled migrants, who may find even a minimum-wage U.S. job a big step up. Immigration also raises the total income of native-born Americans, although reasonable estimates suggest that these gains amount to no more than a fraction of 1 percent.
But low-skilled immigration depresses the wages of less-skilled native-born Americans. And immigrants increase the demand for public services, including health care and education. Estimates indicate that low-skilled immigrants don't pay enough in taxes to cover the cost of providing these services.

All of these effects, except for the gains for the immigrants themselves, are fairly small. Some of my friends say that's the point I should stress: immigration is a wonderful thing for the immigrants, and claims that immigrants are undermining American workers and taxpayers are hugely overblown — end of story.

But it's important to be intellectually honest, even when it hurts. Moreover, what really worries me isn't the narrow economics — it's the political economy, the effects of having a disenfranchised labor force.

Imagine, for a moment, a future in which America becomes like Kuwait or Dubai, a country where a large fraction of the work force consists of illegal immigrants or foreigners on temporary visas — and neither group has the right to vote. Surely this would be a betrayal of our democratic ideals, of government of the people, by the people. Moreover, a political system in which many workers don't count is likely to ignore workers' interests: it's likely to have a weak social safety net and to spend too little on services like health care and education.

This isn't idle speculation. Countries with high immigration tend, other things equal, to have less generous welfare states than those with low immigration. U.S. cities with ethnically diverse populations — often the result of immigration — tend to have worse public services than those with more homogeneous populations.

Of course, America isn't Dubai. But we're moving in that direction. As of 2002, according to the Urban Institute, 14 percent of U.S. workers, and 20 percent of low-wage workers, were immigrants. Only a third of these immigrant workers were naturalized citizens. So we already have a large disenfranchised work force, and it's growing rapidly. The goal of immigration reform should be to reverse that trend.

So what do I think of the Senate Judiciary Committee's proposal, which is derived from a plan sponsored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy? I'm all in favor of one provision: offering those already here a possible route to permanent residency and citizenship. Since we aren't going to deport more than 10 million people, we need to integrate those people into our society.

But I'm puzzled by the plan to create a permanent guest-worker program, one that would admit 400,000 more workers a year (and you know that business interests would immediately start lobbying for an increase in that number). Isn't institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force a big step away from democracy?

For a hard-line economic conservative like Mr. McCain, the advantages to employers of a cheap work force may be more important than the violation of democratic principles. But why would someone like Mr. Kennedy go along? Is the point to help potential immigrants, or is it to buy support from business interests?

Either way, it's a dangerous route to go down. America's political system is already a lot less democratic in practice than it is on paper, and creating a permanent nonvoting working class would make things worse.

The road to Dubai may be paved with good intentions.

* * *

Hey Folks,

Krugman sounds a lot like me. I'd go even further with the bit about "America's political system is already a lot less democratic in practice than it is on paper."

He also makes the same point (from a different angle) that I did in an earlier posting. This "guest worker" crap is bad for immigrants and bad for America. The only ones helped are the exploitating few.

This is what the British used to do to the Irish; it's similar to the treatment of the Chinese we brought in to build our railroad. It's crap!

And again, the point Krugman makes about institutionalizing a disenfranchised work force goes beyond the "non-voting" block he mentions (i.e. the "guest workers"). It includes most of America's present, "legal" workers - and that is true whether they vote or not! America's workers are simply not represented - even by people like Kennedy. Labor law is a joke. The Democrats do want big labor unions behind them, but don't do any more for laborers than the Republicans do for "fiscal conservatives." Workers, whether they vote or not, are invisible.

Think about it. There are a lot of programs on TV and radio dedicated to "business." Every major paper has a "business" section. We hear constantly (at least here in Ohio) how we must all do such and so to encourage (i.e. kiss the ass of) business.

When have you ever viewed or heard a weekly or daily "labor" program? Does your paper have a "labor" section? Have you ever experienced any media gink suggesting we kiss labor's ass?

I learned a long time ago that the notion of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is more than just some goodie-two-shoes clap-trap; and more than just some nice thing we ought to attempt; and even more than a responsibility every decent human being owes his fellow man.

It is wisdom, a wise dictum that serves us as well as those to whom we apply it. As Krugman points out, mistreating immigrants is destructive of ourselves and of the things we value in our own social context.

If we go along in fucking immigrants, we fuck ourselves; which is exactly what Dick Cheney told us to do.

- Uke Man

Howard Zinn 

Howard Zinn - a reason for optimism

Hey Folks,

Perhaps you know of Howard Zinn, author of "A People's History of the United States." He is a deep and inspiring thinker on the scene today.

Believe me, I know how difficult it is to keep on keeping on when every way we turn we confront stupidity, craven fear, greed, prejudice, scapegoating, lies, self-advancement, hypocrisy, and you-name-it.

Zinn gives us an argument for optimism.

- Uke Man

The Optimism of Uncertainty
by Howard Zinn; November 06, 2004

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

L A Protest

 

! Viva Latinos !

Hey Folks,

George Will is an aristocratic twit and in desperate need of a thrashing, but he did us a service in his column today, inadvertently betraying the true nature of the “immigration problem.”

The “problem” as I’ve been saying for years is that the few who benefit from abusing the rest of us have run into themselves – something that happens when you work both sides of the street and talk out of both sides of your mouth.

One priority of the ruling class is to keep us under control, to keep us divided, to keep us distracted, to keep us isolated by selfishness. Racism has always been a helpful tool in this regard; hence prejudice and scapegoating (of Latinos in this case) is to be encouraged.

Another priority of the swells, however, is the degradation of the status of workers, thereby increasing profits for the non-working class. Illegal immigration has always been a helpful tool in this regard; hence real steps to stop such immigration aren’t taken.

For years, politicians have ranted against “illegal immigration” while laughing all the way to the bank. Now, for a number of reasons, the train racing North and the train racing South have smashed into one another, aggravating ruling twits like Will.

Presently the government is working overtime to solve the problem – not the problem faced by hard-working Latinos, not the “problem” imagined by xenophobic Americans, but the control/profit problem of the ruling class.

Will urges “unlimited immigration by educated persons with math, engineering, technology or science skills.” Why? There is no shortage in these areas. What Will and his ilk are after is a SURPLUSS, so that the wages of even these highly educated professionals can be suppressed, thus increasing profits.

As for the less-educated, Will favors “a guest-worker program to supply what the U.S. economy demands: immigrant labor for entry-level jobs.” Yeah, let ‘em in to do the ever-increasing number of shit jobs, but don’t let them stay and move up the ladder.

So, Will has a start on untangling the wrecked loco-motives. With his sly plan, nothing important really changes. The xenophobes can back off – "we’ve put those wet-backs on notice." And the entremanures can celebrate too – cheap, exploitable labor will be not only still available, but actually encouraged.

It’s “win-win” – nobody loses. Except for millions of Latino Americans.

As to any ridiculous objection these folks might make, Will says, “Large rallies of immigrants . . . reveal that many immigrant have, alas, assimilated: They have acquired the entitlement mentality spawned by America’s welfare state, asserting an entitlement to exemption from the laws of the society they invited themselves into.”

Stupid immigrants. Who do they think they are, the “unitary executive,” George Bush? They can't make "signing statements"! And where do they get the notion that in the U.S.of A. anyone is entitled to protest injustice? George Will’s government isn’t here to create injustice; the government is here to preserve injustice.

Well, Senor Will es un pendejo.

Power to the people! However they got here.

- Uke Man

 

"Hi, I'm David Brennan. Yeah, I'm fuckin' the system over, but I'm makin' a shitpile o' money!!" 

Response to the 3-29-06 Dispatch Editorial

To the Editor,

Your prejudices are showing in the "Try something different" editorial (March 29). You suggest that the Columbus teacher union's insistence on using union teachers in the district's charter schools has "the appearance of intimidation." Logically, such insistence is no more intimidating than the superintendent's proposal to use non-union employees.

You also write, "Hopes for the school's success depend on the union keeping that promise [to be flexible]." While, perhaps, flexibility can play a part, you seem to assume that flexibility on the part of the union is the crucial factor. The Dispatch recently ran a story about non-union charter schools - which are apparently as flexible as you could hope for - that seem far from successful academically. If the Columbus experiment fails, will you blame the union?

You say, "Old-fashioned schooling has failed to reach those students. District administrators and teachers should look for new ways to engage them." Besides the fact that teachers and administrators are always looking for ways to engage students, and that it is true that more can always be done, attempting more does not guarantee success. If the Columbus experiment fails, will you blame the union?

You point out that "Ohio parents are flocking to charter schools because they want something different." You do not explain whether this search for something “different” results from academic, political, religious, cultural, security or other concerns. Many non-public charter schools I've read about seem to have attracted parents for other than academic reasons. Is this satisfactory? Does it help you overlook these schools’ academic failure because they are non-union schools or because, in a number of instances, voucher-supporting entrepreneurs like David Brennan are accruing millions of dollars in profit as a result of the scheme?

Finally, by concentrating in your editorial on the teachers, their union, and their administrators; you – intentionally or unintentionally – avoid dealing with the real problem. Teachers and their unions – and even administrators – didn’t invent racism, classism, poverty, and segregation. Society did.

The same quality of teachers and administrators, and the same union extant in Columbus all exist in suburban schools as well, where luckier families CAN “afford private schools” but where the vast majority are content that THEIR “old-fashioned” public schools have NOT “failed to reach” the students. The Dispatch, however, does not recommend that vouchers be provided in sufficient denomination to move everyone to the suburbs or even - less expensively - to make “private school” affordable to anyone who wants it.

I don’t expect that you ever will. It’s a lot easier to blame those trying to address the problem than it is to challenge the system which caused it.

- Uke Man

 

Eric Idle sings

Hey Folks,

This has been around a while, but it still applies, and you may have missed it!

(just today the Dispatch has a story on profanity and the "F-word," and a day or two ago Fudge Judge Scalia gave a photographer the finger - and there's always Darth "Go fuck yourself" Cheney who shot ducks with Scalia before he switched to shooting people)

- Uke Man

Eric Idle presents... The FCC Song. "Here’s a little song I wrote the other day while I was out duck hunting with a judge… It’s a new song, it’s dedicated to the FCC and if they broadcast it, it will cost a quarter of a million dollars."

http://www.pythonline.com/plugs/idle/FCCSong.mp3

 

Has the Rapture Begun?

Hey Folks,

Did you read “Yahoo News” this morning? Here’s the headline:


“Afghan Convert Vanishes After Release”

Gosh ! Immediately I asked myself, “Has the rapture begun?”

I thought, “Maybe it HAS. I’m still here aren’t I ?”

But then I read on (see below), and I think it’s all turned out pretty well – especially for our president. Think about it.

When GWB was the execution-governor of Texas, he didn’t care whether some scofflaw had found Jesus – tough tonails!!!

When GWB was the execution-governor of Texas, he didn’t care whether the perpetrator was mentally unfit – too bad, so sad!!!

When GWB was the execution-governor of Texas, he gave a deaf ear to other nations when they advised clemency – we saved your ass from Hitler and . . . and . . . Remember the Alamo !!!

When GWB was the execution-governor of Texas, he wouldn’t listen to the Pope either !!!

But now!! Praise Jesus, the boy has seen the light. Now, finding Jesus counts for something; mental illness IS a mitigating factor, what other nations think about things is important, and the Pope’s not a dope.

Halleluiah !!!!

Of course, I COULD be wrong about this. Ron “the Gipper” Regan loved unions IN POLAND but broke them here at home. Still, how could a President who is a man of character and values, who regularly talks with God – how could he show Americans less interest, compassion, understanding, and clemency than he would a foreigner in Afghanistan?

- Uke Man


KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan man who had faced the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity quickly vanished Tuesday after he was released from prison, apparently out of fear for his life with Muslim clerics still demanding his death.

Italy's Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said he would ask his government to grant Abdul Rahman asylum. Fini was among the first to speak out on the man's behalf.

Rahman, 41, was released from the high-security Policharki prison on the outskirts of Kabul late Monday, Afghan Justice Minister Mohammed Sarwar Danish told The Associated Press.

"We released him last night because the prosecutors told us to," he said. "His family was there when he was freed, but I don't know where he was taken."

Deputy Attorney-General Mohammed Eshak Aloko said prosecutors had issued a letter calling for Rahman's release because "he was mentally unfit to stand trial." He also said he did not know where Rahman had gone after being released.

He said Rahman may be sent overseas for medical treatment.

On Monday, hundreds of clerics, students and others chanting "Death to Christians!" marched through the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif to protest the court decision Sunday to dismiss the case. Several Muslim clerics threatened to incite Afghans to kill Rahman if he is freed, saying that he is clearly guilty of apostasy and deserves to die.

"Abdul Rahman must be killed. Islam demands it," said senior Cleric Faiez Mohammed, from the nearby northern city of Kunduz. "The Christian foreigners occupying Afghanistan are attacking our religion."

Rahman was arrested last month after police discovered him with a Bible during a custody dispute over his two daughters. He was put on trial last week for converting 16 years ago while he was a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan. He faced the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws.

The case set off an outcry in the United States and other nations that helped oust the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001 and provide aid and military support for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

President Bush and others had insisted Afghanistan protect personal beliefs.

 

Once there was a way ************** ********* to get back homeward

Hey Folks,

Paul is not dead!! Neither is the Beatles' great music.
Juggling is alive too.

Check this out:

http://s158645047.onlinehome.us/video_5290_10558.html?sid=5290&aid=10558

- Uke Man
a ukethanks to John

No, it's John & George 

Reality Left Behind

Hey Folks,

Before some of you were born, there was a largely-held belief circulating that “Paul is dead!” – Paul McCartney of the Beatles.

There was plenty of “evidence” that "proved" it, such as : Paul’s bare feet and closed eyes on the Abbey Road album cover - representing a corpse (supposedly “an Irish practice” of burying folks without shoes and socks), and Revolution #9’s “number nine, number nine,” when played backward says, “turn me on, dead man, turn me on dead man” (see
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/3674/pid.html for the whole story).

I didn’t buy it, and as far as I can tell, Paul still isn’t dead.

Last night I watched a DVD, “Left Behind II, Tribulation Force” (the sequel to - can you guess - “Left Behind”). I didn’t believe IT either. In fact, the “Paul is dead” theory made a lot more “sense” than this.

Desmond Ryan of the Philadelphia Inquirer said of “Left Behind,” that it was “Piously acted, stiffly directed, and infused with a view of world politics that might charitably be described as delusional.”

Here is what Scott Weinberg of DVD Talk http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=19339
had to say about both movies:

Left Behind (2000) -- Movie #1 focuses on the early section of the Book of Revelation, the one that says half the world's population will instantaneously ascend into the heavens, leaving those "left behind" to deal with the mysteries of God's will and the arrival of a particularly hard-working anti-Christ.

Sounds like the plot of a potentially compelling fantasy flick, right? Wrong. Because none of the Bible authors were wise enough to comment about things like half-decent production values, intelligent screenwriting, or talented actors, the true believers are now stuck with a flagship flick that looks amazingly chintzy, sounds like it was written by a 9-year-old Sunday schooler, and is littered with some of the most hilariously inert acting performances of the new millennium.

Not so much a cautionary tale for the uninitiated as it is a corny tongue-bath for those who are already flock-members, Left Behind doesn't work as drama, science-fiction, or theology. It's a flick that's content to ponderously preach at its own congregation, secure in the knowledge that "the message" is what will allow its intended audience to overlook the myriad flaws in pacing, production value, dialogue, and simple common sense.

As a movie, Left Behind is an abject failure, and as religious propaganda it's even worse. Were I a staunch believer in the Evangelical teachings, I'd absolutely cringe at the way my beliefs were carried across in this laughable film. But I suppose you have to take the bad with the good when you truly believe you're one of God's "chosen angels." These folks get eternity in heaven, while I'm stuck here watching the Left Behind trilogy. The one that stars Kirk Cameron. I'm calling my rabbi.

Left Behind 2: Tribulation Force (2002) poses the question: What happens after half the world's people vanish in a cloud of God's love, leaving behind the confused and bereaved to deal with the anti-Christ's nefarious plans to mess with Israel, the United Nations, and the world's monetary structure? And the answer is this:

More Kirk Cameron.

Tribulation Force plays out like some sort of Evangelical "What if we were right??" party game. Our world is about to be taken over by the devilish diplomacy of Nicolae Carpathia, a man seen as a savior by millions ... but he's really the devil says the Tribulation Force! Composed of a whiny news reporter, a blockheaded Air Force pilot, a forever sermonizing preacher man, and a few hundred extras, the Tribulation Force is committed to spreading the word about Carpathia. And that word is this: Only those who accept Jesus Christ will escape this Earth-bound hell-hole. All others will be left to rot. How nice.

The meandering plot is interrupted every few minutes so that lead actors Kirk Cameron and Brad Johnson can convert a non-believer, preach about the short-sightedness of non-Christians, or get all moon-eyed when discussing Jesus this and Jesus that. Again, I mean no disrespect to the religious folks, but heck, movies like these just make Christianity seem more weird.

