RuthCalabria
Rookie
- Aug 30, 2008
- 6
- 1
- 1
Dear Friends,
I don't have to be a Nobel Prize economist to see how deep this economic downturn is going to be. Nor do I have to be a Pulitzer Prize historian to tell you that deep economic downturns lead to revolutions and world wars. The opening chapters of the Barbra Tuchman World War I classic, The Guns of August, and the newsreels of that era which show the unemployed of France, England and Germany happily marching off to trench warfare make that perfectly clear. And World War II, which raised the casualty level from five to fifty million and brought on Hiroshima, was preceded by the Great Depression as obviously as sunrise is preceded by dawn. And we see the bloody French Revolution that condemned tens of thousands of aristocrats to be drowned in the rivers of Paris and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it springing from the massive economic downturn made famous by Marie Antoinette's let them eat cake phrase.
But this current worldwide economic contraction we are in isn't going to cause those kinds of problems because we have an anti-war, people-caring President Obama at the helm of our wobbly Death Star. But let's not relax with our plastic Jesus so fast. Isn't Obama's reappointment of Bush's war hawk Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and his refusal to follow through on the tax hikes for the wealthy he promised telling us that the biggest scoundrel in presidential history may be about to be followed by its biggest coward.
We spent thousands of dollars of our meager savings helping to get you elected, President Obama, and hope you take our advice. The house of cards America has become is about to crash down on your head on Inauguration Day the minute you take your hand off the Bible. You're going to have to grow up fast and see things realistically if you really want to keep people in their homes and bread on the table and rioting from happening in the streets. You're going to have to make changes in income distribution that will, indeed, amount to socialism and changes in the anti-terror, warlike attitude of this country that will have your conservative friends who stole the 700 billion and caused the crisis with their trillion dollar mortgage scam calling you a traitor.
If you blow it, even if not to the extent that takes us all the way to Armageddon, your ineptitudes will open the door to a lunatic Palin to follow the coward, Obama, and the scoundrel, Bush, who will delight in crushing riots in the street and in finishing Bush's job of slaughtering the pagan Muslims and in pressing the button of nuclear war if God wills it. If you have any chance of keeping these worst case scenarios from being tomorrow's news headlines, you will be paying a lot of attention to the Clintons, the one good choice that Axelrod and Michelle made for you.
If the possibility of these hells breaking loose strikes you as an excessive reading of history and current events, please get your science advisor to carefully look at the mathematics of evolution on matrix-evolutions com. Derived from the century old accepted work of the classical population biologists, R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, it makes clear that a population over its resource capacity, as can come about suddenly for humans from a deep economic downturn, employs atypical behaviors to reduce its numbers back to ecologic equilibrium. For hunting species such as piranha, who exhibit this population reducing activity as cannibalism when prey are scarce during the dry season on the Amazon, these sporadic atypical behaviors get very bloody. Such war of all against all for the sake of survival precisely parallels the common sense historical correlation of humans making war on each other during hard times as bio-logical competition for dwindling resources and territory, a phenomenon which can get particularly ghastly when nuclear weapons are available for the competition.
We were living in Acapulco, Mexico, back in 2007, in exile from the Bush version of Orwell's "1984", when the unprecedentedly two year long presidential debates began. Was this paraded charade of democracy put on by corporate media to distract us all from King George's mad slaughter of Muslims and young American kids in Iraq? Or, our ever paranoid minds inquired, were the debates a way of introducing a pleasantly two faced Oreo named Barack Obama into the political theatre as another chit for the ruling class to control our minds and thinking with?
No, damn it. Senator Obama was actually talking courageously about the war. And saying things that were true, a bold political strategy we had not seen in decades. Our three generation family started working around the clock sending out emails to make sure the Clintons didn't swipe the nomination, 40,000 of them the weekend before Super Tuesday. Great! Barack won! But what if old time Hillary manages to convince the old time superdelegates to foil the vote of the people and steal the nomination at the Denver convention?
Long time political activists, we should have known better. But like millions of others who became excited by the Obama inflatable doll reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln, we dedicated our lives to his election and made up our minds to make the trek North to Denver to make sure that Obama and the people won this time around. As is made clear with photos on matrix-evolutions com taken a week before we left that we were doing very well where we were before being so stupid as to return to the United States to campaign for this newly created man of the people, Senator, call me Barack, Obama.
Once arrived in Denver, we headed straight for the Obama campaign office downtown to let them know we were here to do our part. But it took about all of ten minutes talking to see that we were not a very good fit with these organizationally disciplined Obama functionaries whose sense of America's problems was as deep as a Tuesday afternoon grocery list. They did not seem to appreciate our enthusiastic support for Obama's message of hope and we thought there was something genuinely detestable about that. But that was no big deal, we told ourselves having come two thousand miles to support this new messiah. People are people and each has their own way of looking at things, we told ourselves having come two thousand miles.
Our rosy view was also shaken at this time by the ABC debate where the moderators treated Obama with piss-on-your-shoe disrespect and his instinctive response was but the public wince of a mouse kicked in the stomach. What we saw was not the hero of the ages we had come to fight for. But maybe it's a matter of campaign strategy rather than character we told ourselves having come two thousand miles.
Obama's pandering to the right by wearing the flag pin he correctly first described as a false symbol of patriotism added to our doubt. But our sense of Obama as a typical hypocrite politician was yet minimal when we decided to go straight to West Virginia to directly help his chances of beating Hillary in the primary there. Whatever Obama's negatives, our spending thousands of dollars of our less than robust savings to help get him nominated was strongly driven by our alarm at the conservatives' steady march towards totalitarianism since Reagan came to power in 1980 to kill the revolution of the late 60s. We had a sense that the recent Homeland Security police militarization of America was not unlike Julius Caesar's taking over Rome with his army and changing it suddenly from the Roman Republic it had long been to the totalitarian Roman Empire it became for the next 400 years.
As to the job the Clintons had done and that Hillary could be expected to do, the 2008 Pew Report made it clear that one American in a hundred is in prison today. We have 7 million people caught up in our penal system, which is sixteen times greater per capita than in the Peoples Republic of China where, nobody disagrees, there is no freedom or human rights. We in America are the most incarcerated people in human history, a milestone better appreciated by comparison to two other regimes that were number one in imprisonment in their times, Stalinist Russia and apartheid South Africa. And the Clinton's were the ones, in serving their wealthy conservative handlers, who signed the bills that put the more police on the streets and built the more prisons that put the many more people in jail. And that should be criticized seriously when combined with their fulfilling another very important piece of the conservative agenda, ending welfare help for poor people, which put nearly a million more of them out on the street homeless. No, Hillary held out little hope as Joan of Arc come to stop the rise of American fascism. And how could one trust her word to stop a war she voted to start?
Worried as we left Denver for Charleston that Obama's failure to properly respond to pokes in the nose would cost him the election, we sent him advice through his staffer I am sure he never got and, as far as winning the election went, he never needed.
Dear Victoria,
..Barack was publically raped and humiliated the night of the ABC debate. He showed no instinctive anger at being spat on. His face, rather, made it clear that their finger was up his ass. My husband, son and ten-year-old grandson all winced and lost respect, almost laughing at him by the end of that debate. Barack was executed that night. His campaign staff is made up of young people who know the Internet, but, alas, not the enemy.
Soon the conservatives will destroy him entirely, using him, even as they are now, as a role model for treasonous behavior while they persist in their bloodbath in the Middle East. Somebody should tell Uncle Barack that he has nothing to lose by speaking the truth, as he really feels it in his heart, speak it always and openly, before they hang his ass high up on the backboard for all to see, a black man, a liberal democrat, to scorn and ridicule.
Ruth
Our plan once in West Virginia was to follow Hillary and Bill around and challenge their exaggerated campaign promises. Upon arrival in Charleston, we went right over to the Obama campaign office to tell them what we intended to do. Again we did not get a great reception, our passionate political feelings not entitling us to an upper echelon greeting. Well, these are just kids who don't know any better we told ourselves after coming three thousand miles. What really matters is our efforts to actually help Obama in West Virginia, whatever the elitist attitudes of these organizationally disciplined staffers.
The first Clinton event we staked out was at Shepherd's University up in the West Virginia panhandle. Being novices in the art of passing out Obama political flyers at a Clinton event, we quickly discovered that Hillary supporters were very loyal and very aggressive. "Get out of here! Just get out of here!" This sort of shouting attracted more Hillary supporters, all of whom started glaring and shouting at us in what might be mistaken for a physically threatening way. At this point Pete got protective and took us across the street far from the rally where we were given some interesting information from a professor at this liberal university who told us that the area was frequented by conservative homosexuals a la Senator Larry Craig and that creepy representative from Florida, Mark Foley, who looks like a double born again George Bush. He told us that the Republican gays did their perversities on the QT in this permissive hamlet that was but a short commute from Washington, DC.
That so many outwardly homosexual baiting conservatives were closet queers themselves hardly surprised me. Conservatives are super sneaky and super perverse in their behaviors outside the public view. I suppose their nonstop deceitfulness is obvious to anybody who listens to a White House press conference or tunes into Fox News, though you have to know the type up close to see Neil Cavuto as the consummate mother's boy and Bill O'Reilly as a rubber faced dominant faggot. I did know the type because my father was a fundamentalist minister and my first husband, back in my twenties, a missionary to Japan with more of an interest in perverting than converting the young men who flocked to our church to discuss Bible stories with me, an unwitting Suddenly Last Summer attraction for the victims as I was cute enough to be a commercial model on Japanese TV in addition to being a pastor's wife.
If you have just the right amount of lies and beatings rammed into you in childhood, you're swamped by it and remain a believing jackass until the day you die. But I was lucky. My up close experiences were excessive. My mother was a stone faced lizard my equally ugly father was grateful to get as a wife. She spanked me repeatedly for breaking petty rules I was sure to break, thus insuring her treating herself regularly to a britches down beating of little girl already so terrified and obedient that I remained afraid of the dark until I was in my 30s. It's the minister and his equally whacked out wife playing the game on you, so who's to complain to? Fortunately besides being sneaky and mean my evangelicals were, beyond the ingenious lies they used on children and equally unaware parishioners, quite stupid. Indeed, my mother assured me in my childhood that the fossils in Dinosaur National Monument were plaster fakes made by people who hated God and she believed it.
My constant unhappiness with this socially sanctioned cult of Lutheran clerics eventually resulted in my running away from them with Pete 35 years ago. I got the ultimate satisfaction from my senile mother by having her confide to me on her deathbed the secret advice that conservative mothers give to all their children when they come of age: "Don't ever say what you think." Conservatives don't. Which should make you mistrust everything they say and do, from their five year bloodbath of a war to save us all from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to their 700 billion dollar bailout to save us all from economic disaster they caused that's coming anyway?
It was this sense of Obama as the country's savior from all these horrid conservatives that kept us fighting for him in West Virginia. Ben, June and I went off to the State Capitol the next morning where Hillary spoke. Again we were fiercely glared at by Hillary supporters as we passed out our pro-Obama flyers. But June, who was paying more attention to what Hillary was actually saying than I was, said she thought she was a gutsy woman and spoke with real emotionally honestly.
In the afternoon we made our way to Fayetteville where Bill Clinton was speaking. The down home folk who lined up outside the high school auditorium for Clinton's talk made it clear in their chit chat with us that they would have rather a white faced bank robber than Obama as the next president. But being strong family people they warmed up to our gang of 11 to 67 year olds and accepted our Obama fliers politely, even if to crumble them on the ground after we had walked away.
After a long wait, Bill strode onto the auditorium stage, a bright rooster for somebody his age, Pete said. He also thought Clinton had a brain had some fire in him whatever the merit of his sales pitch about Hillary curing Alzheimer's. At some point I got tired of Bill promising that Hillary would deliver on health care after eight years of failed trying, so I interrupted him. My getting Bill's goat with the cameras rolling in Bill Clinton Argues With Voter (CBS News) was a great success, for the CBS video got a half-million hits on YouTube and over 3000 comments, most of them very favorable to Obama and anti-Clinton. It also got write-ups in the New York Times and all the major newspapers and blogs in the country, including even five minutes on Rush Limbaugh.
Hooray! We had done something useful. But when we went back to the Obama campaign office in Charleston excited and eager to tell them about it, the head staffer from the national office dismissed it brusquely saying he had more important things to do than watch television. We thought this response odd as the reality of it was the video did make Bill (and Hilary) look bad nationally, which had to help Obama. Again we brushed the staffers' rudeness and stupidity aside telling ourselves that these were just kids. But considering that we had also spent a long night making phone calls for Obama and that eleven-year-old Champ had made a great two minute speech for Obama on local TV, we were beginning to have our doubts about Obama.
The final twist was the family being turned down by these pompous underage mobsters for tickets to hear Obama speak in Charleston the day before the primary voting, a big part of what our three generation family had come all the way to West Virginia to see. Instead, we had to watch Obama's speech on TV. He was dramatically unimpressive that day, mumbling his way through a litany of stump speech rhetoric with his flag pin on and looking all the time like he had to make a mad dash out to use the bathroom. Shut out by people who make it clear that they didn't like our level of politics, we watched the primary returns instead at a bash at the Marriot thrown by WV Governor, Joe Manchin. This turned out to be greatly informing because we were seated next to a very knowledgeable Democratic Party biggie who spelled out the details of Hillary's health care efforts in the face of great Republican resistance to it on behalf of the insurance companies.
Then the next morning, as we were about to leave West Virginia, Pete and I looked at each other while we packed our bags and simultaneously said: something is wrong. That something wrong was that we were backing THE WRONG CANDIDATE. After a few minutes of talking, we did a 180 turn to Hillary. We felt we had to keep the conservatives from getting in again and with the gloss completely off Obama, what we saw of the Clinton's close up was beginning to get us to see them in a different light. Later we were not surprised by Obama's voting for the FISA spying bill and cheering the pro-gun Supreme Court decision and by his sharp turn to the right after he beat Hillary.
As to the Clintons, we had always seen them as your typical out of the box populist politicians, puppets of the ruling class as all populists are (and as Obama, his shining armor tarnished, also is.) The Clintons had to make nice with the wealthy during their rise to power and with the conservatives during their tenure in the White House. But the Clintons were made utter fools out of by the right with the Monika Lewinski, Linda Tripp entrapment and we argued, as we were stuck with them now as a last resort, they had tasted the whip directly on their flesh and were now in a more resisting mood. They were different kinds of populists, maybe even revolutionary populists, so we not entirely kidded ourselves. Pete argued also that Bill had at least gotten angry when I jumped on Hillary about health care, which he interpreted as indicating that Bill was cool with Hillary and that the Clintons were real human beings, at least for politicians. Such is the nature of the human mind when all options run out.