Anyway, the reporter heads to Israel to look into some trouble at the Wailing Wall while the pilot gets a gig jetting the anti-Christ across the globe. Both are acting as Jesus' undercover operatives, searching for clues to the Devil's unpleasant plan while converting a few souls along the way. Not a whole lot of anything actually happens in LB2: T-Force, because every time we think the plot is about to advance somewhere interesting, we take a chat-laden detour into Preachville. All we need to know is that the true believers are on the case against the Auntie Christ, and their mission can only be completed by converting a rabbi into a devout Christian on worldwide television ... or something.

***

So, what’s the point, Uke Man?

Well. The “Paul is dead” hoax may have been believed by millions, but no one believed it for long, and everyone knows better now.

This religious mumbo-jumbo, on the other hand is based on “faith” and is not subject to challenge by reality. The millions who believed Paul was dead HAD to deal with the fact of his continued corporeal presence. The millions who think these movies (and the books upon which they are based) are sensible, realistic, and in keeping with the Bible – in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – cannot back off of their position without destroying most of their psychological foundation and, at the same time, exposing their own fears, naïveté, and ignorance.

No, instead, they will pound relentlessly on the rest of us to anoint their misguided stupidity as the vision of God. They seem to be increasingly bent on doing just that, and seem to be increasingly successful in that regard.

More on this soon.

- Uke Man

'E's a Johnson! 

Does Tony Blair secretly hate Bush?

News Update from Citizens for Legitimate Government
26 March 2006
http://www.legitgov.org/
http://www.legitgov.org/index.html#breaking_news

Bush Proposed Assassinating Hussein
to Provoke War With Iraq: Memo

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, President [sic] Bush made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second United Nations resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times...

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation [with Iraq]. "The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

Address to receive newsletter: http://www.legitgov.org/#subscribe_clg
Please write to: signup@legitgov.org for inquiries. lrp/mdr

CLG Newsletter editor: Lori Price, General Manager. Copyright © 2006, Citizens For Legitimate Government ® All rights reserved. CLG Founder and Chair is Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D.

Buds

from the same shrub 

the TRUTH about John McCain

PAUL KRUGMAN

It's time for some straight talk about John McCain.

He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his
former opposition to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us."

But now - at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive
war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger - Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never
moderate. During the 2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain called for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North Korea.

Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for
invading Iraq? We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year, "then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat
Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have
taken "the appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest were excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man
of the hard right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr.McCain's recent voting record, available at <http://www.voteview.com/> , ranks him
as the Senate's third most conservative member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes
from the fact that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo.
President Bush, when signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free to disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always returns to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.

So here's what you need to know about John McCain.


He isn't a straight talker. His flip-flopping on tax cuts, his call to send troops we don't have to Iraq and his endorsement of the South Dakota anti-abortion legislation even while claiming that he would find a way around the legislation's central provision show that he's a politician as slippery and evasive as, well, George W. Bush.

He isn't a moderate. Mr. McCain's policy positions and Senate
votes don't just place him at the right end of America's political spectrum; they place him in the right wing of the Republican Party.

And he isn't a maverick, at least not when it counts. When the
cameras are rolling, Mr. McCain can sometimes be seen striking a brave pose of opposition to the White House. But when it matters, when the Bush administration's ability to do whatever it wants is at stake, Mr. McCain always toes the party line.


It's worth recalling that during the 2000 election campaign
George W. Bush was widely portrayed by the news media both as a moderate and as a straight-shooter. As Mr. Bush has said, "Fool me once, shame on - shame onyou. Fool me - you can't get fooled again."

 

The Wizard of Oil

Hey Folks,

You MUST give this a look:

http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4559

(a big ukethanks to Phyll)

- Uke Man

 

The Day that Superman Died

a son of the Greatest generation
***a father of the Alphabet
******a John the Baptist of the Big Boom
***********living under the gilded “W”

Watching . . .
. . . . . . & Wishing:

**********I wish I may,
**************I wish I might
*****************find a chunk
*****************************of . . .
*********************************Kryptonite



****Superman has died .
****and he is not the same.

****Clark Kent is dead
****and Bizarro clark
****stands there in his stead.

****Lois is a trollop
****Perry works for Fox
****and Jimmy fancies signing up
****to come home in a box.

****And the Super one,born again,
****according to god’s plan,
****cannot speak the language –
****says, “Hi, I’m Stuporman.”

****Yes, he’s still a man of steel,
****but a smirking super fool
****who would destroy the world itself
****to fit it to his rule.

**********I wish I may,
**************I wish I might
*****************find a chunk
*****************************of . . .
*********************************Kryptonite



- Uke Man

@ the Bowery Poetry Club the night before the Boston Video

Photos by Ron Hester
www.ronhester.com 

"Spam Eatin' Blues - live in Boston with the whole damned BAND!!

Hey Folks,

Here's a highlight of my life!!
What a band!!!!

Check it out!

http://www.ukuleledisco.com/spamlive?PHPSESSID=63b6784cf9f0ae687c21038e667c16ef

- Uke Man

 

Real Religion !

Hey Folks,

This is long, but a lot shorter than the book

AND

It tells it like it is!!! What religion in America used to be.
Listen to Jimmy Carter before it's too late!!!

- Uke Man

Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death
By Garry Wills

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis
by Jimmy Carter
Simon and Schuster, 212 pp., $25.00

In 1972, I was asked by New York magazine to survey Southern reactions to the attempted assassination of George Wallace. On my list of people to call was Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. When I called his press secretary, Jody Powell (a name I had never heard before), I was told it would be better for me to come to Atlanta than to talk on the phone. (Powell was drumming up attention for his man, with a view to his running for president.) When I arrived there, Powell had arranged for me to fly with Carter in his little state prop plane to Tifton, a small South Georgia town where there was a meeting with local sheriffs. The sheriffs were unhappy with Carter's liberal racial policies, and Powell obviously thought it would be good for his reputation nationally to be seen as standing up against regional prejudice.

Carter used all his local ties to defang the critics—the sheriffs did not openly turn against him—and I was impressed. On the flight back, he said he wanted to drop off in the town of Plains and see how his peanut business was doing—a homey touch the press would be treated to ad nauseam over the next two years. I do not remember any mention of his local church while we were in Plains. In fact, I cannot recall that religion was brought up in all our hours together. Perhaps he thought that was not something New York magazine readers would respond to. At any rate, I was surprised when, four years later, so much was made of his religion as he ran for president. It began when he was asked, while visiting Baptist friends, if he thought of himself as "born again." He answered yes—not surprisingly, since the Gospel of John (3:5) says that one must be born again to enter the kingdom of heaven, and Saint Paul says that baptism is being reborn into Christ (Romans 6:4). Reporters did not know this as a basic belief of Christians—they treated it as an odd cult claim.

That led to his second-most-famous remark of the 1976 campaign. Carter was asked in a Playboy interview if he thought he was a holier-than-thou person because he was born again. He answered that, no, in fact he had committed lust in his heart—again quoting the New Testament (Matthew 5:28). That did it. For much of the Carter presidency, the line of some in the press (and, as I know well, in the academy) was that he was a religious nut. I followed him in the 1976 race and heard a reporter ask Carter why he constantly brought up religion. He replied that he had made a determination never to bring up religion in the campaign. But the reporters kept asking him about it, and he had to answer them or be criticized for dodging the issue.

His attendance at church was not announced; we reporters had to ferret that out by ourselves. Carter is an old-fashioned Baptist, the kind that follows the lead of the great Baptist Roger Williams—that is, he is the firmest of believers in the separation of church and state. Unlike most if not all modern presidents, he never had a prayer service in the White House. His problem, back then, was not that he paraded his belief but that he believed. All this can seem quaint now when professing religion is practically a political necessity, whether one believes or not. There is now an inverse proportion between religiosity and sincerity.

Carter rightly says in Our Endangered Values that the norms of religion and politics are different. His religion, at any rate, places its greatest priority on love, of God and one's neighbor, even to the point of self-sacrifice. But a president cannot make his nation sacrifice itself—that would be dereliction of duty. The priority of politics is justice, and love goes beyond that. But love can help one find out what is just, without equating the two. That is why none of us, even those who believe in the separation of church and state, professes a separation of morality and politics. Insofar as believers—the great majority of Americans—derive many if not most of their moral insights from their beliefs, they must mingle religion and politics, again without equating the two.

In his new book, Carter addresses religion and politics together in a way that he has not done before, because he thinks that some Americans, and especially his fellow Baptists, have equated the two in a way that contradicts traditional Baptist beliefs in the autonomy of local churches, in the opposition to domination by religious leaders, and in the fellowship of love without reliance on compulsion, political or otherwise. In 2000, these tenets were expressly renounced by the largest Baptist body, the Southern Baptist Convention, which removed a former commitment to belief that "the sole authority for faith and practice among Baptists is Jesus Christ, whose will is revealed in the Holy Scriptures." What was being substituted, Carter writes, was "domination by all-male pastors." As a leading spokesman, W.A. Criswell, put it: "Lay leadership of the church is unbiblical when it weakens the pastor's authority as ruler of the church." The Southern Baptists, Carter laments, have become as authoritarian as their former antitype, the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The Southern Baptist Convention has severed its ancient ties with the Baptist World Alliance.

The marks of this new fundamentalism, according to Carter, are rigidity, self-righteousness, and an eagerness to use compulsion (including political compulsion). Its spokesmen are contemptuous of all who do not agree with them one hundred percent. Pat Robertson, on his 700 Club, typified the new "popes" when he proclaimed: "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist." Carter got a firsthand taste of such intolerance when the president of the Southern Baptist Convention visited him in the White House to tell him, "We are praying, Mr. President, that you will abandon secular humanism as your religion."

Such attitudes are far from the ones recommended by Jesus in the gospels as Carter has studied and taught them through the decades, and their proponents have brought similar attitudes into the political world, where a matching political fundamentalism has taken over much of the electoral process. Such dictatorial attitudes defeat the stated goals of the fundamentalists themselves. On abortion, for instance, Carter argues that a "pro-life" dogmatism defeats human life and values at many turns. Carter is opposed to abortion, as what he calls a tragedy "brought about by a combination of human errors." But the "pro-life" forces compound rather than reduce the errors. The most common abortions, and the most common reasons cited for undergoing them, are caused by economic pressure compounded by ignorance.

Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the "pro-life" movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany.... It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.

The result of a rigid fundamentalism combined with poverty and ignorance can be seen where the law forbids abortion:

In some predominantly Roman Catholic countries where all abortions are illegal and few social services are available, such as Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, the abortion rate is fifty per thousand. According to the World Health Organization, this is the highest ratio of unsafe abortions [in the world].

A New York Times article that came out after Carter's book appeared further confirms what he is saying: "Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions."[*] This takes place in countries where churches and schools teach abstinence as the only form of contraception—demonstrating conclusively the ineffectiveness of that kind of program.

By contrast, in the United States, where abortion is legal and sex education is broader, the abortion rate reached a twenty-four-year low during the 1990s. Yet the ironically named "pro-life" movement would return the United States to the condition of Chile or Colombia. And not only that, the fundamentalists try to impose the anti-life program in other countries by refusing foreign aid to programs that teach family planning, safe sex, and contraceptive knowledge. They also oppose life-saving advances through the use of stem cell research. With friends like these, "life" is in thrall to death. Carter finds these results neither loving (in religious terms) nor just (in political terms).

Carter finds the same rigid and self-righteous—and self-defeating—policies at work across the current political spectrum. The pro-life forces have no problem with a gun industry and capital punishment legislation that are, in fact, provably pro-death. Carter, a lifelong hunter, does not want to outlaw guns and he knows that Americans would never do that. But timorous politicians, cowering before the NRA, defeat even the most sensible limitations on weapons useful neither for hunting nor for personal self-defense (AK-47s, AR-15s, Uzis), even though, as Carter shows, more than 1,100 police chiefs and sheriffs told Congress that these weapons are obstacles to law enforcement. The NRA opposed background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists and illegals, and then insisted that background checks, if they were imposed, had to be destroyed within twenty-four hours. The result of such pro-death measures, Carter writes, is grimly evident: "American children are sixteen times more likely than children in other industrialized nations to be murdered with a gun, eleven times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from firearms accidents." Where are the friends of the fetus when children are dying in such numbers?

Carter observes that "the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research reports that the rate of firearms homicide in the United States is nineteen times higher than that of 35 other high-income countries combined" (emphasis added). In the most recent year for which figures are available, these are the numbers for firearms homicides:

Ireland 54
Japan 83
Sweden 183
Great Britain 197
Australia 334
Canada 1,034
United States 30,419
[emphasis added]

Once again, Carter finds no support for the policies that make such a result possible in the US, in terms of either a loving religion or a just society.

Capital punishment is also a pro-death program. It does not protect life. It aligns us with authoritarian regimes: "Ninety percent of all known executions are carried out in just four countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia—and the United States" (emphasis added). Execution does not deter, as many studies have proved. In states that abolished it, Carter writes, capital crimes did not increase:

The homicide rate is at least five times greater in the United States than in any European country, none of which authorizes the death penalty. The Southern states carry out over 80 percent of the executions but have a higher murder rate than any other region. Texas has by far the most executions, but its homicide rate is twice that of Wisconsin, the first state to abolish the death penalty. It is not a matter of geography or ethnicity, as is indicated by similar and adjacent states: the number of capital crimes is higher, respectively, in South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia (all with the death sentence) than in the adjacent states of North Dakota, Massachusetts, and West Virginia (without the death penalty).

How can a loving religion or a just state support such a culture of death? Only a self-righteous and punitive fundamentalism, not an ethos of the gospels, can explain this.

It is in foreign affairs that Carter finds the most self-righteous, rigid, and self-defeating effects of a religio-political fundamentalism. It is the gap between rich and poor in the world that presents the main threat to our future, yet American policies increase that gap, at home and abroad. We give proportionally less money in foreign aid than do other developed countries, and our ability to give is being decreased by our growing deficit, incurred to reward our own wealthy families with disproportionate tax cuts. Carter points out that much of the aid announced or authorized never reaches its targets. This reflects a general smugness about America's privileged position. We are dismissive of other countries' concern with the world environment, with nuclear containment, and with international law. Carter gives specifics gathered from his world travels and from the experts' forums he regularly assembles at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

We have, for example, declared our right to first use of nuclear weapons. We have used aid money to bribe people against holding us accountable to international law. We have run secret detention centers where hundreds of people are held without formal charges or legal representation. We have rewarded with high office men who, like Alberto Gonzales, say that the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners are "obsolete" or even "quaint," or who, like John Bolton, say that it is "a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so."

The result, as Carter writes, has been to turn a vast fund of international good will accruing to us after September 11 into fear of and contempt for America unparalleled in modern times. We undermine the inspection teams of the UN and the IAEA with the result that we blunder into Iraq on bad information gathered from self-serving hacks buttering up our officialdom. On the eve of our attack on Iraq, Carter published an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times arguing in terms of the just war tradition that a preemptive and unilateral invasion was unjustified. Going to war was not a last resort (inspections could have continued to contain Saddam until the proof of WMDs, or the lack of them, could be established). War was not authorized by international authorities for eliminating nuclear weapons, but was an opportunity seized in order "to achieve regime change and to establish a Pax Americana in the region." It did not promise proportional violence with a clear hope of providing better conditions than the ones it was remedying. Carter's was a calm and moral judgment about the war, which most Americans now believe was the right one. In retrospect, a majority think the war was a mistake. We should have listened to Carter.

We pretend we are against nuclear proliferation, yet we spur it on when others see our disregard for the very international agreements that promote it:

The end of America's "no first use" nuclear weapons policy has aroused a somewhat predictable response in other nations. Chinese major general Zhu Chenghu announced in July 2005 that China's government was under internal pressure to change its "no first use" policy: "If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons."

We attack terrorism not by cooperation with other countries' security teams, which often have better information on worldwide terrorist activities than we do, but with unilateral and preemptive uses of force that just increase terrorism. This is a new culture of death: "The US National Counterterrorism Center," Carter writes, "reported that the number of serious international terrorist incidents more than tripled in 2004. 'Significant' attacks grew to more than 650, up from the previous record of 175 in 2003."

We claim to be spreading democracy in the Middle East, but a Zogby international poll in 2005 showed that an overwhelming majority of Arabs did not believe that US policy in Iraq was motivated by the spread of democracy in the region, and believed that the Middle East had become less democratic after the Iraq war. The approval rating of America plummeted at the very time we were supposedly bringing the blessings of freedom there—it stood, Carter notes, at "2 percent in Egypt, 4 percent in Saudi Arabia, 11 percent in Morocco, 14 percent in the United Arab Emirates, 15 percent in Jordan, with a high of only 20 percent in [our friend] Lebanon." These developments have taken place as America enacted a retreat from earlier commitments, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, that parallels what Carter describes as the retreat of evangelicals from earlier fidelity to gospel values such as life, compassion, tolerance, and inclusiveness.

Carter is a patriot. He lists all the things that Americans have to be proud of. That is why he is so concerned that we are squandering our treasures, moral even more than economic. He has come to the defense of our national values, which he finds endangered. He proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic, any more than a patriotic American has to be punitive, narrow, and self-righteous. He defends the separation of church and state because he sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics, and pragmatism. That is a combination that once was not rare, but is becoming more so. We need a voice from the not-so-distant past, and this quiet voice strikes just the right notes.