Hillary won the West Virginia primary despite our valiant efforts to beat her. But her chances for winning the nomination were slim at that point. The only way it might be possible hinged on how the superdelegates would cast their votes at the convention in Denver. So we headed back to Denver, where we thought the action would be. Just a few days after we returned, McCain came to town to give a speech at the University of Denver. We printed up a bunch of pro-Hillary flyers and went out to meet the Republicans head on. But, in all honesty, it was with somewhat mixed feelings. We knew nothing about McCain. And while we credited the Clintons now with being our new category of politicians, educated by life populists, we weren't the "I love Hillary" devotees of her that many were. So we went into the talk of this not really conservative Republican with a maybe 10% thought that he might be the best candidate.
It's hard to like Republicans viscerally even if you could find a good political reason to align yourself with them. This was emphasized by the extreme strangeness of the GOP folk who attended McCain's talk. Though the suits they wore and their grooming gave the impression of success, their faces looked like the tragic poor people we remembered begging on the streets of Troy, NY, twisted and ugly to the point of being funny looking. There's no way to say this chunk of truth politely. The wealthy look nothing like their soap opera stand-ins. Perhaps this had us down on McCain before he even walked on the stage. He was not impressive in person. If you look at footage of him years back, he has a kind of healthy rascally look about him. And we knew he was not today's typical Jesus crap Republican even though he did kiss Jerry Falwell's ass in public to have a shot at the presidency. But mostly he looked plain old and tired and a bit confused that day.
There was little emotion in him other than when he was putting down the peace activists in the audience and proclaiming that he would bring our troops homer with honor and VICTORY! At this point of McCain's ultra beaming smile of victory, I blurted out spontaneously as I felt it: "He's crazy!" Given our very real sorrow at the endless and unnecessary butchery done to American soldiers and Iraqi innocents, to keep listening to this would have been to honor this horror dressed in sacrosanct patriotic tones. I stood up and we all walked out to make a public display out of our disgust. The fellow next to us followed, shouting at McCain on his way out, "Go to hell!" It is easy to understand McCain's attitude given the fact that he'd been tortured for five years. Pete had been tortured for three years in federal prison and the feeling of revenge was always there when he recalled it. But revenge as a thought is different than actual revenge at the cost of other's lives.
So, it was settled 100% who our candidate was and we continued to hand out our pro-Hillary leaflets and gave a pro-Hillary interview to the Rocky Mountain News after we walked out. And shortly after, we wrote up a piece spelling out how we felt about Obama's lack of testicular fortitude called "Still Holding Out For Hillary?" in Carla Marinucci's column in the San Francisco Chronicle www . sfgate . com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=28131,
Our primary political concern is to stop war, not just the War in Iraq, but the possible escalation of it to a global conflict that might trigger the unthinkable, a nuclear war. Our crusade for the last 20 years has been to start a movement to eliminate all weapons in the world for, as difficult as that is to make happen, once accomplished it is a real solution to the problem of tyranny, capitalist, communist or fascist, which we show mathematically is the primary cause of mankind's unhappiness. Eliminating weapons changes the world in a big way for would-be tyrants without weapons are not a problem. And war is much less likely to start in the absence of the anger and bad feeling that spontaneously comes from the unhappiness caused by tyranny. And a war fought without weapons, as will happen because war is programmed into human nature by that mathematical function on the flag, is a heck of a lot less bloody. We said all that back when in an article printed in the Albany, NY, Knickerbocker News, May, 1986, and reprinted on matrix-evolutions com, the idea no less compelling now than it was then.
Somehow we told ourselves the Clintons had enough brains, whatever their personal sense of politics, to understand the point we were trying to make that tyranny leads to unhappiness and unhappiness to aggressive feelings which cause people to hurt others not only in the petty meanness we all have learned to watch out for in our day to day lives but also in the campus and workplace mass murders we see ever more frequently and in our escalating strife with other nations that will one day cause war at the nuclear level and destroy us all if the problem is not recognized. But a Hillary presidency was doomed from the moment we first imagined it in West Virginia.
So whatever our consideration of Obama as just a sparkly flavor of standard politician, we went back to him after he got the nomination in Denver. Had to, particularly given Palin's addition to the Republican ticket which made it clear that a continuation of conservative rule would take us all to hell. For never have I seen a more dangerous person, one who actually believes God is up there telling her what to do, one who would not hesitate to start a war and press the button if she thought it was God's will. But beyond the problem of nuclear war, the last thing most of us worry about, truth be told, Obama will be just more of the same, little more than a Palin type rhetorician controlled by people bigger than him. President Obama will be nothing but vanilla flavored ricin, poison sugared with a smile, as people will learn soon once the economy totally crashes and Obama does nothing substantive to help. The science on matrix-evolutions com explains all of what I am saying analytically. Now Pete wants to say a few words.
Two main people that Ruth left out because she can't stand them should be talked about because their stories make important points about life in America that are hard to talk about using just mathematical equations. When we got back to Denver from West Virginia, a pair of jerks came into the game. One was Ruth's brother, Don, somebody I find hard to bring up without using nasty adjectives. The other asshole was Ken Bazinet, the White House Correspondent for the New York Daily News. He logged onto this website back in May and started an email exchange that went on through Election Day.
It would be impossible to explain how brother Don came to put Ruth in jail in the middle of this presidential campaign without going way back to 1973 when I first met her. For me it was love at first sight. My first thought the first moment I saw her, she was on the porch of a youth hostel and I was thirty feet away standing in the parking lot, was that she looked like a model you might see in Family Circle magazine. I was at this youth hostel in Point Reyes National Seashore as a revolutionary drop out one credit shy of a PhD in Biophysics, the dropping out caused by my having had work stolen a few years before by my thesis advisor, Aaron Posner, whose work is used here in the math section. My choice was to walk away or kiss the ass of this disgusting bastard who stole my work, an indignity it took me all of ten seconds to know enough to avoid. Later I drove a taxi in New York City where my lungs got burned out from the first oil embargo crisis when Con Edison was allowed to burn high sulfur oil. Unfortunately I happened to live just a block and a half from the electric plant on Manhattan's lower East Side. Gasping for fresh air I headed for the California coast where I hoped the air would be better.
I wound up eventually in that youth hostel north of San Francisco. I was lucky to land there because I had little money and my lungs were so bad off that I was sleeping 22 hours a day. The youth hostel was run by a bunch of jerks, the other side of the sixties coin. There were two faces to the 60s revolution. Some of us saw that the pain in life came from having power shoved up your ass, from teachers and bosses like Aaron Posner and from landlords and police and the like. We were the ones who fought back. For me it was a fun trip, even if dangerous, because I had taken the "fight to the death" vow once I saw what the power game was. The freedom in that attitude is heady. On the other side was a broad spectrum of people who had little sense of freedom except as a license to experiment. Nothing wrong in that, of course, but not respected when you know so well that without a lot of people fighting for it, freedom is a lost cause or a very dangerous enterprise.
I started off in life as a good boy, as a typical middle class kid who pleased his mother and got good grades to get her constant subtle pats on my half broken head. But dropping out of graduate school and living on the street makes you tough fast, or you get beat. Which is what I was by the time I ran into Ruth at the youth hostel, smart enough to have gotten a PhD in an area, biophysics, that is as painful to learn as it sounds, and tough enough to have survived four bullet holes, a half dozen knife scars and never lost a fight in the number two homicide precinct in America for two years. The upside of this game of dangerous living is that you wind up as heroic a character as you fantasized you'd be when you were in the seventh grade, with you afraid of nobody and all the girls loving you. This persona is very nice to have wound up with because it avoids your getting your heart broken when you fall in love with a beautiful woman, something I was very prone to in my younger days. It avoids being beaten and made small by love frustrated, a shrinkage of the psyche and self-confidence that gets many young men to accept their role as an agreeable slave in the sweatshop of America.
And it was good to be that confident when I met Ruth because she was the kind of beautiful girl who knows she's beautiful, which is very good, but can also make for difficulties in courtship. Fortunately, also, she was vulnerable, a damsel in distress trying to avoid being destroyed by her minister husband and her fundamentalist minister family and all the help they could get from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that her husband and father were ministers in. Under these circumstances, trust me, it helps to be good with your fists because the minister husband didn't get the message to stop hurting Ruth until I was sitting on his chest about to rip his eyes out.
Now whatever the good book and Dr. Phil tells you, love is basically attraction and good sex. And there is a difference between good sex and not so good sex. The last three years Ruth was with the missionary, she slept on the coach. The thought of sleeping with him just made me vomit, was the way she out it. For myself, a good boy in my early twenties and a fairly bad boy in my late twenties, the difference between good sex and not so good sex was also clear. Done right human mating is remarkably like that of a wart hog or a lion, a kind of properly resisted, low level rape. The pleasure for both is fierce enough to make you both want to come back for more. And that's what keeps you staying together while you're sorting out the differences adult human beings have when they first get together. Sex you want three times a day patches over those lovers quarrels. Not the silly ideas about "relationships" that capitalist Christian culture sells you that are doomed to fail you and quickly turn the two of you into sad and agreeable nine-to-five slaves.
Others were not as happy with this karma sutra love story as we were. What her scummy family tried to do to break us up can't be told without raising enough rage on the printed page to put me in jail for threats of first degree murder. Suffice to say we learned a lot about Christians, especially the fundamentalist sort and how unbelievably sneaky and vicious they are. But I will serve that course for the mathematics lest I be accused of exaggeration and extreme prejudicial hatred. Equations aside, trust these rats and turn your back on them as you would a hungry alligator.
Now let's get the story back to brother, Don. Ruth had kids by the missionary and years after we got past her family's using them in every which way to get Ruth back we went to visit them in Texas. Appearing on the scene again was occasion for more traps and terror from these fake Jesus bastards. Fortunately I had come back to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute by 1980 to fetch my PhD and, as the prodigal son returning from the late sixties with my stolen research on bone growth now recognized in the literature for the genius work it was, got as a bonus a position in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. With my polyester suit and red stripped tie and previously long scraggly hair cut down as neat as Robert McNamara's, we strode into Don's house one morning to have family breakfast with him and his wife, Ruby, and as part of their trap, Ruby's Texas pig farmer father and Ruby's Texas speedway owner brother in law.
With Don, a lawyer, on the scene, the game was no win. You can lose the fight and lose the woman you love in being made a fool out of, which is what happens when you lose a fist fight for all you who have never gotten near the experience of winning or losing at such. Or you can win the fight and be taken to jail by the lawyer who knows how to arrange such things, especially in this Third Reich hamlet of Lubbock Texas where the many cathedral size churches and the courthouse and the jail all snuggle up close to each other downtown like they are architecturally in bed with each other. But I beat the asshole by just plain frightening him with the furious anger I felt and showed when he tried to make Ruth afraid and humiliate her publically. The punk who was only able to beat up women got so scared I was going to kill him, something I was trying to resist intensely, that he couldn't pull the trigger.
It helps to have never been suckered into anger management class. Avoiding it gets you to keep your temper, which can go a long way in settling differences without bloodshed by making it clear before the fact that much blood will be shed if the jerk is stupid enough to keep on antagonizing you. An illustrative war story, not the best I have but appropriate to making the point, is the time I was walking back to my $60 a month apartment on East 11th Street in New York at 2 AM and a black fellow drew a knife when I was ten paces away from our running into each other. I never carried a weapon because I didn't think it fair. But the urge to murder a predator as displayed violently on one's face was understood by this fellow and he folded up his knife and smiled and wished me a good evening a few moments later.
Don's trophy wife, Ruby, (that means she married him for his position and money, not for lust), had played nice with me at the breakfast table as part of the trap. She wasn't bad looking, but not something you'd want to f*** unless you like plastic or she was properly tied down with ropes. She had that type of knowing evangelical good looks. Anyway, after he broke Don made repeated and terrified excuses that he meant no harm to us. A couple of years later, I always guessed because of this stain on Don's teeny tiny manhood, Ruby divorced him, big thing in their tight religious community, and went out of her way to write to us in New York to tell us about it and make a total fool out of him, a fitting punishment to this asshole lawyer who masterminded the schemes to break Ruth and me up during the legal phase of her separation from the creepy missionary.
This should tell you that Don and I were not friends. Because of that when I tell you that Don was a mama's boy, I hope you won't think I am just saying that to further insult him for there is actual factual evidence for him being a mama's boy. As Ruth made clear, her (and Don's) mother was a spanker, a typical, if at the far end of the spectrum, fundamentalist conservative spanker, the kind of parent so low and repelling that beating up a little kid was the only possible way she could get the child's respect. Ruth remembers Don getting put over mama's knee often, during which times she also remembers feeling very bad for him. Ruth escaped this ministerial house of Jesus sanctioned child abuse horrors. But the ones who don't escape become, like mom, lizards themselves, petty and mean and very deceptive as to how they extract the energy from others they need to keep them going in life after mother took away their testicles in childhood.
To get to the punch line in this story, it is also necessary to make clear that Mother Graf was very not fond of me. In my one encounter with her during our courtship days, Ruth's mother seemed much like a lesbian rival for Ruth's affection. And I treated her as such. This prompted mom-in-law to call down God to punish me in high blown Old Testament tones in front of Ruth. But after two years of living in the half black, half drug dealing Puerto Rican neighborhood I was coming from where no evening went without a stabbing or a shooting or somebody getting hit over the head with a ten foot length of pipe, I was not cowed by Mother Lizard's calling on God to smite me down. I can't remember if I told both mother and God to go f*** each other or just indicated how I felt with my disposition. But suffice to say I was no more friends with Don's mother than I am with Don or God, neither of whose sexuality I trust either.
That sets the scene properly for Ruth's unannounced meeting with her mother just before she died at age 91. This was at an old folk's apartment house in Lubbock. The witch, old and feeble and off her game, was unable to phase Ruth even with all that corporal punishment conditioning when Ruth was young. Not too long after we first met, Ruth took revenge on the family by writing a comic book which included the child abuse she had endured under her parents. The comic was good enough to be called a "masterpiece of sorts" by Robert Crumb who said he liked all of it except the last page where Ruth poisons her mother with black widow spiders. The missionary husband came down with throat cancer six weeks after we sent it around to a thousand of his fellow Lutheran ministers. And the father was dismissed from his parish down in Waco and became a real estate salesman after that and died of prostate cancer.
You have already heard the story of Ruth dropping in to see her mother when she was near death and of her mother telling her "Don't ever say what you think." Ruth was half way out the door when she heard that and on her way down to the receptionist at the entrance of the old folks apartment house to tell her that her mother was a disgusting child molester, this an effort to insure that the mother had no peace on earth to the end of her days.
So we were surprised when she left Ruth $30,000 in her will when she died. But not surprised that she left the money in trust with Don with his having absolute control over it, and in that way, over Ruth. And even less surprised when Don told Ruth up in his law office shortly after the mother's death in 2007 that Ruth would never see a penny of the money unless "you leave Pete." This attempt at control from the grave may not be unusual, but we thought it exquisitely fitted to a nutcase evangelical and her mama's boy son.