"Can you say 'Theocracy'? 'Course ya can." 

Murray Space Shoe & Jason Tagg of Midnight Ukulele Disco

 

Uke Man Videos !!! -

(this is an updated posting from January 19, 2005)

Hey Folks!!!

WHAT have I been thinking!!! For some time now, wild and crazy Uke Man Videos have been available to my millions of adoring fans !!!

All you have to do is go to: http://www.ukuleledisco.com/ a part of: http://www.sonicuke.com/, Sonic Uke, the website of my good friends Ted and Jason, the inhabitants of Manhattan’s one and only “Murray’s Space Shoe” emporium
( http://www.sonicuke.com/nytimes.php ) and the members of SONIC UKE (they are in my “links” – for your easy access at a later date).

Anyway, you can view many, many, many wonderful performances from the Midnight Ukulele Disco show at the site; among these, you can check out the Uke Man’s efforts on the following songs (at http://www.ukuleledisco.com/ ):

Green Card – Brand New Season
---Jesus Chrysler
---Monster in the Whitehouse
---Father Culliton (Long Ago)
---King of the World
---Pee Wee Where Have You Gone?
---Spam Eatin' Blues (the whole damned band)
---Crazy Over You
---Love Is Something
---Paintin' Them Toes


Orange Card – 2005/2004 – Season 2
---God Bless America

Gray Card – 2004
---I’ve Got a Booger in My Nose
---Pumpkin Fest Ferris Wheel (ad lib ditty)
---Pea Green Boat
---Eldorado
---Sittin’ Down at Shifty’s
---Dubya’s Ukulele Nightmare Café

If you’d like, tune in every other Tuesday at 9:00 (EST) to Midnight Ukulele Disco via your computer. Call up http://www.mnn.org/ ; then click on “Ch. 57.” You will arrive at Manhattan Neighborhood Network and enjoy the show. You can also usually get the program by tuning in to http://www.ukuleledisco.com/live , as the show gets close to going on.

Enjoy!!

- Uke Man

Thousand Dollar Bills packed tight from Philadelphia to New York City

Bush Enablers Awake (or start storing food and water)

March 23, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

George Bush's Trillion-Dollar War
By BOB HERBERT
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Call it the trillion-dollar war.

George W. Bush's war in Iraq was never supposed to be particularly expensive. Administration types tossed out numbers like $50 billion and $60 billion. When Lawrence Lindsey, the president's chief economic adviser, said the war was likely to cost $100 billion to $200 billion, he was fired.

Some in the White House tried to spread the fantasy that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the war. Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary and a fanatical hawk, told Congress that Iraq was "a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon."

The president and his hot-for-war associates were as wrong about the money as they were about the weapons of mass destruction.

Now comes a study by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University, and a colleague, Linda Bilmes of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, that estimates the "true costs" of the war at more than $1 trillion, and possibly more than $2 trillion.

"Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by 2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars," the authors say.

The study was released earlier this year but has not gotten much publicity. The analysis by Professors Stiglitz and Bilmes goes beyond the immediate costs of combat operations to include other direct and indirect costs of the war that, in some cases, the government will have to shoulder for many years.

These costs, the study says, "include disability payments to veterans over the course of their lifetimes, the cost of replacing military equipment and munitions, which are being consumed at a faster-than-normal rate, the cost of medical treatment for returning Iraqi war veterans, particularly the more than 7,000 [service members] with brain, spinal, amputation and other serious injuries, and the cost of transporting returning troops back to their home bases."

The study also notes that Defense Department expenditures that were not directly appropriated for Iraq have grown by more than 5 percent since the war began. But a portion of that increase has been spent "on support for the war in Iraq, including significantly higher recruitment costs, such as nearly doubling the number of recruiters, paying recruitment bonuses of up to $40,000 for new enlistees and paying special bonuses and other benefits, up to $150,000 for current Special Forces troops that re-enlist."

"Another cost to the government," the study says, "is the interest on the money that it has borrowed to finance the war."

Among the things taken into account by the study are some of the difficult-to-quantify but very real costs inflicted by the war on the American economy and society, such as the effect of the war on oil prices, and the economic loss that results from the many thousands of Americans wounded and killed in the war.

The study does not address the substantial costs of the war borne by Iraq or by any other countries besides the United States.

In an interview, Mr. Stiglitz said that about $560 billion, which is a little more than half of the study's conservative estimate of the cost of the war, would have been enough to "fix" Social Security for the next 75 years. If one were thinking in terms of promoting democracy in the Middle East, he said, the money being spent on the war would have been enough to finance a "mega-mega-mega-Marshall Plan," which would have been "so much more" effective than the invasion of Iraq.

It's not easy to explain just how much money $1 trillion really is. Imagine a stack of bills worth $1 million that is roughly six inches high. (Think big denominations — a mix of $100 bills and $1,000 bills, mostly $1,000's.) If the six-inch stack were enlarged to the point where it was worth $1 billion, it would be as tall as the Washington Monument, about 500 feet. If it were worth $1 trillion, the stack would be 95 miles high.

Ms. Bilmes said that the $1 trillion we're spending on Iraq amounts to about $10,000 for every household in the U.S.

At his press conference on Tuesday, President Bush made it clear that whatever the cost, American forces would not be leaving Iraq soon. When asked whether a day would come when there were no U.S. forces in Iraq, he said that decision would be made by future presidents and future governments of Iraq.

The meter's running. We're at a trillion dollars, and counting.

Aloha 

Ukulele Virtuoso

Hey Folks,

The Uke Man writes and sings songs.

Jake Shimabukuro plays the hell out of the instrument.
Here's a George Harrison (a uke player too) song. Check it out. Enjoy!!

(by the way - my friend in NYC, Jason Tagg, filmed this a while back in Central Park - see: http://www.ukuleledisco.com/ - and there are some Uke Man videos there too on the archives):


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1352016870638076087

Hmmm. . . 

"Boston Legal" Video - You Gotta Hear It

Hey Folks,

Has it come to this? . . . . . . . .Yes !!!

- Uke Man


http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Boston-Legal-Stick-It-1.wmv

The Policeman is Your Friend !

 

Police (state) Tactics

Hey Folks,

You know this shit goes on - no matter how much they deny it !

- Uke Man


Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics
Calmed Protest


By JIM DWYER
Published: March 17, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/nyregion/17police.html?hp&ex=1142658000&amp;amp;en=5b0782ad98a92b1c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In five internal reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New York City police commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used "proactive arrests," covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be employed at future gatherings.

Among the most effective strategies, one police captain wrote, was the seizure of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue who were described as "obviously potential rioters."

The reports provide a rare glimpse of internal police evaluations and strategies on security and free speech issues that have provoked sharp debate between city officials and political demonstrators since the Sept. 11 attack.

The reports also made clear what the police have yet to discuss publicly: that the department uses undercover officers to infiltrate political gatherings and monitor behavior.

Indeed, one of the documents — a draft report from the department's Disorder Control Unit — proposed in blunt terms the resumption of a covert tactic that had been disavowed by the city and the federal government 30 years earlier. Under the heading of recommendations, the draft suggested, "Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds."

Asked about the proposal, Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said yesterday: "The N.Y.P.D. does not use police officers in any capacity to distribute misinformation."

Mr. Browne also said that the "proactive" arrests referred to in the report — numbering about 30 — involved protesters with pipes and masks who he said presented an obvious threat.

In another report, a police inspector praised the "staging of massive amounts" of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of the demonstrators, writing that the sight "would cause them to be alarmed."

Besides the draft report, the documents released yesterday included four final reports written by commanders to assess police performance during the World Economic Forum, which met in New York from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2002.

The economic forum, a private organization that normally meets in Davos, Switzerland, and draws a grab bag of leaders from government, business, and academia — as well as protesters from a miscellany of causes and movements — was moved to the city as a gesture of solidarity after the terror attack.

Security was extremely tight around Midtown Manhattan, where the delegates were meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, and demonstrators were kept blocks from the hotel. Officials spoke of violence during antiglobalism protests at other high profile gatherings in Seattle and Genoa, Italy. In the end, though, as one of the police reports noted, "the amount of confrontation and number of arrests were lower than expected."

Parts of that document and others were made public, over the objections of the city, by a federal magistrate, Gabriel W. Gorenstein, who said the excerpts went to the heart of a lawsuit brought by 16 people who were arrested at an animal rights demonstration during the economic forum. The police said they were blocking the sidewalk and had refused to obey an order to disperse; the demonstrators said no one told them to move.

Many of the issues in the animal rights case, which challenge broad police tactics and arrest strategies, resonate in well over a hundred other lawsuits brought against the city by demonstrators who were arrested at war protests, bicycle rallies and during the Republican National Convention.

Daniel M. Perez, the lawyer representing the people arrested at the animal rights demonstration, argued that the police tactics "punish, control and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities." The Police Department and the city have said that preserving public order is essential to protecting the civil rights of demonstrators and bystanders.

Mr. Perez maintains that the police documents, taken together, show a policy of pre-emptive arrests. The draft report discussed how early arrests could shape future events. "The arrests made at West 59th Street and Fifth Avenue set a 'tone' with the demonstrators and their possible plans at other demonstrations," the report stated.

The disorder control unit's commander, Thomas Graham, is listed as the author of the report, but the document is not signed and the word "draft" is handwritten across the top.

The same tactic is cited in another report, dated Feb. 8, 2002, and signed by Capt. Robert L. Bonifaci, commander of the Queens North Task Force. Captain Bonifaci wrote, "It should be noted that a large part of the success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters." Skip to next paragraph
Elaborating on the report, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that plainclothes officers saw a group of demonstrators put on masks as they drew near the Plaza Hotel, then take out metal pipes and try to rush police lines.

"In addition to mainly peaceful protesters, the W.E.F. attracted hard-core, violent elements that were surveilled by the N.Y.P.D.," Mr. Browne said, citing the incident at the Plaza. "Yes, we used surveillance techniques to track and hopefully disrupt violent elements. That's proactive."

About 30 people were arrested there, and virtually all their cases are now sealed, indicating that the charges were either dismissed by prosecutors or dropped after six months without further incident.

The Police Department report from Michael E. Shortell, a deputy inspector who headed a narcotics command in northern Manhattan, included a list of "positive aspects" of the Police Department's approach. Among them: "The staging of massive amounts of equipment in the key areas (e.g. armored vehicles, command posts, prisoner wagons, Department of Correction buses, city buses)."

Capt. Timothy Hardiman also took note of what he saw as the helpful presence of city corrections buses, which are used to transport prisoners and have reinforced windows, protected by metal grids.

"It was useful to have buses with corrections officers on hand," Captain Hardiman wrote. "They also had a powerful psychological effect."

Mr. Browne said the main reason buses were on hand was to quickly move prisoners from an arrest scene. "If a corrections bus had a deterrent effect on someone contemplating a violent act, then that's value added," he said.

However, the draft report stated that the emphasis on quickly moving prisoners had not been helpful. "This hastened the process adding to the confusion and increasing the potential for mistakes to be made," the report stated.

Mr. Perez said the show of force sent a deliberate warning to people expressing their opinions. "The message is, if you turn out, be prepared to be arrested, be prepared to be sent away for a long time," he said. "It sounds like something from a battle zone."

Demonstrators arrested during the economic forum were held by the police for up to 40 hours without seeing a judge — twice as long as people accused of murder, rape and robbery arrested on those same days, Mr. Perez said.

Mr. Browne of the Police Department said that the arrests were processed as quickly as possible, and that protesters were not singled out for longer detention.

The reports, which were heavily edited at the request of the city, also discuss the use of undercover officers at the protests. Captain Hardiman wrote that "the use of undercovers from narcotics provided useful information." And on Inspector Shortell's list of positive aspects of the strategy, he listed "the use of undercover personnel in the ranks of the protesters."

The power of the police to secretly monitor political gatherings was tightly controlled by a federal court between 1985 and early 2003, the result of a lawsuit by political activists from the 1960's who charged that police undercover officers had disrupted their ability to express their opinions. Many of the restrictions from that case, known as Handschu, were eased at the request of the city in 2003.

The proposal to use undercover officers to spread misinformation — which the Police Department says was not adopted — recalled the origins of the Handschu lawsuit, which was based in part on the actions of undercover agents and officers who instigated trouble and spread lies among a group of military veterans who opposed the Vietnam War.

 

A Fun End-of-the-World Video

Hey Folks,

Have a laugh at the expense of nuclear proliferation*:

http://www.funnyjunk.com/v/157X (a ukethanks to Phyll)

- Uke Man

* It's Clinton's fault

Hmmmm . . . 

Just a Thought

Hey Folks,

Just a thought bubbling around in the Uke Man’s head.

A few days ago Bryan Flannery, a little-known candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, came out with unsubstantiated charges about the front-runner, Ted Strickland, supposedly having once hired a pedophile to work in his office. Flannery also wanted to know why Strickland had “gone to Rome with that man.”

The charges were quickly rebutted by Strickland who claimed that similar charges had been made long ago by an opponent in a very heated campaign, that the aide had denied any such orientation, and that no one had brought any evidence forward.

After Flannery’s big, one day splash, those charges are not being heard – I can’t even find them on the net.

OK, but what happens next?

Hot on the heels of this mud, Bill O’Reilly, Joe Scarborough, and other national, right-wing, talking-point flunkies “discover” the evil Judge Conner and call for his impeachment because he is soft on . . .

Yep!! PEDOPHILES!!!!!!!

OK, but what happens next?

Well, Governor Daft and guber-natorial candidate Petro start puffing up, and foaming at the mouth – “impeach the judge!”

Curiously, candidate Blackwell lays low, concedes the floor of righteousness to the lame duck and the lame candidate. This seems out of character since Blackwell is the God&Jesus, revivalist, family-values, gay-bashing candidate.

Hmmmmm . . . So what to make of it?

Well, here’s what the Uke Man thinks might be going on.

Kkkarl Rove has his finger in this.

It is in the nut-case right-wing’s interest to, in the end, get nut-case right-wing Blackwell elected rather than a moderate Democrat. The Doughboy has decided – quite sensibly – that Blackwell will kick Petro’s ass in the primary – there are just too many fearful, hateful, blindly religious people in this great state of ours; Ohio where “With God All Things Are Possible.”

Now Flannery, a former Notre Dame football player (along with his running mate) may have come up with the slur on his own, been tipped off by a Republican plant, or be a part of the whole plan; but it doesn’t matter.

Kkkarl probably has had “Strickland – pedophile slur” written on one of his infamous debating cards for years. When the Gipper’s boys made the accusation (for whatever reason), the fair and balanced media dogs were set loose, and in turn fueled such a vicious Republican feeding frenzy, that even the Columbus Dispatch was repelled, comparing their fellow GOP’s to a “lynch mob.”

OK, but what happens next?

As quickly as it all erupted, it seems to have disappeared. Now Taft and Petro are lying low. There’s nothing coming from Flannery, and the legislature is no longer interested in impeachment.

As it turns out, the judge in question behaved in much the same way as many judges have around the state. So, why pick on him?

Well, he was in the wrong place at the right time for the seed to be planted for sprouting during the general election. I can hear Blackwell now:

“These aren’t MY allegations. They were made by his own party, the party that looked the other way when children suffered.”

Any assertion that the Republican party too had been “soft on pedophilia” will be turned aside by scapegoating Taft and Petro who were suckered into the maelstrom. Blackwell will claim THEY are the problem with the party – he is the NEW Republican party!

Just a thought.

- Uke Man

The Complete Twain Postings

Hey Folks,

Here it is! The whole ball of wax, the whole can of worms, the “compleat” Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, expurgated – by the Uke Man - for rapid assimilation.

The story starts out at Warick Castle in England, where the author Mark Twain, a participant/character in the story, is "touring." In the process he meets an odd stranger, a talkative man well-informed about both ancient armor and the ancient individuals who wore it.

When the tour guide points out a strange, unaccountable hole in one specimen of armor we hear:

“Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramour le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain mail in the left breast; can’t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms – perhaps maliciously by Cromwell’s soldiers.”

My acquaintance smiled – not a modern smile, but one that must have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago – and muttered, apparently to himself:

“Wit ye well, I saw it done.” Then, after a pause, added: “ I did it myself.”

The “Stranger,” it turns out, is in possession of a manuscript recounting his memoirs, and he leaves it with Twain to read. The story, for the most part, is made up of this memoir.

The “conceit” or assumption that makes this all work is that, somehow, a person can be “transpositioned” through epochs. People in Twain’s time (and now?) believe in the “transmigration of souls”; so, it wasn’t much of a stretch to suspend disbelief over someone being knocked out in the 19th century and waking up in the 6th century.

Well, the “Stranger,” Hank Morgan, the Yankee, the superintendent of “the great Colt arms-factory,” overseeing “a couple thousand men,” gets in a fight at the factory, ending with a crushing blow from a crowbar “along side the head,” and wakes up in 6th century England, not far from Camelot.

It takes some time for him to take it all in – all the new and archaic conditions. He finds the date and the people difficult to reconcile with his experience. Early-on, along the way, he meets a page, Clarence, who will be his friend and aide throughout the story.