Now, though the will had a clause in it that if Ruth tried in any way to contest it in court, she would automatically lose all the money, a lawyer told us that there were limits to how much Don could block her getting it, especially if she needed the money for health reasons. Ruth needed work on her teeth and had no dental insurance, so at least she could get her teeth fixed with the money. So we went to one of best dentists in Denver after we got back there from West Virginia and he came up with a treatment plan for $16,000 and sent Don the bills for the initial examination. What came back from Don to the examining dentists was:
Dear Dr. Gurinsky and University Dental Arts:
For some unknown reason, I received a bill from your office yesterday referencing Ruth M. Calabria. I am the trustee of a small trust for Ms. Calabria, but I have not authorized the expenditure of any monies with you and have heard nothing from Ms. Calabria seeking approval of any expenses with you. I have no address for her and therefore request that you send her a copy of this letter. I am not authorizing the expenditure of any funds from her trust for medical expenses and will not do so unless I am contacted prior to any procedures and have approved any expenditure in writing.
He did pay the examination bill, but the dentists were taken aback with this letter from a brother about his 67 year old sister's dental work. But we were hardly surprised. The losers and the lonely get their jollies in life screwing up other people's happiness and it was clear that it was going to take more than just writing a letter to get the inheritance from this control freak who had dominated much of his sister's early life and wanted to continue to do so, the mother having given Ruth to Don as a sister wife, so to speak, an obedient female, as was and still is the custom in many conservative clans. So we left Denver for Lubbock to do battle hand to hand with sonny boy and are still here after five months. During this time Don sent Ruth to jail for criminal trespass when she went up to up in his law office to talk about the money and his receptionist said for the fourth time that Don was busy with a client or out of town or at court and Ruth refused to leave until she got to speak to him.
At around this same time, we started hearing from Ken Bazinet, the White House Correspondent of the New York Daily News. Ruth first sent him a form email back in February along with many other journalists in America to make them aware of our election campaign website.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2008 5:59 AM
To: Bazinet, Kenneth
Subject: Clinton
Check out our unique take on Hillary on matrix-evolutions com.
As major media journalists don't readily mix with bloggers, we were pleased to get back this reply from him a few months later.
From: Bazinet, Kenneth ([email protected])
Sent: Mon 5/19/08 4:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Holy Moley Ruth, this was not exactly light reading. You and Pete scared the bejeezus out of me! I agree with a lot of it, that's for sure. Thanks for thinking of me. Best, Ken
This was a very nice note from a guy we didn't know from Adam. How serious was he? we wondered, for our politics has an edge much too sharp for most mainstream journalists. We were hesitant to open our hearts to the guy as friendly as his letter was because of experiences we'd had with another journalist, Paul Krassner, who though a rebel in his younger years turned out to be a typical power gamer player as he slid less rebelliously into old age. Ruth wrote Bazinet back a nice note to explain why our website had turned from pro-Obama to pro-Hillary and why we thought Hillary might still get the nomination. Ken replied.
Subject: RE: Clinton
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:57:50 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
One problem with your theory, Ruth, is the top echelon of the Clinton and Obama camps meet Thursday in NYC. The Clintonistas are handing over their fundraising and volunteer lists. The queen has some serious problems to contend with in this town. There is no way she can piss off her party more than she already has. Besides, I have a research buddy in the GOP who has the smoking gun file on Hillary. She would be toast. No, if you want to see McCain beat your only chance is going to be Obama. Mark me well on that. Take care and good luck with the revolution, Ken
Our hope in Clinton, as it turned out, was more hope than a realistic projection of her chances. But once that came to an end at the convention, we switched back and sent out over 100,000 emails in the next two months attacking the Republicans and supporting Obama. Ken's best wishes for the revolution took us a bit by surprise. Bazinet's boss at the Daily News is Mort Zuckerman, ranked the 188th richest person in the country in 2007. Zuckerman is also the editor-in-chief of the U.S. News and World Report, a right leaning rag the last time we looked. Was Ken for real? Or just getting his kicks hanging out with real revolutionaries? Having thoughts about real political change, not the Obama kind of cosmetic change that we will see now that the voting is over, can be dangerous. After writing a string of political pieces in the Albany afternoon daily, I was set up by an FBI informant and sent to federal prison, the actual charge getting angry at an unlicensed stock broker for his losing near $100,000 in family money. Despite our getting back $70,000 in an out of court settlement very quickly, I spent three years in prison in my late fifties. And this was with a PhD under my belt and no prior criminal convictions. This gets a person to take his politics seriously and hesitate to embrace someone who may throw the word revolution around to sound cool. But maybe the guy was for real. So we pushed him a bit in our next email to see who he was. He replied.
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:49:33 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Hey, I ran with Abbie for a time in Massachusetts when I covered his and Amy Carter's trial in Northampton, Mass. in 1986 And of course I attended and wrote of his funeral in Worcester in 1989. So I'm not going to make any bets with any seasoned anarchists today, but I will buy you both a dinner or lunch when we cross paths (and please remind me to check for my wallet when the meal is over). Sheesh, Ruth, your passion is exquisite, albeit a bit chilling even for a Marxist like me. I am, however, nonetheless glad you found me. Cheers, Ken
Bazinet ran with Abbie Hoffman, a fellow I always thought a lot of. And Bazinet is a Marxist. And Bazinet gets his paycheck from Mort Zuckerman. Does that fit? Who knows? Life is full of contradictions. But his remark about our stealing his wallet, even if said in jest, was a red flag. People who want real change enough to stick their neck out to make it happen are brothers in arms and don't think in that way. I wrote back explaining to him that we were not Marxists. Uncle Karl was certainly correct that the capitalists own and treat the workers like a farmer owns and treats his farm animals. But political revolution is more than just seeing the problem. It is also solving the problem. And there Marx was wrong, painfully wrong as people who live under communist regimes have found out. You can't change human nature as regards power. Having all of it eventually corrupts, whatever the ideology or initial good intentions.
Idealism aside, a clear understanding of man's evolutionary origins tells you that the people who have the weapons and the power always come to believe they are king or god, whether they are Stalin or Jim Jones or George Bush. Eventually they run the game to suit their own interests and whims, controlling the rest of us to our detriment. This sure recipe for unhappiness we personally avoided only by living like runaway slaves and developing a plan based on a mathematical understanding of the problem that can't be propagandized away by double talking journalists on corporate owned TV. I made it clear to Ken that I didn't like people who talk the talk to get a pat on the head but don't walk the walk. And when I saw a photo of him on Google, that's now on matrix-evolutions com, covering the visit of the Pope to Washington, DC, it made me wonder more. Not that all resistors to tyranny have to look like Che Guevara. But Ken's thoughts imprinted on his face did make me wonder, if not about his sincerity, than about his understanding of the reality of America. Bazinet's reply came back.
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:42:24 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Peter,
Why aim the anger at me? We were having a polite exchange, seeking common ground and you get huffy? Why? Because you got caught? Because your friend got killed? Give me a break. Do you do what you do for you or for the greater good? Ruth is polite and smart. Are you rude and self-absorbed? You know nothing about me or my pen. I work my craft with an eye on Jack Reed, Isaiah Thomas and George Orwell. So please spare me your pseudo Ohio 7 rap (I covered those trials too, and the Macheteros as well). Spectator or not I am familiar with the real deal, my friend, and I would rather find common ground with you than argue who's got a bigger role in the revolution.
Regards,
Ken
There's some I liked in his reply and some I didn't like. I still wondered if he was just a geezer trying to get Ruth's attention with the rest being little more than self-affectation. He had little sense of who we were and how we thought, but that was understandable, for we are unique because of our unusual backgrounds and not easily categorized. Ruth and I wrote him back.
From: Ruth Calabria [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 1:03 PM
To: Bazinet, Kenneth
Dear Ken,
..These problems are real. Though the bedrock truth of it, without which nothing Pete says or does can make any sense, is that what he really cares about in life is our kids and leaving a world behind for them that will give them some chance at attaining real happiness. Let me put him on the line now. He says he may be able to connect with you through George Orwell, a common ground.
Ken, do you know Orwell in the early stages of his career when he wrote under his real name, Eric Blair? I would bet, yes, if you followed him well. One of his first novels was "Keep the Aspidistras Flying." The central character, a young man, has a variety of problem experiences, one with a waiter of an upper class restaurant the young man takes his would-be girl friend to who talks to him in an insulting way when it is obvious the young man has little money, an experience that Orwell makes clear helps to destroy their possible love relationship. And the young man also has problems with his rooming house landlady who screws him up intentionally with her petty rules and intrusiveness, which also helps destroy the love his girlfriend might have given him, a love that Orwell makes clear is all that matters in life, as is the case. Rules and money and the humiliations that derive from too much of the former and too little of the latter kill love. That's the primary link between the political system, ours a capitalist police state, and a person's happiness or lack of it. No love, no happiness, unless you're crazily content with the delusion of God's love after death.
It doesn't stop there. Only loving couples have tough sons and beautiful daughters, which is all that non-delusional parents care about in life. I'd sacrifice myself - and anybody else - for my kids' happiness. And befriend anybody, treat them like family, who made more possible my kids' happiness. And a good part of that is changing this massive slave state mankind has become and preventing it from continuing on its present course, ultimately to global nuclear war.
If you see life much differently than the need to change this miserable world for the sake of the next generation, then we haven't much in common. Not everybody sees things in this love and family way. Many view facilitative success, rank and money as central rather than as just a means to love and family. Does that make sense? A guy has to have freedom, whatever its costs and risks, to make the love connection, without which raising happy kids, the pinnacle of happiness, is impossible. And that is what you see in America, especially since World War II, a totally f***ed up society relationally, where divorce and isolation is the norm now, and where the resulting unhappiness evidences itself in general meanness and, at its worst, in mass violence, both with kids in schoolyards and in its exportation across national borders as Orwellian wars such as we are presently engaged in over in the Middle East.
Am I making any sense? Few can argue with the coercion that exists in the workplace, where the boss owns the workers as powerfully as any patent slave master for eight hours a day. Whatever clinical psychology and Dr. Phil may say, that crap is more ideology than science. A guy made a fool out of on the job stays a fool on Saturday night and doesn't make the love connection or get the happiness associated with it that is so instinctively necessary in life. Others may argue with the police state we say on our website exists. Let me tell you a couple of personal anecdotes to illustrate how much the police state has grown in America, particularly over the last 20 years.
Back about 20 years ago I got into a fistfight with a thug for hire in Troy. Paid by our landlord to cause trouble, he insulted Ruth by sitting on our porch outside our bathroom window. When I finished with him, he had two streams of blood coming out of eyes, something I had never seen or heard of before I managed, in utter fury, to pull it off. He called the Troy Police in terror after I was finished with him, who arrived in three squad cars. They were quick to look for reasons not to arrest me, a scratch or two or my left ankle. They were laughing. No problem, they said, we just want to see who it was beat the hell out of Dickie Yaddo so bad that he called the riot squad, then explaining to me that Yaddo was well know to them as a hit man for hire in Troy, something I heard at that moment for the first time.
The point is that it was not a crime then for a man who cares about his wife to beat the shit out of some jerk who would insult her. At that time, cops still had some sense of reasonableness. But in this current conservative law and order police state mentality, I'd have been locked up for ten years, for as it turned out, I destroyed the asshole's vision near completely. Indeed I was locked up for much less than that in 1999. I didn't get caught at something, as you suggest. Rather I got set up by a fellow with a lot of money who had a strong connection with the FBI. I'll try not to drag this out to long. I'm not crying when I talk about it. Rather it makes the point of how much of a police state we actually live in.
If you consider yourself an investigative reporter, this is a fun story to follow. Look up on Google, Ebay Stamp Scam, and you will be directed to an article on MSNBC about a conman upstate New York stamp dealer. There's only one significant stamp company in upstate New York, Ferris Stamp and Coin, and it is owned by a fellow named Wendell Williams. He scammed us out of $96,000 in a stock derivatives trading game. He had no broker's license. I got angry at first and unfortunately put it in writing. Later we got back $70,000 in a quick settlement, the papers available should you wish to check them out. But not before he went to his FBI connections in Albany and put me in prison for three years, this on a first time criminal conviction at age 56 with a PhD in Biophysics.
The story on MSNBC was never followed up on and his name was never mentioned in it. He had that level of high level police connections, the same level that allowed him to scam us out of $96,000 and put the blame on me for getting angry at him. Prison was a real trip. The worst anybody might imagine couldn't describe it. For a person who resists the destruction of the spirit, it is nothing but non-stop torture, as bad in our domestic federal prisons, and not just for me, as anything you hear about at Guantanamo or Abu Gharib. Forget about the Martha Stewart airbrushing of the reality of it. A small example: at age 59, completely wrapped in chains and with most of my family watching, in the federal courthouse in Albany, but with no video camera rolling, I was beaten by two federal marshal assholes bad enough to barely be able to walk for the next six months. The federal judge I soon saw a few minutes later was well aware I had been beaten bloody. Yes, we filed suit, available to see on request, but ran away to Mexico rather than push the suit once the consequences of pushing it were made clear.
I survived all this crap because I was a seasoned veteran, in my fifties and still physically intact, at least when I started out. Not so the many, mostly minority younger prisoners, most of whom crack under the strain after a few months, and none of whom, in my observation, make it past two years without losing their spirit and sanity. And once you see this game of destroying a man's spirit in the patent way it is done in prison, it is easy to observe how it is done in lockstep, clockwork, fashion, out on the street, in schools, where I have taught both at the university and grade school levels, and in the work place.
All of this gives me the pomposity to say with surety that democracy is a sham and that what is needed in America is a real revolution, one that Barack Obama could not possibly pull off, even granting him all good intentions, but that the Clintons, who have tasted humiliation deeply and first hand with the Monika setup at the hands of the fundamentalist conservatives, might help to pull off. Sorry about the anger, but my sense is that you are on the sidelines in this more vigorous aspect of life. You have the power to open your mouth loudly, Ken, but as with just about everybody allowed an opinion in media land, you are, I have guessed, a bit too blind to realities you have been insulated from or as regards shortcomings in your own life you are able to rationalize away. I have no axe to grind with you, or anybody, other than as they do less than is necessary when they have the power to do more, for to change things in a way that is truly meaningful for people, a clear awareness of the problem and assumption of real risk has to exist. Are you there in this regard, Ken? I guessed not in my previous email, but perhaps I was wrong and I certainly hope so. Pete
And Bazinet wrote back:
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:07:01 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I am at work right now (with Holy Joe Lieberman in the background on a conference call defending John McCain's Iraq vision -- an experience like fingernails on a chalk board, lemme tell ya) and have just read this for a second time. After the first go, I rocked back and said out loud, "You were right, these folks are the real deal." My second take was much stranger and far less self-serving than crediting myself with on-the-money gut instincts. I had to wipe my eyes (thankfully, a catharsis much unlike Mr.. Yaddo's). I need to process all of this before I can respond in detail. What I would like to say for now is thank you both for taking the time to help me understand. I can also add that I am no longer troubled by my exchanges with Pete, as I had been. It had to happen to get to this point. Now I just need some time to think this through. This is not light reading.