In his 19th century dress and his cultural ignorance, he is taken prisoner, taken to Arthur’s court, and sentenced to be burned at the stake. He is thrown into the dungeon to await his execution.

With the help of Clarence, he subsequently communicates to the court his intent to blot out the sun and destroy the earth if the sentence is pursued - knowing, from his knowledge of history, that a total eclipse of the sun was to occur on the appointed day.

At Merlin’s insistence, however, the planned execution is moved forward, but since Clarence had been confused about the actual date, it all works out. At the appointed time the eclipse begins, the Yankee is saved, and his status as highest in the land – second only to King Arthur – is established.

From this point on, for most of the story, the Yankee is in position to shed light on the human condition – not only as it was in the 6th century but accurately for the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries as well.

Chapter 8 – the Yankee reflects on the self-destructive gullibility of the populace:

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility: as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, however pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody else tells you.

Chapter 8 – the Yankee describes the Arthurian proletariat:

The most of King Arthur’s British nation were slaves . . . and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves so. The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.

Chapter 8 – the Yankee recognizes a sad verity:

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.

Chapter 13 – The Yankee’s take on the French Revolution:

Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever-memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery, the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning, compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Chapter 17 – The Yankee observes religion among the nobility.

However, to my relief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers. I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church. More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat; more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and dispatching his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give thanks, without even waiting to rob the body. There was to be nothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini, that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later. All the nobles of Britain, with their families, attended divine service morning and night daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of them had family worship five or six times a day besides. The credit of this belonged entirely to the Church. Although I was no friend to that Church, I was obliged to admit this. And often, in spite of me, I found myself saying, “What would this country be without the Church?”

Chapter 18 – the one microscopic atom in each of us that is truly us.

Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her. Training – training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training, We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly ME: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome, for all I care.


Chapter 20 – The Yankee observes the oppressed and comments (following the release - by the Yankee's orders - of prisoners wrongly imprisoned for most of their lives).

It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account that I have made room for it here, but on account of a thing which seemed to me still more curious. To wit, that this dreadful matter brought from these down-trodden people no outburst of rage against their oppressors. They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothing could have startled them but a kindness. Yes, here was a curious revelation indeed, of the deapth to which this people had been sunk in slavery. Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him.

I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning a peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringing up the ungetaroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must BEGIN in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.


Chapter 21 - The Yankee learns the history of the desolate Valley of Holiness and of the “loving labors” (think about it) of the monks and nuns.

“And so upon a time, after a year and a day, the good Abbot made humble surrender and destroyed the bath. And behold, His anger was in that moment appeased, and the waters gushed richly forth again, and even unto this day they have not ceased to flow in that generous measure.”

“Then I take it nobody has washed since.”

“He that would essay it could have his halter free; yea, and swiftly would he need it, too.”

“The community has prospered since?”

“Even from that very day. The fame of the miracle went abroad into all lands. From every land came monks to join; they came even as the fishes come, in shoals; and the monastery added building to building, and yet others to these, and so spread wide its arms
and took them in. And nuns came also; and more again, and yet more; and built over against the monastery on the yon side of the vale, and added building to building, until mighty was that nunnery. And these were friendly unto those, and they joined their loving labors together and together they built a fair great foundling asylum midway of the valley between.”


Chapter 22 - The Yankee comments on human nature at the occasion of the miraculous fountain’s ceasing to flow.

The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn’t do as horses or cats or angleworms would probably have done - turned back and get at something profitable - no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.


Chapter 25 – The Yankee explains the King’s justice (sounds familiar).

And although this expedition was strictly a holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of his business functions going, just the same. He touched for the evil as usual; he held court in the gate at sunrise and tried causes, for he was himself Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.

He shone very well in this latter office. He was a wise and humane judge, and he clearly did his honest best and fairest, - according to his lights. Yes, according to his lights. That is a large reservation. His lights – I mean his rearing – often colored his decisions. Whenever there was a dispute between a noble or gentleman, and a person of lower degree, the king’s leanings and sympathies were for the former class always, whether he suspected it or not. It was impossible that this should be otherwise. The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over, and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. This has a harsh sound, and yet should not be offensive to any – to even the noble himself – unless the fact itself be an offence; for the statement simply formulates a fact. The repulsive feature of slavery is the THING, not its name. One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below him to recognize – and in but indifferently modified measure – the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these are the slaveholder’s spirit, the slaveholder’s blunted feeling. They are the result of the same cause, in both cases; the possessor’s old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king’s judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.


Chapter 26 – Long ago the Kings “touched” the sick to heal them (as TV evangelists do today). Part of the operation involved giving each afflicted soul a small coin. The Yankee replaces the worn and irregularly shaped gold bit currently the practice with a less-valuable nickel he had minted especially for this purpose.

I judged that a sharp, bright new nickel, with a first-rate likeness of the king on one side of it and Guenever on the other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the tuck out of scrofula [the predominant malady – Uke Man] as handy as a nobler coin and please the scrofulous fancy more; and I was right. This batch was the first it was tried on, and it worked to a charm. The saving in expense was a notable economy.

. . . In making this substitution I had drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source - the wisdom of my boyhood . . . in my boyhood I had always saved my pennies, and contributed buttons to the foreign missionary cause. The buttons would answer the ignorant savage as well as the coin, the coin would answer me better than the buttons; all hands were happy, and nobody hurt.


Chapter 28 – The Yankee discusses the nature of work

There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about “the working classes,” and satisfy themselves that a day’s hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day’s manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven’t tried the other. But I know all about both; and as far as I am concerned, there isn’t money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down – and I will be satisfied, too. Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him – why certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it’s a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair – but there it is, and nothing can change it; the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it’s also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship [and the aristocracy of inherited wealth – Uke Man].


Chapter 30 – The Yankee and the King come upon a burning Manor house and a mob of peasants busy chasing down and hanging other peasants suspected of having killed the oppressive lord and burning his manor.

The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor. This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel between a person of their own class and his lord, it was the natural and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil’s whole caste to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter. This man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing against them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable as evidence; still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it.

This was depressing – to a man with the dream of a republic in his head. It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the “poor whites” of our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them.


Chapter 32 – The Yankee, still in disguise, "sets up" the blacksmith, a “self-made man” who is quite full of himself to blather on about his own "importance."

Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him hum. Self-made man, you know. They know how to talk. They do deserve more credit than any other breed of man, yes, that’s true; and they are among the very first to find it out, too. He told how he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends able to help him [etc., etc. – until he achieved his present "high" station in life – at least compared to the other artisans in the village – that is, as he says] “Two times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table . . .and eight times, salt meat . . . [and] on my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year.”


Chapter 33 – The Yankee discusses wages and their future with Dowley, the blacksmith.

“Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?”

“Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council, but most of all, the magistrate, Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes wages.”

“Doesn’t ask any of those poor devils to HELP him fix their wages for them, does he?”

“Hm! That WERE an idea! The master that’s to pay him the money is the one that’s rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice.”

“Yes – but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in it too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have, who DO work. You see? They’re a ‘combine’ – a trade union, to coin a new phrase – who band together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred years hence – so says the unwritten law – the ‘combine’ will be the other way, and then how these fine people’s posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes, indeed! The magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear way down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing, and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself. Ah. He will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation to settle.”

Chapter 34 – The King (the font and creator of the country’s laws) and the Yankee (both still disguised as peasants) are sold into slavery.

A dozen of the rascal’s servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were helpless, with our hands bound behind us. We so loudly and so earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd, and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude. The orator said:

“If indeed ye are freemen, ye have naught to fear – the God-given liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter! [Applause.] Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs.”

“What proofs?”

“Proofs that ye are freemen.”

Ah – I remembered! I came to myself: I said nothing. But the king stormed out:

“Thou’rt insane, man. It were better, and more in reason, that this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are NOT freemen.”

You see. He knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a MEANING, and get very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.


Chapter 34 - It’s all in the perspective: Einsteinian/ Hans Chritian Andersenian relativity.

The slave dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession. We took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon; and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd, that the king of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows, where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me, it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.


Chapter 39 – The Yankee is forced to joust with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious who has been festering for years over an imagined insult. The newspaper (another of the Yankee’s innovations) covered the story. In promoting the event it offers commentary upon the nature of “charities” (and also expresses why the Uke Man thinks society as a whole – not charities – should address society’s ills).


The box office will be open at noon of the 13th; admission 3 cents, reserved seats 5; proceeds go to the hospital fund. The royal pair and all the Court will be present. With these exceptions, and the press and the clergy, the free list is strictly suspended. Parties are hereby warned against buying tickets of speculators;they will not be good at the door. Everybody knows and likes The Boss, everybody knows and likes Sir Sag; come, let us give the lads a good send-off. Remember, the proceeds go to a great and free charity, and one whose broad benevolence stretches out its helping hand, warm with the blood of a loving heart, to all that suffer, regardless of race, creed, condition or color – the only charity yet established in the earth which has no politico-religious stop-cock on its compassion, but says Here flows the stream, let ALL come and drink!


Chapter 39 – The trouble begins. This novel has been called “the longest sustained invective in the English language.” To this point Twain has been savagely critical of innumerable human traits, most often as demonstrated by those benighted folks around the Yankee, but also as demonstrated now and then by the Yankee himself.

If you’ve been reading along with this continuing saga of excerpts, you may remember from an earlier posting:

“I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning a peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringing up the ungetaroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must BEGIN in blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.”

The Yankee wanted a bloodless revolution. Throughout the story he had taken steps to bring down the nobility and knight-errantry via subtle ridicule and debasement – having some wear sandwich boards advertising mundane things like tooth brushes, having others riding about selling stove polish (before stoves even existed), selling soap, and having others sell top-hats – which they wore instead of helmets. The idea was to gradually work them away from all the class, superstitious, and prejudicial aspects that oppressed the vast mass of people which actually WAS the nation.

In the Yankee’s confrontation with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious, the Yankee’s intentions are made perfectly clear and the stakes are raised as well:

“Up to the day set, there was no talk in all Britain of anything but this combat. All other topics sank into insignificance and passed out of men’s thoughts and interest. . . there was abundant reason for the extraordinary interest which this coming fight was creating. It was born of the fact that all the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men, so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of super human art and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age. . . Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against mine. . . Merlin had been busy whole days and nights together, imbuing Sir Sagramour’s arms and armor with supernatural powers of offence and defense. . .

So the world thought there was a vast matter at stake here, and the world was right; but it was not the one they had in their minds. No, a far vaster one was upon the cast of the die: THE LIFE OF KNIGHT-ERRANTRY. I was a champion, it was true, but not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was champion of hard, unsentimental, common-sense and reason. I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.”


Chapter 39 - The plot thickens. The Yankee had intended to defeat Sir Sagramour and the other knights who would inevitably enter the lists against him, one after the other, by the harmless use of a lasso. And so he does until Lancelot, the greatest of them all, and the last remaining challenger, takes the field and begins his charge.

“In that moment, down came the Invincible, with the rush of a whirlwind – the courtly world rose to its feet and bent forward – the fateful coils went circling through the air, and before you could wink I was towing Sir Launcelot across the field on his back, and kissing my hand to the storm of waving handkerchiefs and the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!

Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn, and sat there drunk with glory, ‘The victory is perfect – no other will venture against me – knight-errantry is dead.” Now imagine my astonishment – and everybody else’s, too – to hear the peculiar bugle call which announces that another competitor is about to enter the lists!”




Chapter 39 – The Yankee’s plan for a bloodless victory over knight-errantry had gone well, defeating all with just the use of a lariat. But then another challenger is announced. It is Sir Sagramour with blood in his eyes and determined to have another go at it, but this time with his broadsword rather than a lance. In the meantime, “Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! That old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.”

Although Lancelot objects and the king is concerned, the arguments of Sagramour and Merlin, in the end, force the Yankee to face the angry night without apparent defense.



“The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations. There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring. It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal. But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramour’s long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come. I sat still. On he came. I did not move. People got so excited that they shouted to me.

‘Fly, fly! Save thyself! This is murther !’

I never budged so much as an inch, till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.

Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramour, stone dead”



The blood had started to flow.


Chapter 39 – After shooting Sir Sagramour out of his saddle, the Yankee was not satisfied to end the day as he could have easily done with all of knighthood cowed by the event, but instead challenges them and then goads them into accepting it!

Then I said:
“If there are any who doubt that this field is well and fairly won, I do not wait for them to challenge me, I challenge them.”

“It is a gallant offer,” said the king, “and well beseems you. Whom will you name first?”

“I name none, I challenge all! Here I stand, and dare the chivalry of England to come against me – not by individuals, but in mass!”

“What!” shouted a score of knights.

“You have heard the challenge. Take it, or I proclaim you recreant knights and vanquished, every one!”

It was a “bluff,” you know. At such a time it is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to “call,” and you rake in the chips. But just this once – well, things looked squally! In just no time, five hundred knights were scrambling into their saddles, and before you could wink a widely scattering drove were under way and clattering down upon me. I snatched both revolvers from the holsters and began to measure distances and calculate chances.

Bang! One saddle empty. Bang! Another one. Bang-bang! And I bagged two. Well, it was nip and tuck with us, and I knew it. If I spent the eleventh shot without convincing these people, the twelfth man would kill me, sure.

And so I never did feel so happy as I did when my ninth downed its man and I detected the wavering in the crowd which is premonitory of panic. An instant lost, now, could knock out my last chance. But I didn’t lose it. I raised both revolvers and pointed them – the halted host stood their ground just about one good square moment, then broke and fled.

The day was mine. Knight-errantry was a doomed institution. The march of civilization was begun. How did I feel? Ah, you never could imagine it.

And Brer Merlin? His stock was flat again. Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de rol got left.



(note to the reader: That day in the story the Yankee killed his first ten men, and the experience leaves him with what I find to be strange feelings. Also, the last sentence holds significance in regard to both the story and our own situation today. – Uke Man )


Chapter 40 - “Three Years Later” - Having vanquished night-errantry, the Yankee steps out of hiding.

“I no longer felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and work-shops to an astonished world.”

He knew the knights would realize he’d been bluffing in the lists; so he repeated the challenge:

“I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.

I was not bluffing, this time. I meant what I said; I could do what I promised. . . this was a plain case of ‘put up or shut up.’ They were wise, and did the latter. In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.”


Chapter 40 - “Three Years Later” – In the three years following the massacre in the lists, the 19th century “improvements” blossomed: schools, colleges, newspapers, railroads, telephones, phonographs, typewriters, sewing machines, electricity, etc. Slavery was outlawed; knights were employed as salesmen and railroad conductors. Modernity was rampant. Things were moving in the Yankee’s desired direction.

“ I was very happy. Things were working steadily toward a secretly longed-for point. You see, I had two schemes in my head, which were the vastest of all my projects. The one was, to overthrow the Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins – not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was, to get a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur’s death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike – at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who, at middle age, should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age – that is to say, forty – and I believed that in that time I could easily have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history of the world – a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed, The result to be a Republic. Well, I may as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it: I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first President myself. Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that out.



Chapter 40-41 - “Three Years Later” continued – In this time the Yankee has married Sandy – the damsel of his earlier adventure, and they have a child, “Hello Central.” The knights are kept busy as stock brokers, and in their spare time they’ve started up baseball teams, consisting of kings and emperors from around the known world.

At one point the Yankee and Sandy are advised to take their sick child to a warmer climate in France. While there, oblivious of everything except nursing their child, things changed. The ship they’d sent for supplies and news never returned, and all the evidence of sea commerce that had been so evident during their arrival had evaporated. The Yankee leaves Sandy and the baby and sails home.

“ I approached England the next morning, with the wide highway of salt water all to myself. There were ships in the harbor, at Dover, but they were naked, as to sails, and there was no sign of life about them. It was Sunday, yet at Canterbury the streets were empty; strangest of all there was not even a priest in sight, and no stroke of a bell fell upon my ear. The mournfulness of death was everywhere. I couldn’t understand it. At last, in the further edge of that town I saw a small funeral procession – just a family and a few friends following a coffin – no priest; a funeral without bell, book or candle; there was a church there, close at hand, but they passed it by, weeping, and did not enter it; I glanced up at the belfry, and there hung the bell, shrouded in black, and its tongue tied back. Now I knew! Now I understood the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England. Invasion? Invasion is a triviality to it. It was the INTERDICT!

. . . The Church had struck; the thing for me to do was to get into a disguise; and go warily . . . A miserable journey. A desolate silence everywhere. Even in London itself. Traffic had ceased; men did not talk or laugh, or go in groups, or even in couples; they moved aimlessly about, each man by himself, with his head down, and woe and terror in his heart . . . it made me feel as if maybe it was symbolical – a sort of sign that the Church was going to KEEP the upper hand, now, snuff out all my beautiful civilization just like that.”


Chapter 42 – “War!” - In the Yankee’s absence war broke out, THE war of the Arthurian legend – the trouble over Guinevere, Lancelot, and Arthur; and the darkness of Mordred. When the Yankee returns, the knights have been decimated and the round Table is no more, Mordred and Arthur are dead, Guinevere is in a convent, and the Church is in charge.

The Yankee, who is being briefed on all of this by his loyal cohort Clarence, says:

“What changes! And in such a short while. It is inconceivable. What next, I wonder?”

“I can tell you what next.”

“Well?”

“Stake our lives and stand by them!”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The Church is master, now. The Interdict included you with Mordred; it is not to be removed while you remain alive. The clans are gathering. The Church has gathered all the knights that are left alive, and as soon as you are discovered, we shall have business on our hands.”

“Stuff! With our deadly scientific war-material – with our hosts of trained – “

“Save your breath – we haven’t sixty faithful left!”

“What are you saying? Our schools, our colleges, our vast workshops, our – “

“When those knights come, those establishments will empty themselves and go over to the enemy. Did you think you had educated the superstition out of these people!”

“I certainly did think it.”

“Well, then, you may unthink it. They stood every strain easily – until the Interdict. Since then, they merely put on a bold outside – at heart they are quaking. Make up your mind to it – when the armies come, the mask will fall.”




Chapter 42 - The Yankee and all his plans are in jeopardy, and all but sixty of his faithful followers have succumbed to superstitious fear. His assistant
Clarence explains that the Church, through its servants the doctors, had sent him out of the country for their own purposes; whereupon the reactionary
forces immediately began to dismantle every one of the Yankee’s 19th century “improvements.”


“Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared!
Also as suddenly and as mysteriously, the railway and
telegraph and telephone service ceased, the men all
deserted, poles were cut down, the Church laid a ban
upon the electric light! I had to be up and doing -
and straight off. Your life was safe - nobody in
these kingdoms but Merlin would venture to touch such
a magician as you, without ten thousand men at his
back - I had nothing to think of but how to put
preparations in the best trim against your coming. I
felt safe myself - nobody would be anxious to touch a
pet of yours. So this is what I did. From our
various works I selected all the men - boys, I mean -
whose faithfulness under whatsoever pressure I could
swear to, and I called them together secretly and gave
them their instructions. There are fifty- two of
them; none younger than fourteen, and none above
seventeen years old.”

“Why did you select boys?”

“Because all the others were born in an atmosphere of
superstition, and reared in it. It is in their blood
and bones. We imagined we had educated it out of
them; they thought so, too; the Interdict woke them up
like a thunderclap! It revealed them to themselves,
and it revealed them to me, too. With boys it was
different. Such as have been under our training from
seven to ten years have had no acquaintance with the
Church’s terrors, and it was among these that I found
my fifty-two.”


Chapter 42 – In the Yankee’s absence, faithful Clarence has been busy preparing a defense for him and his remaining supporters. In a large cave – formerly one of Merlin’s haunts – he’s activated a large generator and built wire fences.

“The wires go out from the cave and fence-in a circle of level ground a hundred yards in diameter; they make twelve independent fences, ten feet apart – that is to say, twelve circles within circles – and the ends come into the cave again.”

The fence is to be electrified as needed. Clarence also has gatling guns at the ready and mines (“glass-cylinder dynamite torpedoes”). The defense is impenetrable. The Yankee speaks to Clarence.

“Yes, everything is ready; everything is ship-shape, no detail is wanting. I know what to do, now.”

“So do I: sit down and wait.”

“No, sir! rise up and strike!”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, indeed! The defensive isn’t in my line, and the offensive is. That is, when I hold a fair hand – two-thirds as good a hand as the enemy. Oh, yes, we’ll rise up and strike; that’s our game.”

“A hundred to one, you are right. When does the performance begin?”

“Now! We’ll proclaim the Republic.”

“Well, that will precipitate things, sure enough!”

“It will make them buzz, I tell you! England will be a hornet’s nest before noon to-morrow, if the Church hasn’t lost its cunning – and we know it hasn’t. Now you write and I’ll dictate – thus:

****************** PROCLAMATION

‘BE IT KNOWN UNTO ALL. Whereas, the king having died and left no heir, it becomes my duty to continue the executive authority vested in me, until a government shall have been created and set in motion. The monarchy has lapsed, it no longer exists. By consequence, all political power has reverted to its original source, the people of the nation. With the monarchy, its several adjuncts died also; wherefore there is no longer a nobility, no longer a privileged class, no longer an Established Church: all men are become exactly equal, they are upon one common level, and religion is free. A Republic is hereby proclaimed, as being the natural estate of a nation when other authority has ceased. It is the duty of the British people to meet together immediately, and by their votes elect representatives and deliver into their hands the government.’

I signed it ‘The Boss,’ and dated it from Merlin’s Cave.


Chapter 43 – After posting the Proclamation and making sure defenses were “ship-shape,” as the Yankee put it, they had a week to sit and wait.

“I had spies out, every night, of coursae, to get news. Every report made things look more and more impressive. The hosts were gathering, gathering, down all the roads and paths of England the knights were riding; and priests rode with them, to hearten these original Crusaders, this being the Church’s war. All the nobilities, big and little, were on their way, and all the gentry. This was all as was expected. We should thin out this sort of folk to such a degree that the people would have nothing to do but just step to the front with their Republic and –

Ah, what a donkey I was! Toward the end of the week, I began to get this large and disenchanting fact through my head: that the mass of the nation had swung their caps and shouted for the Republic for about one day, and there an end! The Church, the nobles and the gentry then turned one grand all-disapproving frown upon them and shriveled them to sheep! From that moment the sheep had begun to gather to the fold – that is to say, the camps – and offer their valueless lives and their valuable wool to the “righteous cause.” Why, even the very men who had lately been slaves were in the “righteous cause,” and glorifying it, praying for it, sentimentally slobbering over it, just like all the other commoners. Imagine such human muck as this; conceive of the folly!

Yes, it was now “Death to the Republic!” everywhere – not a dissenting voice. All England was marching against us! Truly this was more than I had bargained for.”


Chapter 43 – With the realization that “All England was marching against” him, the Yankee had to do some quick thinking to avoid losing the fifty-two frightened boys who were still standing by him. He argued that the despised nobility and gentry – rather than the common folks – the boys’ own class – would, as was the custom, lead the attack. That these thirty thousand would be destroyed and “Immediately after, the civilian multitude in the rear will retire, to meet business engagements elsewhere” ; and that will be that. - The boys were satisfied.

“I was ready for the enemy, now. Let the approaching big day come along – it would find us on deck.

The big day arrived, on time. At dawn the sentry on watch in the corral came into the cave and reported a moving black mass under the horizon, and a faint sound which he thought to be military music. Breakfast was just ready; we sat down and ate it.

This over, I made the boys a little speech, and then sent out a detail to man the battery, with Clarence in command of it.

The sun rose presently, and sent its unobstructed splendors over the land, and we saw a prodigious host moving slowly toward us, with the steady drift and aligned front of a wave of the sea. Nearer and nearer it came, and more and more sublimely imposing became its aspect; yes, all England was there, apparently. Soon we could see the innumerable banners fluttering, and then the sun struck the sea of armor and set it all aflash. Yes, it was a fine sight; I hadn’t ever seen anything to beat it.

At last we could make out the details. All the front ranks, no telling how many acres deep, were horsemen – plumed knights in armor. Suddenly we heard the blare of trumpets; the slow walk burst into a gallop, and then – well, it was wonderful to see! Down swept that vast horse-shoe wave – it approached the sand-belt – my breath stood still; nearer, nearer – the strip of green turf beyond the yellow belt grew narrower – narrower, still – became a mere ribbon in front of the horses – then disappeared under their hoofs. Great Scott! Why, the whole front of that host shot into the sky with a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments; and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was left of the multitude from our sight.


Chapter 43 – After the thundering explosion as the charging knights entered the mine-field, heavy smoke obscured the battlefield for half an hour before it dissipated allowing a view.

“No living creature was in sight! We now perceived that additions had been made to our defences. The dynamite had dug a ditch more than a hundred feet wide, all around us, and cast up an embankment some twenty-five feet high on both borders of it. As to destruction of life, it was amazing. Moreover, it was beyond estimate. Of course we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogenous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons."

Feeling secure, the Yankee spoke to his “army,” his fifty-two boys, in certain terms that after this victory, none would be left to attack them but the nights – the commoners having left the scene – and that, as for the knights, “We will kill them all.”

He then sends out work crews laboring through the night to prepare the diversion of a mountain brook just south of his defences, “arranging it in such a way that I could make instant use of it in an emergency.” Later . . .

“As soon as it was good and dark, I shut off the current from all of the fences, and then groped my way out to the embankment bordering our side of the great dynamite ditch. I crept to the top of it and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch. But it was too dark to see anything.”

After a long wait . . .

"At last I caught what you may call indistinct glimpses of sound – dulled metallic sound. . . This sound thickened, and approached – from toward the north. Presently I heard it at my own level – the ridge- top of the opposite embankment, a hundred feet or more
away. . . I heard that metallic noise descending into the great ditch. It augmented fast, it spread all along, and it unmistakably furnished me this fact: an armed host was taking up its quarters in the ditch. Yes, these people were arranging a little surprise party for us. . . I groped my way back to the corral, now; I had seen enough. I went to the platform and signaled to turn the current onto the two inner fences. . . It was my notion that as soon as dawn approached we could expect the ditch’s ambuscaded thousands to swarm up over the embankment and make an assault, and be followed immediately by the rest of their army.”


Chapter 43 - The Yankee returns to the cave, turns
off the current on the outer fences, and returns with
Clarence to observe.

We started a whispered conversation, but suddenly
Clarence broke off and said -

“What is that?”

“That thing yonder?”

“What thing? - Where?”

“There beyond you a little piece - a dark something -
a dull shape of some kind - against the second fence.”

I gazed, he gazed. I said:

“Could it be a man, Clarence?”

“No, I think not. If you notice, it looks a lit -
why, it IS a man! - leaning on the fence.”

“I certainly believe it is; let’s go and see.”

We crept along on our hands and knees until we were
pretty close, and then looked up. Yes, it was a man -
a dim great figure in armor, standing erect, with both
hands on the upper wire - and of course there was a
smell of burning flesh. Poor fellow, dead as a
doornail, and never knew what hurt him. He stood
there like a statue - no motion about him, except that
his plumes swished about a little in the night wind.
We rose up and looked in through the bars of his
visor, but couldn’t make out whether we knew him or
not - features too dim and shadowed.

We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down
to the ground where we were. We made out another
knight vaguely; he was coming very stealthily, and
feeling his way. He was near enough now, for us to
see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend
and step over it, then bend and step under it and over
the lower one. Now he arrived at the first knight -
and started slightly when he discovered him. He stood
a moment - no doubt wondering why the other one didn’t
move on; then he said, in a low voice, “Why dreamest
thou here, good Sir Mar-” then he laid his hand on
the corpse’s shoulder - and just uttered a little soft
moan and sunk down dead. Killed by a dead man, you
see - killed by a dead friend, in fact. There was
something awful about it.

Chapter 43 – That night the Yankee and Clarence waited and watched as more and more knights naively joined their dead brethren, electrocuted all along the fence lines.

“We concluded to make a tour between the inner fences. We elected to walk upright, for convenience sake . . . Well, it was a curious trip. Everywhere dead men were lying outside the second fence – not plainly visible, but still visible; and we counted fifteen of those pathetic statues – dead knights standing with their hands on the upper wire. . .

Pretty soon we detected a muffled and heavy sound, and the next moment we guessed what it was. It was a surprise in force coming! . . . we stood by the inner fence and watched the silent lightning do its awful work upon that swarming host. One could make out but little of detail; but he could note that a black mass was piling itself up beyond the second fence. That swelling bulk was dead men! Our camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead – a bulwark, a breastwork, of corpses, you may say.

I sent a current through the third fence, now; and almost immediately through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up. I believed the time was come, now, for my climax; I believed that that whole army was in our trap. Anyway it was high time to find out. So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.

Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn’t lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties; then they’d have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks. THERE was a groan you could HEAR! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.”

“A glance showed that the rest of the enemy – perhaps ten thousand strong – were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing forward to the assault. Consequently we had them ALL! And had them past help. Time for the last act of the tragedy. I fired the three appointed revolver shots – which meant:

‘Turn on the water!’
There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.

‘Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!’

The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment, the three-fourths reached it and plunged over – to death by drowning.

Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.

Chapter 44 – “A Postscript by Clarence” - The “conceit” or “gimmick” that has made this whole story possible is the “transposition of epochs – and bodies”; the 19th century Yankee is laid out cold in a New England factory fight, only to wake up in 6th century England.

As part of this “conceit” we also “know” that – except for a brief part at the beginning and again at the end, the entire story is presented from an ancient manuscript shared with Twain by the “Stranger” he meets touring Warwick Castle. Twain reads the manuscript to us throughout the night.

Furthermore, we know by now the import of the Stranger’s cryptic comments uttered on the second page. The castle tour guide is speaking to the tourists:

“Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramour le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain mail in the left breast [ see: ]; can’t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms – perhaps maliciously by Cromwell’s soldiers.”

My acquaintance smiled – not a modern smile, but one that must have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago – and muttered, apparently to himself:

“Wit ye well, I saw it done.” Then, after a pause, added: “ I did it myself.”


The “Stranger,” the owner of the ancient manuscript, is – indeed - the Yankee himself, somehow re- transpositioned into the 19th century. We read the Yankee’s final entry to that manuscript:


“Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.”

Chapter 44 – “A Postscript by Clarence” - Clarence explains that the Yankee – as he has done several times throughout the story – naively misjudges the nature of backward humanity:

“He proposed that we two go out and see if any help could be afforded the wounded. I was strenuous against the project.”

But the Yankee (“the Boss”) insisted and:

“The first wounded man who appealed for help, was sitting, with his back against a dead comrade. When the boss bent over him and spoke to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him.”

After dispatching the assailant:

“We carried the Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was not very serious, the best care we could. In this service we had the help of Merlin, though we did not know it. He was disguised as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife. In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he had appeared a few days after the Boss was hurt, and offered to cook for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving. The Boss had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with finishing up his record.

We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed. We were in a trap, you see – a trap of our own making. If we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defenses, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered. The Boss recognized this; we all recognized it. If we could go to one of those new camps and patch up some kind of terms with the enemy – yes, but the Boss could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands. Others were taken down, and still others. To-morrow –

To-morrow. It is here. And with it the end. About midnight I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about the Boss’s head and face, and wondered what it meant. . . . The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing toward the door. I called out –

“Stop! What have you been doing?”

She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:

“Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered! These others are perishing – you also. Ye shall all die in this place – every one – except him. He sleepeth now – and shall sleep thirteen centuries. I am Merlin!”

Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one of our wires. His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still laughing. I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until the corpse turns to dust.

The Boss has never stirred – sleeps like a stone. If he does not wake to-day, we shall understand what kind of sleep it is, and his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it. As for the rest of us – well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and loyally hide the Manuscript with the Boss, our dear good chief, whose property it is, be he alive or dead.

END OF MANUSCRIPT.

The book ends with a “Final P.S. by M.T.," Mark Twain (the fictional persona of Samuel Clemens) who received the manuscript from the Stranger:

“The DAWN was come when I laid the Manuscript aside. The rain had almost ceased, the world was gray and sad, the exhausted storm was sighing and sobbing itself to rest. I went to the stranger’s room, and listened at his door, which was slightly ajar; I could hear his voice, and so I knocked. There was no answer, but I still heard the voice. I peeped in. The man lay on his back, in bed, talking brokenly but with spirit, and punctuating with his arms, which he thrashed about, restlessly, as sick people do in delirium. I slipped in softly, and bent over him. His mutterings and ejaculations went on. I spoke – merely a word, to call his attention. His glassy eyes and ashy face were alight in an instant. With pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome:

“O, Sandy, you are come at last, - how I have longed for you! Sit by me – do not leave me – never leave me again, Sandy, never again. Where is your hand?- give it me, dear, let me hold it – there – now, all is well, all is peace, and I am happy again – we are happy again, isn’t it so, Sandy? You are so dim, so vague, you are but a mist, a cloud, but you are here, and that is blessedness sufficient; and I have your hand; don’t take it away – it is for only a little while, I shall not require it long . . . . . Was that the child? . . . Hello-Central! . . . . She doesn’t answer. Asleep, perhaps? Bring her when she wakes, and let me touch her hands, her face, her hair, and tell her good-bye . . . . . . . Sandy! . . . . Yes, you are there.I lost myself a moment, and I thought you were gone . . . . . . Have I been sick long? It must be so; it seems months to me. And such dreams! Such strange and awful dreams, Sandy! Dreams that were as real as reality – delirium, of course, but so real! Why, I thought the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn’t get home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I, and a handful of my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England! But even that was not the strangest. I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even that was as real as the rest! Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! Between me and my home and my friends! Between me and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the living! It was awful – awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy. Ah, watch by me, Sandy – stay by me every moment – don’t let me go out of my mind again; death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with the torture of those hideous dreams – I cannot endure that again . . . . . . Sandy? . . . .”

He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death. Presently his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign I knew that his end was at hand. With the first suggestion of the death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed to listen; then he said:

“A bugle? . . . . It is the king! The drawbridge, there! Man the battlements! – turn out the –“

He was getting up his last “effect;” but he never finished it.

"Hi, sailor" 

A letter to Kathleen Parker - Dispatch Columnist

Hey Folks,

Ms. Parker's column appeared in the Columbus Dispatch Mon., March 20
http://www.dispatch.com/editorials-story.php?story=dispatch/2006/03/20/20060320-A7-01.html

This is my response.