Of course, Bazinet's words are hard to judge harshly on their face. I didn't appreciate him questioning who I was, but, I thought, he knew me as little as I knew him. I still had no idea where this was going. The major media generally come in two flavors, the FOX News people who lie at every moment and are simply well paid propagandists. And there are the honest news dummies, like some on NBC who are allowed to speak their minds, their honest take on things all the more trusted by the listeners even if the opinions are incorrect. But even they trim what they say for fear of going too far and losing their jobs. Toward these, one is caught between educating them, hard to do past the power of the healthy paycheck reporters at Bazinet's level get, and kicking them in the ass as you would the FOX News crew, for in the end what matters are the mistruths they send out and the great harm that causes. In the end, after two months of near daily talking on the Internet with Bazinet about everything under the sun, we were sure that something he wasn't talking about was smelling up the conversation, possibly a life style he wasn't so keen to reveal of a kind that took a softer stance on rebellion than could ever be effective politically or helpful to us. So when our endless fear of how the conservatives might steal the election by bombing Iran, a reasonable fear given the WMD treachery Bush got us into Iraq with and his attack on Fallujah just before the 2004 election, we tried to push Bazinet to open his mouth by shaming him with the following email sent to Carla Marinucci, the Senior Political Correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected],[email protected]
Subject: Emergency
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:07:50 -0400
Dear Carla: I sent this email off to Kenneth Bazinet of the Daily News last week the minute I heard about our sending an envoy to today's Iran nuclear talks in Geneva. We talk on our website, matrix-evolutions com, of knowing the conservatives well from our personal experience and are absolutely sure of what they are about to do with Iran, with the help of the Israelis, and that the primary purpose of their bombing Iran is to play the war-terrorism card to get McCain elected. Forget my insults on Bazinet, whom we had a 30 email political argument with last month. For all I know he could be married with six kids, though I doubt it. More is the feeling after all that jawing with him that he's a coward and so sneaky in his correspondence, which in my older generation's experience has the implications stated.
The important point is that the political game in America is going to shift from our presidential schoolyard politics to the rough reality of an irreversible shift in the balance of political power in this country as an effective total takeover by the conservatives. I shouted to Bazinet to do something, but as with almost all media people, he's a get-along flunkey only interested in keeping his job. I'm not screaming down your throat. Somehow I have respect for your ability to see things with your own two eyes. But let me encourage you to stay sharply keyed to this murderous ploy with Israel and Iran and to react in print in a swift and timely manner, for neither your kids nor mine nor anybody else's will be having a good life if what they plan with Iran and its related political tightening back in America goes down without a very vigorous fight.
Regards: Peter Calabria
Dear Kenny,
OK. Now I get it. But first things first. We're going to bomb Iran, us or the Jews. This as a way to get McCain ahead in the game, a position he could never get to otherwise because Obama completely outshines, outthinks and outmaneuvers him. Saturday, the US State Dept. envoy, William Burns, will be present when the EU presents its stop the nuclear proliferation proposals to the Iranians in Geneva. A mathematically minded analyst says this is unusual. A conspiracy minded political observer says this allows Bush or Condiweasel Rice to pontificate as to our going way out of our way to have gone to Geneva to do diplomacy with the Iranians in order to save the world from nuclear proliferation, but the Iranians, nuclear mass murderers that they are, won't back down so we and/or the poor, severely threatened, Israelis have absolutely no choice but to bomb them back to the stone age for said very moral reasons. Which will get the Iranians, who are four times as reactive and rashly aggressive than I am, to retaliate against just enough targets, Tel Aviv, US soldiers in Baghdad and oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, to give the national ambiance the feel of another 9/11, which allows for the unfurling of the grand war flag. All of which will get McCain far ahead in the game and keep the conservatives in power for another four years.
An auxiliary reason and outcome of us and/or the Israelis making war on Iran is the distraction of the citizens from the on-the-brink irreversible collapse of the financial markets. I know the markets. I played stock options back in the late 80s and made 45K in one day when the Japanese bankers refused to give a critical loan to UAL. I gave back $30,000 of it the following week, so I am not proclaiming to be Ivan Boesky resurrected. But I do understand the realities of the financial markets and I did take Samuelson math-based economics, so I can tell you with some confidence that the entire US economy is going bye-bye, not in a cyclical downturn, but in a permanent collapse in this nation's economic strength - and in our broader strength as a nation, no longer as number one.
This very soon to come war on Iran will provide a cover for all the little people taking the money hit with the evisceration of their 401K retirement funds, loss of home value equity, the outrageous inflation about to get so bad, effectively making everybody but our not insignificant number of millionaires paupers. The economy is not revivable. Its fate was sealed with our entry into this prolonged war and its taking the deficit to unimaginably high levels and the day and night printing of money and its killing of the dollar, that and the greedy Wall Streeters who, in conjunction with the blind eyed Bush regime regulators killed the economy. There's nothing anybody can do to fix it now. It's like the mighty Mississippi high above the flood mark, the daily rush to pile on financial sand bag solutions totally unable to prevent the financial disasters that are happening.
The war will both provide a patriotic distraction from the financial debacle and get McCain elected, silencing anybody who dares then to shout out even 10% of the truth of why we went to war against Iran and what will be happening as a result of it, a capitalist media airbrushed version of the Third Reich, more or less.
So you're a homosexual, gay, queer, faggot, whatever you want to call it, Rumple-still-skin. Does that mean you don't care if everybody gets f***ed up? Maybe it does mean that. Does it also mean you don't care about the broader war that is sure to escalate from this immanent attack on Iran? Farfetched? Certainly not, for this attack on Iran about to happen momentarily is exactly what Seymour Hersh has been saying was going to happen for the last three years. It is going to happen. Iran first, and eventually an expansion to global nuclear war from these lunatic conservatives. Open your f***ing mouth. You have to say this ahead of time, to put your finger in the dyke now to save the situation. It won't do any good to shout out afterwards because such shouting will be advertised to the public as the worst kind of lack of patriotism, the worst kind of traitorous behavior. Shouting it out now won't stop the bombing from happening. Nor will it save Obama's candidacy. But it will give some of us, a significant number if you open your mouth now, some leverage, some grounds to stand on, to resist the repression that will surely be activated and rationalized as a result of this attack on Iran and their response.
With Obama made to look unpatriotic by the conservative propaganda machine, possibly even called an out an out traitor, his poll numbers will plummet, which will give Hillary Clinton a chance to step in to make the only critical difference possible, for she will be the only way for any meaningful resistance to this conservative putsch. And, make no mistake, without such a miracle Clinton circumventing of their war fever strategy, America will land in cement hard totalitarianism.
Don't be scared to open your mouth. Believe in God, Kenny. Your and my special God who I am inventing at this very moment just so you can have a positive delusional promise that after you die, you'll get 200 virgins in Heaven with all the trimmings and whatever it takes for you to enjoy them if that's what it takes for you to summon up the balls it takes to write this impending scenario up now, before it happens. If I print this myself on my website, I doubt it will get enough readers given our paltry 800 visitor a week to do the nation any good, though you never know how things might take off if I send a copy of it to Carla Marinucci at the San Francisco Chronicle, too. Really rather not. If you write it up all by yourself, laying the blame (or credit) for the predictions on me to protect yourself, it works a hell of a lot better, because it works for sure and it works fast, Mr. White House Correspondent for the New York Daily News. This is no joke. Nor is any of this a competition between a straight guy, me, and a brilliantly successful not very straight guy, you. Think beyond your zipper. A lot of people are going to get hurt if somebody doesn't start shouting and screaming out what's going to happen now. I am giving you the information. Only you have the media power to shout it out. Though subtly is fine too, as long as you get the word out. Jean Genet, a gay dude, was uniquely informing and so was Michel Foucault, even more so as the only modern social philosopher really worth reading. In that way, whatever his life style, he was a genuine hero. Be a hero, too, Ken.