- Uke Man


Dear Ms. Parker,

It is unclear from your column whether the Massachusetts Catholic charity involved with adoption receives public money or not. Only you can say whether not reporting on this point was an oversight or by design.

In any case, if the charity receives no public money, I think you make a good point regarding the "question of conscience.”

If, however, the charity does receive public funds (which seems likely to me), then I must disagree.

The Church is entirely free to follow its conscience regarding its privately financed religion – and it does regularly discriminate. For example, the Church refuses to marry divorcees, refuses the sacraments to those not “in a state of grace,” and recently allowed some groups of Catholics to eat meat on Saint Patrick’s Day (a Friday in Lent).

No one has to be Catholic. Catholics voluntarily submit to the authority of the Church. If the Church discriminates against any of its voluntary members, that is a private matter.

If the Church, on the other hand is employed (paid with public funds) by the state to administer social programs, then the discrimination is public and, if in conflict with the law, illegal.

The question of conscience is not about “controlling the church,” not about whether the Church will be allowed to follow its conscience. If the Church is receiving public funds, it is doing so voluntarily; it is not required to.

The question of conscience is the Church’s to answer. Will it continue its work in harmony with the law but at odds with its beliefs? Will it renounce public money so as to be free to continue its service legally and in harmony with its beliefs? Or will it end its service altogether? Those are the qustions of conscience that demand answers.

The argument that the Church does so much good that gays have put themselves before children is fallacious. It may seem to make sense on the surface, especially to straight, religious folks; but consider it in general.

Religions are free in this country to look down on, dislike, or demonize any group they want; and within their private functions, such behavior is protected by the law. In many cases – depending on the contemporary laws – this discriminatory behavior is illegal in the public sector.

It doesn’t make sense to say “Religion X discriminates illegally in the public sector against groups A and B, but they do so much good for the rest of the alphabet (and since I personally am not a member of group A or B), religion X should not have to obey the law. That is a case of justifying the means by the end; and that is considered, by the overwhelming number of people who study issues of ethics and morality, to be a questionable and dangerous tactic.

Yours - Tom Harker
Circleville, Ohio

Saturday's Protest 

Protest Video

Hey Folks,

Here's a video from Saturday's protest:

http://cbusimc.org/node/586/play

- Uke Man (a ukethanks to Columbus Independent Media)

"Hey Bush ! If you come to a fork in the road outta town, take it!" 

Yogi Berra Impersonator

Hey Folks,

You may have already enjoyed many of these - I have - but they never fail to make me smile. Unless I've misunderestimated you, I think you'll smile too!

- Uke Man (a ukethanks to John Locke)



"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country. "- George W. Bush

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." - George W. Bush

"One word sums up probably the responsibility of any Governor, and that? one word is 'to be prepared'. "- George W. Bush

"I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future." - George W. Bush

"We're going to have the best educated American people in the world. "- George W. Bush

"I stand by all the misstatements that I've made." - George W. Bush

" We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe We are a part of Europe."- George W. Bush

"A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls." - George W. Bush

"We are ready for unforeseen events that may or may not occur. "- George W. Bush

"For NASA, space is still a high priority."- George W. Bush

" Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children." - George W. Bush

" It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. " - George W. Bush

"It's time for the human race to enter the solar system." - George W. Bush

God sent THIS clown on a mission? 

The Judge Conner Witch Hunt

Dear Mr. Marrison,
Editor of the Dispatch,

I’ve read that during the Salem witch trials one of the accused was tried by a judge and jury and found innocent. However, the crowd outside the courtroom strenuously objected, and the judge required the jury to reconsider the verdict – which they did.

As a result, the verdict was changed, and the victim was executed.

So much for a “colony of laws.”

I am grateful that the Dispatch has taken a somewhat enlightened view of the Judge John Conner rhubarb. It is the canary in the mine, symptomatic of a much larger aberration within the soul of the nation and the world.

Both you and the paper’s related editorial come down within the “reality based community.”* You both point out that regardless of your personal opinions, the judge acted within the law, and that voters – regardless (I would say) of the rationality of their opinions – can vote Conner out in the next election if they so choose.

It’s clear to me that you and the “powers-that-be” at the paper were as shaken as I by the implications of this mob mentality, by its immediacy, by its intensity, by the involvement of national demagogues like Bill O’Reilly, and by its threat to “the system” (at least the one on paper).

Thank you for speaking up. As I said, this issue is bigger than Judge Conner and pedophilia. It cuts to how we as a people are going to perceive and address the world.

It’s been eighty-one years since the Scopes Monkey Trial, and we are still experiencing threats – serious threats – from the “non-reality-based community” over Mr. Darwin’s theory. To its credit, the Dispatch has objected to these attacks. In this matter the paper sides with rationality rather than emotion. But has the Dispatch done enough, has it lived up to its responsibility, or does the paper pick and choose just like the fundamentalist Luddites do?

The Bush administration has cozied up to God from the start. It has declared its independence from the “reality based community.” We must support them or we are supporting the terrorists. God has sent the president on a “mission” - and our God is bigger than their God. We are at WAR!! We MUST support the Commander in Chief!!! And elections are to be determined by fear, prejudice, hatred, and manipulation rather than on the issues.

There is no room for rationality in any of that, and the same irrationality is mixed up in the gubernatorial race. We have the Republican “God” candidate fighting the faith-based culture wars, promising to return the state to the days of Cal Coolidge, and polling ahead of the colorless, un-godly candidate. I think we both know why Jim Petro got involved with the present witch-hunt.

How low WILL we go? How powerful IS superstitious mumbo-jumbo? Who will be its next victim? What will be the consequences of its ascendancy? How much damage will it do?

Putting our faith in Bush rather than evaluating him with reason has already caused grievous damage to our nation. It seems to me that the Dispatch was awakened by this recent absurdity to question the future of the state as well. Is it too late?

Where has the Dispatch been in challenging Bush & Co.’s demands for faith-based allegiance – not only to God, but to the President, the generals, the policies – to anything and everything? When Blackwell wins the Republican nomination, will the Dispatch endorse him?

What other major media have seriously taken on the know-nothing/faith-based/ feeling/opinion/ I-want-what-I-want/to-hell-with-gays-and-abortion warriors? Why should the virulence demonstrated in the Judge Conner episode be surprising to anyone, particularly the media?

This has been going on and increasing in strength for years. It has been accepted, overlooked, supported, and even modeled by the so-called “opinion leaders” – including the Dispatch.

The paper’s editorials periodically trot out and revere the notion of “the rule of law.” That notion is at play here too; and that is proper. Another valued notion mentioned here is the “separation of powers.” Obviously, if the legislature or executive can beat down the judiciary for emotional/political reasons unrelated to the judiciary’s behavior, a destructive travesty will have occurred.

The Dispatch seems to see that - in THIS situation. I can’t say the same for the school-funding issue. There, the paper did worse than look the other way when the legislature repeatedly ignored the legal orders of the Supreme Court. In fact, it attacked the court – not unlike those attacking Conner today – and praised the legislature for the disrespect it showed the “rule of law” and the “separation of powers.”

The chickens are coming home to roost. What will the Dispatch be doing about it?

- Uke Man


* Reality-based community
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Reality-based community" is a popular term among Internet bloggers that is an example of political framing. In the fall of 2004, the phrase "proud member of the reality-based community," was first used to suggest the blogger's opinions are based more on observation than faith, assumption, or ideology and that others who disagree are unrealistic. The term has been defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from [their] judicious study of discernible reality." Some bloggers have gone as far as to suggest that there is an overarching conflict in society between the reality-based community and the "faith-based community" as a whole.

The source of the term is a quotation in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by writer Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Bloggers who use this term generally oppose President Bush's policies and by using this term imply that Bush's policies are out of touch with reality. Others use the term to draw a contrast with the perceived arrogance of the Bush Administration's unilateral policies, in accordance with the aide's quote.

Protest Pictures

Hey Folks,

I've checked into it. Apparently, everyone on blogger.com is having difficulty uploading pictures.

So!!! You can see ALL the pictures I took at the protest by clicking here:

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/ukulele_man/album?.dir=/8ee5&.src=ph&.tok=phTqClEBY1.6vUWQ

This is NO FUN!! I trust "blogger" will get this working soon!!!

- Uke Man

Today's Protest

Hey Folks!!

The day went well - over a thousand of us said "No" to War & Bush!!

Below, find some photos. I will be adding more once the software starts behaving.

- Uke Man

The People & Signs 

The People 

The Speakers 

The Crowd - 1000+ Strong 

And finally: the BEST T-Shirt !! 

No WAR

 

Imagine! It’s easy if you try.

Hey Folks,

I hope to see you at the protest!! If you can't make it, I'll have pictures and a report Saturday night!! (unless I'm in jail)

- Uke Man

 

A number of Anti-War Activities - Columbus Friday - Sunday

( I'll be at the Goodale march Saturday and performing at the Little Brothers activity Sunday -Uke Man )


Friday, March 17th, 2006, from 6:00 PM. Meet and Greet. An activist get-together with music, poetry, open stage. Location: Victorian Midnight Café at 251 W. Fifth Ave. For more information, contact: http://us.f329.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=connieharrispeace@yahoo.com

Friday, March 17th, 2006, 7:00 – 9:00 PM. Opening of the exhibit: War Paintings by John Sunami. Art and poetry by local artists. Location: Kafe Kerouac, 2250 N. High St. http://www.kafekerouac.com/.

Saturday, March 18th, 2006, 12:oo Noon Gather at Goodale Park * for a short program and then we march to the Ohio Peace Rally at the Ohio Staehouse. Sponsored by Not In Our Name - Columbus
* http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?addr=120+West+Goodale+Blvd&csz=Columbus%2C+Ohio&country=us&new=1&name=&qty=

Saturday, March 18, 2006, 12:00 Noon – 1:00 PM. Interfaith Prayer Service: Prayers of Hope and Healing for Iraq. On the 3rd year anniversary of the attack on Iraq, we will gather together again as communities of diverse faiths to:- pray for peace in the world and in our country- value all life as being precious in the eyes of a loving God- raise concern for U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, as well as armed forces of other nations and civilians who have been killed or injured in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other areas of military conflict in the world- repent for the Iraqi prisoner and detainee abusesLocation: St. John's Evangelical Protestant Church, United Church of Christ, 59 East Mound Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215, http://www.stjohnscolumbus.org/ (March to StatewideStatewide Pro-Peace Rally at the Statehouse Begins at 1:15 PM From the Church) Organized by: Faith Communities Uniting for Peace & Interfaith Association of Central OhioFor More Information:Rev. Deanna Stickley-Miner 614-284-9294Rev. Dr. Leslie Stansbery 614-231-6954Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia 614-210-0591

Saturday, March 18th, 2006, 2:00-3:00 PM. Statewide Rally for Peace, End the War, and Bring the Troops Home Now! A statewide rally to end the war - at the statehouse. Columbus will be hosting participants from all over Ohio who will help us by converging on the statehouse en masse from all over the city to let our government know that this war has got to end. Events will be from Friday, March 17th through Monday, March 20th including marches, the convening event(s) at the statehouse, and direct actions. Gather at Goodale Park (see above), St. John’s (59 E. Mound St.) and at the Free Press Offices (Del Monte Building-Suite 10, 341 S. 3rd @ Mound St.) for a march to the rally at the Statehouse. We will step from there around 1:30 PM.
Sponsored by Central Ohio Peace Network (COPN).

Saturday, March 18th, 2006, 5:00 PM-Midnight. Peace Salon at the Free Press Offices (Del Monte Building-Suite 10, 341 S. 3rd @ Mound St.). Meet with other activist interested in forming an Ohio Peace Network or just relax and enjoy good conversation and entertainment. For more information, contact: http://us.f329.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=connieharrispeace@yahoo.com

Saturday, March 18th, 2006, starting at 10:00 PM. Folk the War. Musicians and more. Location: Bernies Restaurant, 1896 N. High St. (Across from OSU). For more information, contact: http://us.f329.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=connieharrispeace@yahoo.com

Sunday, March, 19th, 2006, 12:00 – 4:00 PM. Peace Gathering at Little Brother’s. Get together to continue networking, open stage, and music. Location: Little Brother’s, 1100 N. High (short north). No alcohol sales - for more information contact http://us.f329.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=connieharrispeace@yahoo.com

Protest Saturday 

Stop Bush's War

March 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Stop Bush's War

By BOB HERBERT
(A ukethanks to Phyll)

"By some estimates," according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, "the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of the [U.S.] invasion has reached six figures — vastly more than have been killed by all international terrorists in all of history. Sanctions on Iraq probably were a necessary cause of death for an even greater number of Iraqis, most of them children."

Not everyone agrees that Iraqi deaths have reached six figures. President Bush gave an estimate of 30,000 not too long ago. That's probably low, but horrendous nevertheless. In any event, there is broad agreement that the number of Iraqis slaughtered has reached into the tens of thousands. An ocean of blood has been shed in Mr. Bush's mindless war, and there is no end to this tragic flow in sight.

Jeffrey Gettleman of The Times gave us the following chilling paragraphs in Tuesday's paper:

"In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

"They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."

Everyone who thought this war was a good idea was wrong and ought to admit it. Those who still think it's a good idea should get therapy.

Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled "Vietnam and the Presidency" was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.

Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is to "impress democracy" on other countries. And he noted something that the public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a brand-new war is upon us: that wars are "inhumane, brutal, callous and full of depravity."

Think Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Think suicide bombers and death squads and roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms or legs or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many thousands dead.

Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that the best way to fight it was with other people's children. That in itself is a form of depravity.

Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam, the author of "The Best and the Brightest," which is not just the best book about America's involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more essential with each passing year. If you read it in the 70's or 80's, read it again. We can all use a refresher course on the link between folly and madness at the highest levels of government, and the all-but-unimaginable suffering it can unleash.

In the book's epilogue, Mr. Halberstam wrote that, among other things, President Johnson "and the men around him wanted to be defined as being strong and tough; but strength and toughness and courage were exterior qualities which would be demonstrated by going to a clean and hopefully antiseptic war with a small nation, rather than the interior and more lonely kind of strength and courage of telling the truth to America and perhaps incurring a good deal of domestic political risk."

That latter kind of toughness is what's needed now. Invading Iraq was a disastrous move by the Bush administration, and there is no satisfactory solution forthcoming. The White House should be working cooperatively with members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the curtain down on U.S. involvement.

Before that can begin to happen, the administration will have to rid itself of the delusion that things are somehow going well in Iraq. The democracy that was supposed to flower in the Iraqi desert and then spread throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush continues to assert that our goal in Iraq is "victory." Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Tim Russert that things were going "very, very well" in Iraq.

They are still crawling toward the mirage. It's time to give reality a chance.

Yes! 

 

Resist!!!

A DANGEROUS TRAJECTORY
(An Open Letter to Progressives From Not In Our Name/Columbus)

GREETINGS... As you know, progressive-minded individuals are increasingly apprehensive about the direction of this country and we share a sense of responsibility to mobilize and alert our friends, neighbors and co-workers to the dangerous situation we’ve seen develop since 9-11.

Under George W. Bush, the U.S. has embarked on a dramatic departure from established international norms of behavior. In addition, there have been serious assaults on long-standing civil liberties at home. Add to the mix an aggressive, well-funded “Christian” theocratic political force, and don’t the alarms start sounding?

Some features of the Bush agenda that progressives everywhere find disturbing include:

The dangerous doctrine of “preemptive” war and its use to justify U.S. military supremacy.

Unjust war and occupation in Iraq, entered into based on disinformation, resulting in over 100,000 Iraqi deaths (half of them women & children) & 2300 U.S. fatalities, with thousands more killed in Afghanistan.

Roundups & detentions of Arabs, Muslims & South Asians.

A chilling of free expression due to compulsory patriotism that views all dissent as suspect.

The policy of “extraordinary rendition”, secret C.I.A. torture centers, torture & abuse at Guantanamo Bay & Abu Ghraib prison.

Intrusive government scrutiny & spying, measures such as the “Patriot Act” & a growing police state threat.

The concentration of unchecked power in the hands of a “Unitary Executive” intent on dominating all three branches of government.

An erosion of rational discourse, scientific research & the teaching of science by theocratic supporters & allies of the current administration, who also target our personal lives & the rights of women on matters of their own reproductive health.

We are not alone in the fear that the Bush regime intends, by these measures, to remold this country, significantly, and for years to come.

WE PLEDGE RESISTANCE TO THIS EXTREMIST AGENDA!


RALLY AGAINST THE IRAQ WAR- SATURDAY, MARCH 18TH!

One very important opportunity is coming up this weekend. On March 18th, the third anniversary of the war in Iraq, people from around Ohio will be gathering at the Statehouse to demand an end to unjust war and occupation in Iraq.

We will start out at Goodale Park, in the short north, a block west of N. High Street, between Goodale and Buttles. From there it’s a short march to the Statehouse.

Come join us!

join us 

Check it out! 

Fresh Market - Fresh Meat 

Victor helps me out! 

Surry Sausage Delight

Hey Folks,

Here’s a heads-up on a Uke Man gastronomical favorite.

The Fresh Market on Henderson Road just west of Reed in Columbus (easily reached off 315 N.) has a great meat department (and a nice selection of other goodies too– I get my ginger jelly there).

My delight at the moment is the “Surry Sausage,” a short little, smoked, fully-cooked sausage – excellent for nibbling!!! I buy a bunch and freeze most of them for retrieval as the stomach gods demand additional sacrifice.

Give ‘em a try!!

- Uke Man

Victor helps me out!

 

Surry Sausage 

Surry Sausage

 

Mmmm. . . Hot Italian Sausage, Sweet Italian Sausage, & Bulk 

And Condi makes a threesome ! 

"Hillary-ous" cartoon

Hey Folks,

I'm not taking ANY position on Hillary, but YOU can have some fun with this!!

http://www.michaelhodges.com/missing.html


- Uke Man

chilling parallels 

The Yankee and the "Texan"

Hey Folks,

If you have been following along with the periodic postings from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, you may have been struck, as I was, with its eerie and sad similarity to our own, present circumstances.

To be perfectly honest, I was taken by surprise in this regard. I knew from earlier readings that the story contained many biting insights into the continuing human condition – that is why I chose to post it - but I was blind-sided by the larger statement exploding before my eyes and in my heart as everything collapses in the last two chapters.

The comparison is chilling.

The Americas of the 19th and 21st centuries have so much to offer the backward, superstitious peoples of the world, and – at least to some extent on some level – both had good intentions. However, in the novel and in the reality of our lives, the road to hell is paved with those “good” intentions

The disparity between the science, technology, and power of the Yankee, on the one hand, and the superstition, broadswords and pikes of the knights, on the other, suggests the technological disparity between the “one remaining” super-power’s death-dealing arsenal and the terrorists’ tinker-toy devices.

The Yankee’s naïve faith in his ability to establish a republic in Arthur’s England, the Bush administration childish faith in its ability to establish “democracy” in the Middle East; the willingness of both to use force to achieve their ends; the willingness of both to kill - and to kill as many as is required; the egotistical pride of the Yankee and the Neo-cons, and their refusal or failure to severely examine their own motives; the perversion of the good they could offer, turned to deadly ends; all this and more thunder through the caverns of irony and echo back again.

According to literary critics, Twain originally intended to have fun with his Arthurian adventure, and we can see that in the story, but the reality of his characters inevitably turned a utopian dream into a nightmare. Likewise, the happy and democratic utopia the Neo-cons and Bush believed they could so easily and quickly bring into being has become a Frankenstein’s monster feeding on its master.

In both cases as the bodies pile higher and higher, victory is declared – mission accomplished. In the novel, though, a point is reached when reality can no longer be denied. As Clarence says in the end, “We were in a trap, you see – a trap of our own making.” They had gotten themselves into a situation from which they could not escape; the diseased corpses of their victims would kill them if they stayed, and the living enemies remaining would destroy them if they left. In the end, all was lost.

We are not quite there yet, but – the Bush rhetoric notwithstanding – we are close. The bodies pile higher – ours and theirs – the declaration of “mission accomplished” rings hollow, and louder with each passing day. The optimistic predictions of happy people celebrating their liberation and showering our troops with candy and flowers seem demented now. The administration’s Tom Sawyer / Madison Avenue marketing productions sold Americans but not Iraqis; and contrary to the Whitehouse’s preference, the reality of the situation is not controlled by imperial edicts.

Just as the Yankee failed to think his scheme all the way through; and, thus, ends up without an “exit strategy”; the Bush regime has placed our nation in a deadly war which – we are told – could last a generation. Likewise, even if we leave sooner, we will pay a dear price. As with the Yankee’s fifty-two boys, our utopian scheme has created, encouraged, and increased the numbers of so many enemies (as well as demonstrating to them the ACTUAL power of the “one remaining superpower”) that the likelihood of financial, technological, and terrorist animosity and belligerence is terribly multiplied.

Worst of all, as we watch the Yankee in his death throes, we realize that he has lost all the things he loved and treasured in life: peace, love, and peace of mind; his wife, and child – lost! Gone! He dies dodging the nightmare he himself has conjured.

For our part, the utopian schemers in Washington have destroyed or degraded so much that America has always claimed to treasure. The military industrial complex is enriched while the middle class is being decimated and the working class impoverished. We have, like Hitler, embraced "preemptive war." The Geneva Convention is declared “quaint” and “outdated.” The Constitution is described by the President as “just a piece of paper.” Prejudice, fear, and hatred are valued political tools. Voter rolls and electronic machines are manipulated and various “difficulties” manufactured to thwart honest elections. All this and more.

Well, the Yankee had one benefit that is denied to a nation: he escaped to death and got free of the nightmare. The nation will carry on, stuck with what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Kkkarl Rove, and the Neo-cons, et al have wrought.

- Uke Man

p.s. Soon I will compile the entire Yankee postings into one posting for anyone who missed out or would like to read them all consecuatively..

 

Protest the WAR - Saturday !!

He Folks,

The poster directly below says:

notinourname.net


On the 3rd anniversary of the war in Iraq,
join people from all over Ohio in a march
from Goodale Park
to rally at the Statehouse !!

Protest !
12 Noon
Saturday, March 18
Goodale Park

Join the ancient Uke Man !!
(more soon)

This coming Saturday !!

 

www.alienstevens.com 

Uke Man as Movie "Star"

Hey Folks,

It may have escaped your attention, but the Uke Man is a Movie "Star" !!

Yessireebob!!!! Thanks to my good friend Alien Stevens ( www.alienstevens.com ). Yep! In my first major roll I appeared in Auraprint, the saga of a lonely night-shift crew at the Sunnyside Suites Motel.

Mr Steven's script, echoing Shakespear, incorporates a movie within a movie; and I play the producer of that movie - Richard's Gear - Warhol eat your heart out.

The film, which debuted at the Wexner Center Film festival, is seventeen minutes long and takes only a few minutes to download (on broadband - a good bit longer on dial-up), but is worth the trouble (if you ask me).

In any case, take a shot at it (no pun intended).

Click here:
http://www.alienstevens.com/vid_aud_pix/artflixx_m/auraprint.mov

(no animals were harmed in the production of Auraprint)

- Uke Man

Oh yeah. Bleed Blues runs during the titles and that's my Eldorado too!

"The damned human race." 

Twain - the Conclusion

Hey Folks,

I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 39th and final entry) .

I will follow up sometime soon with a bit of commentary.

- Uke Man


Last time, we read the sad, final words of the "Stranger's" manuscript which was shared with the author, Mark Twain. The book ends with a “Final P.S. by M.T.”, Mark Twain, the fictional persona of Samuel Clemens, who has been sharing the story with us from the start.

“The DAWN was come when I laid the Manuscript aside. The rain had almost ceased, the world was gray and sad, the exhausted storm was sighing and sobbing itself to rest. I went to the stranger’s room, and listened at his door, which was slightly ajar; I could hear his voice, and so I knocked. There was no answer, but I still heard the voice. I peeped in. The man lay on his back, in bed, talking brokenly but with spirit, and punctuating with his arms, which he thrashed about, restlessly, as sick people do in delirium. I slipped in softly, and bent over him. His mutterings and ejaculations went on. I spoke – merely a word, to call his attention. His glassy eyes and ashy face were alight in an instant. With pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome:

“O, Sandy, you are come at last, - how I have longed for you! Sit by me – do not leave me – never leave me again, Sandy, never again. Where is your hand?- give it me, dear, let me hold it – there – now, all is well, all is peace, and I am happy again – we are happy again, isn’t it so, Sandy? You are so dim, so vague, you are but a mist, a cloud, but you are here, and that is blessedness sufficient; and I have your hand; don’t take it away – it is for only a little while, I shall not require it long . . . . . Was that the child? . . . Hello-Central! . . . . She doesn’t answer. Asleep, perhaps? Bring her when she wakes, and let me touch her hands, her face, her hair, and tell her good-bye . . . . . . . Sandy! . . . . Yes, you are there.I lost myself a moment, and I thought you were gone . . . . . . Have I been sick long? It must be so; it seems months to me. And such dreams! Such strange and awful dreams, Sandy! Dreams that were as real as reality – delirium, of course, but so real! Why, I thought the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn’t get home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I, and a handful of my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England! But even that was not the strangest. I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even that was as real as the rest! Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! Between me and my home and my friends! Between me and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the living! It was awful – awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy. Ah, watch by me, Sandy – stay by me every moment – don’t let me go out of my mind again; death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with the torture of those hideous dreams – I cannot endure that again . . . . . . Sandy? . . . .”

He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death. Presently his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign I knew that his end was at hand. With the first suggestion of the death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed to listen; then he said:

“A bugle? . . . . It is the king! The drawbridge, there! Man the battlements! – turn out the –“

He was getting up his last “effect;” but he never finished it.

"Who could ever have guessed that!!??"

Recent (2006) Republican discovery: " The Bush administration is unconscionable, irresponsible, vindictive, and inept." - Bruce Bartlett of the right-wing National Review 

"A Cynic is someone who sees the world as it is, rather than as it is 'supposed to be' " ---------------------------------------- variously attributed

Hey Folks,

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I knew Bush was an ass the moment I laid eyes on him. I knew almost as quickly that the NeoConeheads pulling his strings were whacko egotists playing at running the world the way it “ought to be run.” I knew Kkkarl Rove was a brilliant but amoral neurotic focused only on “winning” his self-esteem, that Rumsfeld was a skilled obfuscator but an idiot, and that Condie Rice was so grateful for her life-style and privilege that – at the administration’s request – she’d call “black” “white” and BELIEVE it.

It’s taken me longer, though, to figure out why so many Americans were taken in by what I saw as so obviously rotten. At this point I think people wanted to believe what they wanted to believe – faith over science; that, along with the long-standing practice of fearful, disconnected, uninformed people putting their faith and their destiny into the hands of a hero, a champion, a savior – which makes it all easy (no thinking, no responsibility, no uncertainty, and lessened fear). Fine, unless you put your faith in morons and neurotic beasts.

Which takes us to the Stephen Crane poem I’d like to share with you, which is followed by a Paul Krugman column concerned with the question of WHEN things have been seen clearly, when they SHOULD HAVE been seen clearly, and the import of when they actually WERE perceived.

- Uke Man

A learned man came to me once.
He said:”I know the way, - come.”
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.
Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet.
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried: “I am lost.”

*************Stephen Crane


March 10, 2006
The Conservative Epiphany
By PAUL KRUGMAN
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."
It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck d uring one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he's saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the admini stration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Mr. Bartlett's book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration's fiscal policy. Well, the administration's pattern of fiscal dishonesty and irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who understands budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the selling of the 2001 tax cut — obviously fraudulent budget projections, transparently deceptive advertising about who would benefit and the use of blatant accounting gimmicks to conceal the plan's true cost — was as bad as anything that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before the war — and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that stampeded Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The administration's nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq and 9/11 was also a dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an unnecessary war.

The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.

 

Twain - Clarence writes

Hey Folks,

I’ve been sharing Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court with you (this is the 38th entry, and we are nearing the end) .

Chapter 44 – “A Postscript by Clarence” - The Yankee’s last entry ended:

“But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.”

As Clarence explains, the Yankee – as he has done several times throughout the story – naively misjudges the nature of backward humanity:

“He proposed that we two go out and see if any help could be afforded the wounded. I was strenuous against the project.”

But the Yankee (“the Boss”) insisted and:

“The first wounded man who appealed for help, was sitting, with his back against a dead comrade. When the boss bent over him and spoke to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him.”

After dispatching the assailant:

“We carried the Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was not very serious, the best care we could. In this service we had the help of Merlin, though we did not know it. He was disguised as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife. In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he had appeared a few days after the Boss was hurt, and offered to cook for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving. The Boss had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with finishing up his record.

We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed. We were in a trap, you see – a trap of our own making. If we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defences, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered. The Boss recognized this; we all recognized it. If we could go to one of those new camps and patch up some kind of terms with the enemy – yes, but the Boss could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands. Others were taken down, and still others. To-morrow –

To-morrow. It is here. And with it the end. About midnight I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about the Boss’s head and face, and wondered what it meant. . . . The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing toward the door. I called out –

“Stop! What have you been doing?”

She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:

“Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered! These others are perishing – you also. Ye shall all die in this place – every one – except him. He sleepeth now – and shall sleep thirteen centuries. I am Merlin!”

Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one of our wires. His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still laughing. I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until the corpse turns to dust.

The Boss has never stirred – sleeps like a stone. If he does not wake to-day, we shall understand what kind ofsleep it is, and his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it. As for the rest of us – well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and loyally hide the Manuscript with the Boss, our dear good chief, whose property it is, be he alive or dead.

END OF MANUSCRIPT.




- Uke Man

The Gold at the End of the Economic Rainbow !!!

 

Get out your thinking caps & pitchforks

Hey Folks,

I just watched the evening news on NBC. The friendly souls there reported on the latest employment data.

They said new jobs had increased by two-hundred and some thousand, and that the “lion’s share" of these jobs were in the “service sector.” Remember that a few years ago when the jobs started disappearing at high speed we were told that it would take FOUR-hundred thousand jobs a month for a period of years to recoup the losses. We have seldom –if ever – reached that level (although the radio broadcasts I’d heard earlier today called the two-hundred thousand level “good news.”

Remember also that the largest part of the jobs lost THEN were living wage jobs, but the service sector jobs providing the “good news” are subsistence wage jobs.

BUT

Here is what drove the Uke Man insane (and I’m NOT making this up):

Earlier on the radio news programs, with a straight voice, after reporting the “good news” of increased job offerings, they hurriedly mumbled that “the unemployment rate had increased.”

They didn’t choke, hiccup, cough, explain, or apologize. They just “reported” their contradictory tripe and moved on. THAT gave ME pause, but the 6:30 TV news would top it.

Brian Williams, like his radio pals, reported the increased number of jobs, but HE explained that the unemployment rate had gotten worse because the increase in the number of jobs had caused more people to look for work!

Now, Folks! Read that again:

the unemployment rate had gotten worse because the increase in the number of jobs had caused more people to look for work!

I’m sorry, but THAT is INSANE SHIT!!!

Where does it come from? Who told the media such crap? (Yeah, I know there’s some technical bullshit about the way “they” figure unemployment and I know “they” can explain it away because people “give up” on employment; so they aren’t REALLY unemployed even though they don’t have a job and want a job but can’t find a job–it all makes sense if you buy their underlying principles [which are designed to provide them with shit to feed the talking heads and to, in turn, provide a rationalle for feeding them that shit if anyone ever calls “them” on it] ).

But folks, it DOESN’T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE – unless you are in bed with “them” – or unless you are one of those deluded people who thinks Donald Rumsfeld's "answers" make sense .

What does it say about the media that they uncritically pass insane shit like this along?

What does it say about us if we don’t even notice it when they fuck us – and not just the politicians, but also the friendly, fresh faced men and voluptuous women of network news who smile so nicely as they slip it in!

Wake up, folks!

There’s a protest on March 19 – Be there!!!

More on that soon.

- Uke Man

"Dubya needs discipline !!!" 

"Dubya needs discipline !!!" 

Can Bush even spell "Discipline"?

News item:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush proposed a new law Monday that would help him curb spending by proposing vetoes of specific items in spending bills -- authority that the Supreme Court struck down eight years ago but which would be structured differently under Bush's plan.

"Forty-three governors have this line-item veto in their states," Bush said. "Now it's time to bring this important tool of fiscal discipline to Washington, D.C."


Right!!!!
The boy-President wants the line-item veto to discipline the budget!

Right!!!
This is the half-wit who has created the greatest deficit of all time!!! He has discipline???

Right!!!

This is the frat-boy - traveling on Daddy’s nickel (and the nickels of Daddy’s pals here and in Saudi Arabia) – who has already screwed the least among us via Medicaid “reform” and the Prescription Drug Fiasco –

who has already gotten thousands of our children killed and tens of thousands maimed over a grandiose, unnecessary, counterproductive war –

who sent the soldiers off understaffed and poorly equipped, and has reduced the benefits for them when they return –

who wants grandpa’s retirement reduced and put off longer –

who wants more jobs sent off to India –

who applauds the creation of “WAL-MART” jobs as replacements for manufacturing jobs –

who, although having attended Harvard & Yale remains uneducated, but demands that all kids pass his bullshit No Child’s Behind test to graduate from high school.

Yeah!!! He has good, disciplined judgment !!!

Who do you think the Chimpster is going to decide can do without?
The “Haves” and the “Have Mores”?

Ha !!!!

If that son-of-a-bitch (and I DO mean that literally, Bar!!) gets the “Line Item Veto,” he’ll just fuck us all a lot faster !!


- Uke Man

p.s. It should be interesting how this goes – watch the Dems ! This proposal is totally insane ON THE FACE OF IT !! See if anybody besides me says so.

Gemini

 

the 4th Poem of the Audition

****** Gemini

Gemini has two faces
With opposing views
(sometimes they make the effort to commune)

Mostly

One makes demands, and
The other makes amends
(neither will let the other rest)

Indeed !

One sees what gods see, and
The other mourns humanity.

And whenever

(on those notable occasions)
They turn inward upon themselves
To kiss,

They bite instead.

 

Bush Revealed on Letterman

Hey Folks,

You HAVE to see this. I’ve tried all sorts of things to get this to you; nothing worked until this. Originally I saw a clip that concentrated on Bush. There was no way that worked to put it here. So, here’s a link to where you can see this guy’s whole bit; John Madden, Al Pacino, AND Dubya (Clinton too). Click it and hang in for the end. (a Ukethanks to Linda)

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/frank_caliendo_1.html

- Uke Man

 

Clothes make the man 

Twain - Back to the Future

Hey Folks,

I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you (this is the 37th entry) .

Chapter 44 – “A Postscript by Clarence” - The “conceit” or “gimmick” that has made this whole story possible is the “transposition of epochs – and bodies”; the 19th century Yankee is laid out cold in a New England factory-fight, only to wake up in 6th century England.

As part of this “conceit” we also “know” that – except for a brief part at the beginning and again at the end, the entire story is presented from an ancient manuscript shared with Twain by the “Stranger” he meets touring Warwick Castle. Twain has been "reading" the manuscript to us throughout the night.

Furthermore, we know by now the import of the Stranger’s cryptic comments uttered on the second page:

(The castle tour guide is speaking to the tourists)

“Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramour le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain mail in the left breast; can’t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms – perhaps maliciously by Cromwell’s soldiers.”

My acquaintance smiled – not a modern smile, but one that must have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago – and muttered, apparently to himself:

“Wit ye well, I saw it done.” Then, after a pause, added: “ I did it myself.” [see: http://www.ukuleleman.net/2006/01/twain_26.html ]


The “Stranger,” the owner of the ancient manuscript, is – indeed - the Yankee himself, somehow re- transpositioned into the 19th century.

In the previous Twain posting we read the Yankee’s final entry to that manuscript:


“Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.”

Next time we’ll hear from Clarence, whose postscript completes the Stranger’s manuscript (which, in turn is followed by a "Final P.S. by M.T.")

- Uke Man

Third Poem from Columbus Arts Festival Audition

(this is one of two cut by the previously unannounced "2 poems" rule)




**********Clothes Make the Man #1


Clothes make the man

So, when I die
Bury my clothes.

When I murder
Arrest my clothes

Execute them
Or
(if the Republicans are out)
Give them life imprisonment without chance of parole

Make love to my clothes;
take them off caressingly,
and take the money from the pockets
(they won’t notice)

Impregnate my clothes
and bring forth progeny
of patches and rags,

a gauche immortality

spawn of moths’ balls.

" Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know there are known knows; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknows; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know - so, just the facts, ma'm."

Just the facts, ma'm

Hey Folks,

These creeps never stop. Today, a right-wing Prince of Prevarication, Michael Barone, wrote under a headline “Rhetoric aside, Saddam’s link to al-Qaida is backed by facts.”

He doesn’t give any facts to support this. He simply argues that Democrats and intelligence/career government professionals are looking out for themselves. He claims that a lot of supportive facts can be found someday, and quotes Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfield as saying, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Barone adds, “We do not know that there was such collaboration. But we also do not know that there was not.”

Well, I like that. I can use that. How’s this?

Michael Barone and Donald Rumsfeld’s predilection for sex with sheep is backed by the facts. Their denials and those of their professional friends are self serving. Absence of evidence is not absence of evidence. The truth will eventually be demonstrated. We do not know that there were incidences of beastophelia, but we also do not know that there was not !

- Uke Man

"Move along, panhandler!!!!!!"

 

Letter to the Dispatch

To the Editor,

Tuesday’s editorial “Good investment” says, “In the heart of Downtown, property owners in the Capital Crossroads district pay to employ green-shirted 'ambassadors' who keep sidewalks clean, answer questions and discourage panhandlers.”

How does one “discourage panhandlers”? Are green-shirted employees of private businesses legally authorized to “discourage panhandlers”? Could distant, rival businesses legally employ panhandlers to discourage sales by their downtown competition?

If the Green-Shirts successfully move the panhandlers along, where do they go?

I’m all for businesses mowing their grass, cleaning up trash, and sweeping their sidewalks; that’s real for everyone and solves problems. But “discouraging panhandlers” (i.e. forcing them out of one particular location into another) serves some at the expense of others and ignores the problem.

These “ambassadors” might be wonderful folks, but the use of privately financed “enforcers” is a slippery slope. Green Shirts now; Brown Shirts later?

- Uke Man

******************************** WAL*MART
STUPORCENTER ? 

The Second Poem from the Columbus Arts Fest Audition

Everyday Low Prices at Wal-Mart

Long ago (much more than 7 thousand years ago)
billions of years ago, actually (although it’s just a theory
whose opponents know [for a certainty]
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin)

elemental bits of happenstance and serendipity
were consumed in the bowels of the earth and
(egged on by gravitational passion)
consummated their periodic elemental coitus.

Pricked on against rest
(by overwhelming inertia) and
blessed by the limitless permutations of time,
gestation (eventually) brought forth
primordial Ooze

from the crack of the Mother
earth

and it ate its insensitive elemental brethren
(which was no bother to anyone)
and eventually

(consumed by passion)

foolishly Knew itself
(though a child at heart)
and complicated things further

And

with knowledge
complications geometrically progressed

until

All ate each other
(brothers, sisters, parents, and children)
All & None: innocent
All & None: guilty
Consuming, consummating, and consumed

Etcetera

FINALLY

(we would like to say)
WE (upright folks that we are) appeared on the shelf
to be Known and to Know.

NEW & IMPROVED
(the best yet)
(god’s pet)
(no longer wet
behind the ears)

Dedicated
to consume and be consumed
in the Ultimate consummation
of our carnival knowledgeand

to put an end
to this Mobius trip.

So

Eat me sister
and I’ll eat you
and let us consummate our complications
so that What (we do not know)
shall (blessed by the permutations of time)
carry on (perhaps)

the splendor of
the consumer.

Everyday low prices at Wal-Mart

nearing the end 

Twain - Victory???

Hey Folks,

I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 36th entry) .

Chapter 43 – Last time, the Yankee described the early effect of his several electrified fences: “Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men!”

Then he electrified all the fences: “I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks. There was a groan you could hear ! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.”

Now, here is the rest of the chapter:

“A glance showed that the rest of the enemy – perhaps ten thousand strong – were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing forward to the assault. Consequently we had them all! And had them past help. Time for the last act of the tragedy. I fired the three appointed revolver shots – which meant:

‘Turn on the water!’

There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.

‘Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!’

The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment, the three-fourths reached it and plunged over – to death by drowning.

Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here."

Requiem

 

Poetry Audition

Hey Folks,

I got to audition last Saturday for the Columbus Arts Fest Poetry selection committee. I had four poems ready to read (well within the 5 minute limit), but because the process was running behind, I only got to read two.

I'll share all four with you (but one at a time).

Here's one:


My reclining chair broke his hip last week,
And being as he was old and had seen better days
That was it.
No sense in reconstructive surgery.

Tuesday he goes to the curb,
To await the undertaker,
With nothing to look forward to but
the resurrection of the upholstery.

“Remember chair that thou art dust
and to dust thou shalt return.”

It hurts, what with all those years of intimacy,
To send him away, but what could I do?

I ache, in part, because
I’ve become, with age, a Lazy Boy too.

Maybe when my hip breaks,
The kids can get another Daddy at the store
And, come Tuesday, take me to the curb.



- Uke Man

Bob, a rose between two thorns

file photo 

Hey Folks,

We had a GREAT time and a GREAT SHOW at Larry’s Saturday !!

Ukulele Girl and sidekick Aaron were a crowd pleaser, and – in his turn - Uke Man was so busy playing, singing, and having fun that he neglected to draft a photographer to snap Him & the Band!!

Oh well, we’ll all just have to do with what there is to share.

All the best!

- Uke Man

Jon & Karen

 

Karen

 

Three Derelicts & a Lady

Bobby-Ray, Elizabeth, Ty, & Pete 

Sarah & Aaron wowed the croud

 

Dick Mackey, renowned singer and friend stopped by

 

 

Twain - The Battle Continues - part 2

Hey Folks,

I’ve been re-reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court and sharing pieces of Twain’s political commentary with you here (this is the 35th entry) .

Chapter 43 – We last saw the Yankee and Clarence investigating, under the cover of darkness, the effect of their electrified defences.

“Our camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead – a bulwark, a breastwork, of corpses, you may say. . .

I sent a current through the third fence, now; and almost immediately through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up. I believed the time was come, now, for my climax; I believed that that whole army was in our trap. Anyway it was high time to find out. So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.

Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn’t lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties; then they’d have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks. There was a groan you could hear! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.”

To the Limo Born

 

And there was a large number of overprivileged idiots in Dublin who, nevertheless, fawned on this fool as he drove by in his limo !

from Rolling Stone
Feb 28, 2006 4:48 PM
Simpleton In Chief

Most Americans desperately (if secretly) wish to believe that George W. Bush possesses a deeper competence, one that doesn't evidence itself in his bungled speech or his Barney Fife demeanor.

But J. Paul Bremer's My Year in Iraq (recapped in the New York Review of Books) paints a picture of a president who truly is as callow as he seems:

In Bremer's account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq's ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: "It's important to have someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq." According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush's candidate for president of Iraq's interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had "been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition."

Friday, April 07, 2006
DOUGLAS SOUTHGATE

Alarm over immigration has reached a fevered crescendo. Congressmen talk of fortifying our southern border. News anchors worry aloud that migrants are bringing in diseases such as leprosy. A few even suggest that Texas, California and the states in between are becoming part of Mexico (again).


Not too many years from now, however, we are apt to look back on the immigration debate of 2006 and wonder what the hyperventilation was all about. In all likelihood, we will find that charged rhetoric on the issue peaked just about when Mexicans were moving to the United States in the greatest numbers.

The argument that migration from Mexico – the origin of about threequarters of the new arrivals in this country – is likely to trail off rests on solid demographic and economic realities.

Like the rest of the developing world, our neighbor to the south has undergone a profound demographic transition in recent decades. The first part of the transition was a sharp drop in mortality, thanks to improved sanitation services and water supplies and, above all else, the use of pharmaceuticals. Like other people around the world, Mexicans have reacted to this happy change by procreating less.

The decline in human fertility has been remarkable – much faster, by the way, than the reduction in family size that had occurred a few decades earlier in the United States. As of the early 1960s, Mexican women bore nearly seven children each. Twenty years later, the total fertility rate had fallen to four births per woman. Today the rate is about two per woman, which is the replacement level.

As the norm of small families is sustained, demographic expansion in Mexico will abate. Chances are the country’s population will stabilize in three or four decades. However, high fertility as recently as the 1980s means that many young Mexicans are now entering the work force. There are many more of them than the number of available jobs. Better mannered than young Frenchmen, they do not respond to economic adversity by rioting. Instead, they decamp for the United States, where the work that awaits them offers wages that are attractive by Mexican standards.

Just as day follows night, recent declines in fertility are sure to cause the number of young Mexicans seeking jobs in the United States eventually to fall off. Moreover, market forces will adjust in ways that diminish the incentives for migration. Mexican newspapers carry articles about labor scarcities in selected sectors of the national economy. Such scarcities are bound to push up wages, thereby diminishing the cross-border gap in earnings.

Something else that lessens the incentives for migration is that intermediate-sized Mexican cities are attracting investment. The North American Free Trade Agreement is partly responsible. In addition, single-party rule came to an end during the 1990s, which means that local office holders must now compete for votes. In cities such as Puebla and Queretaro, which I visited in March, mayors and other officials seek support these days by improving garbage collection and other services, which in turn attracts investment and creates employment.

Demographic transition takes a while to play out and market adjustments tend to be below the radar screen, while illegal migrants hopping over a fence are not. But we must keep in mind the demographic and economic realities that are bound to cause migration to ebb, even if governments do nothing.

Sure, it is reasonable to oblige illegals to take their place in line behind people applying for work visas and citizenship in the proper way, pay fines for having entered the United States illegally and learn the language. Mexico’s government, by the way, demands this much and more of foreigners moving to that country. And if immigration benefits the U.S. economy, as various studies indicate, while burdening selected communities – those trying to educate large numbers of children who do not speak English – then federal assistance for such communities is in order.

But there is no need for mass criminalization or deportation of undocumented workers. Neither do we need to build the sort of barrier that Israel erected.

As President Bush evidently appreciates, extreme proposals of this sort strain a bilateral relationship that is important to us in myriad ways. The stakes involved are too great for uninformed, populist grandstanding.

Douglas Southgate is a professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics at Ohio State University.

southgate . 1 @osu.edu

See YOU at Larry's

 

Last Chance for Uke Man & his Prodigals at Larry's

Hey Folks,

All seven of us don’t get out to play together as much as we used to
(I blame it on Yoko; others just say I’m old, senile, and smell funny).

Anyway. You can catch us – the whole damned band – AND Ukulele Girl too

TONIGHT (Saturday) at Larry’s !!!

see all the details in the posting three spots below

- Uke Man

"Ossifer! Arrest that band!! They're bombing!!" 

Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse !

News report:

“A music fan's bicycle put the Ohio University campus on high alert Thursday morning.

OU says around 5:30 a.m., a mountain bicycle chained outside a campus business caught the attention of the university's [simple-minded] police department.

The bike had a sticker on it that said, "This Bike is a Pipe Bomb."

Four university buildings were closed for hours and the Columbus police bomb squad was called in.

Its members determined there was no bomb, and an all-clear was given by 9 a.m.

OU now says it turns out [duh] that “This Bike is a Pipe Bomb” is the name of a rock band.”


The student – who simply posted a sticker advertising a favorite band - is being charged and will pay for the local gendarme’s ignorance- once again demonstrating that “the ignorance of ‘the Law’ is no excuse.

- Uke Man

The Fruitcake Lady

Watch out! 

A Great Video

Hey Folks,

Do you know the Fruitcake Lady? If so, enough said !
If not, you MUST check this out !!!

https://home.comcast.net/~jfmelnick/fruitcakelady.wmv

- Uke Man

Appearances are deceiving !!!

Cut loose Saturday at Larry's !! 

Uke Man & his Prodigal Sons at Larry's

Hey Folks !!

Ukulele Man & his Prodigal Sons

Will be appearing at the one & only

Larry’s

2040 N. High Street - (614) 299-6010

( it was broken-in and revered when the ancient Uke Man had hair and was studying hard at OSU)

This Saturday - March 4

(the whole DAMNED BAND – all 7 of us !!)

TWO SETS – into the morning !!

AND:

Ukulele Girl (Sarah Asher)

Sarah goes on around 10:00; then you’re stuck with us until closing!!

Come join us (who knows when you’ll get another chance!!)

- Uke Man

Ukulele Man & his Prodigal Sons

 

and Ukulele Girl too

 

North Market's "Curds & Whey" !!

the fabulous North Market is located between N. High and Front Streets, across from the Convention Center (59 Spruce Street). 

Hey Folks,

I have a friend I’d like you to meet: Michael Kast, proprietor of the North Market’s premier cheese emporium, “Curds & Whey.”

You’ve seen his picture on this blog already – his shop is, as I pointed out a while back, just a few steps from the Joy of Soy shop - where Sarah Asher, “Ukulele Girl,” can often be found.

Thanks to my young English pen-pal, James, I recently started on a quest to discover REAL cheese (not totally unrelated to my earlier quest to discover the proper pronunciation of “provolone” [pro-voe-LOW-neigh] as documented in the archives – more of a language endeavor).

Being totally ignorant (except in regard to Velveta and Homer Simpson individually wrapped slices), it was trial and error for a while. I wandered here and there, catching as catch can, and then I found the friendly, helpful owner of “Curds & Whey.”

Now I can relax, knowing that when I’ve finally devoured my latest adventure in cheese-dom, I can drop by the North Market again, and Michael will guide me to my next dairy delight.

In addition to that, Mike’s shop offers a complete array of CaJohn’s Gourmet hot sauces.

I’m tellin’ ya, CaJohn’s “Chipolte” hot sauce is to die for. Hot enough, but not too hot - no vinegar twang - just a rich, warm, and tasty accent to your meal. AND it’s created right here in central Ohio!

My son Travis lives in Manchester, New Hampshire He knows I like hot foods and when I visited at Christmas time he presented me with three different bottles of hot sauce.

Guess what!! The three hot sauces he bought me there in Manchester, New Hampshire, were ALL CaJohn creations, created right here in Columbus, Ohio.

Check them out at Curds & Whey – especially CaJohn’s “Chipolte” sauce. It’s great on whatever treat you’re having along with Michael’s superb cheese!

Stop by the shop and tell Mike the Uke Man sent you.
He'll smile.


- Uke Man

Michael Kast

your happy, helpful North Market Cheesemonger !! 

Michael Knows Cheese !!! 

Ohhhhh, CHEESE !!!!!

 

Just a few of CaJohn's Gems

 

 

Uke Man's Favorite

CaJohn's Chipotle Gourmet
. . . . . . hot sauce . . . . . . 

Stop by and chat !!

 

Yum !!!

 

Pope "Eggs[& Sperm]" Benedict to the modern world: "Eat me!"