Pete
Needless to say, we were less friendly after I sent this email. But then comes the day Ruth is arrested and I had to reach out to somebody. Ruth is gutsy and it was all her idea not to budge from Don's law office and be taken off to jail to make the point of the viciousness of Don's tactics. But I was very afraid for her because I have been in prison myself. Jail is the place where the class of people that sit below the ruling class and the manager class and the obedient working class are sent to be broken of their spirit of resisting the rules. Sometimes those who break the rules hurt innocent people and that type are the criminals featured in the evening news. Many, surprisingly for me, as I saw the real story of crime and punishment for the first time only at the late age of 56, are just people who hate bosses and like themselves. Though possibly that view is jaundiced by my own horrible experience with the so-called justice system. The conman who took our money, Wendell Williams, worked with the FBI as an informant on possible money launderers and was so protected by them that when a major EBay stamp scam pointing toward him came to light in an article on MSNBC a few years back, the matter was quickly hushed up in the news and never reported on again let alone prosecuted. So what might have gotten me a brief or suspended sentence for being so stupid as to get angry at him instead of immediately filing a civil suit, was blown up to 3 years of the most tortuous and enlightening experiences any man could have.
Most prisoners have no voice, nobody to speak for them and tell what the experience is all about. It is nothing like what Martha Stewart was shown on TV to have. It is horrible beyond imagination and my personal experience in prison is the prime reason we are so adamant to seeking a society where prison is abolished. Death is by far the better alternative. I was tortured repeatedly, the purpose of it for me and other resistant prisoners being to destroy your self-respect. All prison staff love torturing prisoners, which tells you a lot about the realities of the society that America has become. I was beaten completely shackled by US Marshalls in the middle of a court proceeding and, besides having my eye gashed open clearly for the federal judge to see, was repeatedly kicked so badly in the hip I could not walk for the next six months. The medical records were carefully doctored. While at a county jail used as a rendition for the feds, a place where torture can be done by surrogates, I was attacked by four guards, two of whom held me down while another pried my eyelids open and the fourth poured pepper spray into my eyes. This causes you to scream uncontrollably for two hours.
In a disciplinary prison down in Talladega, I was kept in chains for ten days, eight more than regulations allow, the last four days with black box hand cuffs attached even at night. You can't help falling off to sleep from the exhaustion of being chained up every minute and wake up every ten minutes screaming from the bloody grooves cut into your wrists by the torture hand cuffs. The guards found all this very fun. A Filipino doctor who checked my wrists near fainted from the sight of it. And I was put in chains specifically because I refused to be put in with another aggressive homosexual to be raped. That was tried at least four times while I was in federal prison, that disgusting fate escaped only because of my ability to defend myself physically. With one such asshole, an inmate who was in the army and was a cop in Columbus, Georgia, before he was sent to federal prison, the guards would ask from time to time, "How's Calabria doing?" It's nothing even vaguely like what you are shown on TV where the all trouble a prisoner has is from other prisoners. Jail guards are all the lowest sadists on the planet, as are their bosses and the entire justice system and the ruling class like Bush who know that torture is done and love to see it.
So I was very worried about Ruth, however brave and tough I knew her to be. Now was the time to contact our yet potential brother in arms, Ken Bazinet, and ask for help. Our website was good enough to get hundreds of emails from readers. Mention it in one of your articles in the Daily News, for Christ sakes, Ken. It'll cost you all of one line and could save our lives. I sent that off shortly before going off to visit Ruth at the jail. Came back Bazinet's reply:
Subject: Re: Ruth
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:27:12 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dude, get her out of there. Fight this thing with your in-laws on different ground. As for me not getting on board, I am doing my part in a subtle but effective way.
Best of luck,
Ken
What is he talking about?! I'm asking for help, not discussing political philosophy. I shot back after coming back from visiting her.
From: Peter Calabria [[email protected]]
Sent: Sun 9/28/2008 3:07 PM
To: Bazinet, Kenneth
Subject: RE: Ruth
Well, I just got back from seeing her and I was surprised to see how gorgeous she looked. Looked more like she'd been on vacation for a week, on vacation from the rest of us crazy demanding critters in the family. Best of luck has no meaning for us. It is the equivalent of saying a prayer, which is twice as good as nothing, and an obvious side connotation of f*** you. What value you have reminds me of an old fraternity friend of mine. He was a nice dude when he was young, but life eventually got the better of this five times over millionaire after his wife left him. (He designed and operated various trash-to-energy plants including the one down your way called SEMASS.) Often when I had a problem, I looked to Mahoney to be there to help. But what he really turned out to be, rather, was that delusional hope that keeps you going when things get rough. Difference was though that Pat actually did help out a couple of times in a big way. Pat actually was a good friend when I was young. But that's not really the point. With fools like you spreading the news, propaganda is alive and well and should take us to hell in a fast enough period of time. Hoping current events open your dumb eyes yet, so I will refrain from saying what I really think. I'll let her have the last say after she gets out. Am biting my tongue for the family's sake should you wake up, so I leave off here. Come the revolution, God's going to separate the wheat from the chaff and some folks are going to be surprised. Almost held my tongue. Your kind is hard to take and raises suspicion.
And Ken wrote back:
From: Bazinet, Kenneth ([email protected])
Sent: Sun 9/28/08 3:08 PM
To: Peter Calabria ([email protected])
Definitely not a 'f*** you.' I like you folks; wouldn't waste my time if i didn't. Ruth is compassionate and you are a very wise tightly wound cat. Trust me: you use your formula to solve the problem and I'll use mine. Mark me, we will end up with the same conclusion. I'm glad she is doing so well. Not sure I would be.
Ken Bazinet
White House Correspondent
New York Daily News
It was obvious that Ken wanted us to admire the wonderfulness of his position at the Daily News, but would never stick his neck out for us. As to Ruth, gorgeous she looked because she is. Gorgeous she acted because she has courage, certainly more than any journalist and especially this one whom she said when she got out was just another constantly lying, game playing, closet gay type. This characterizes all major media journalists as intentional propagandists, dumb mothers boys or hush up, get along, closet queers, none of whom should be paid a drop of attention to.
Ruth didn't tell me her problems and worry me to death on the visit. And I saw she avoided talking about her own experiences when she got out. Rather she talked for three days non-stop about the women she met in jail who were black and blue with bruises from being thrown to the ground and beaten up for any reason the guards could invent. She talked of two young girls beaten up like this after being put in jail for being short eleven dollars on an International House of Pancakes bill. This, while the pigs on Wall Street have stolen billions from the people and will never see one day in jail, she said, my Trinity, may her day come. This gives some sense as to what people are all about in the real world in contrast to TV land, which gives some empirical background for the real people we explain with mathematical science on our website. This is not a joke, explaining people and politics clearly with mathematics, for we have made a scientific breakthrough of the first order as may be gathered from the two thumbs up review we got from Dennis Sullivan, a master mathematician from NYU and Stony Brook who won the National Medal of Science in 2004.
Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:50
why not publish the part that explains Posner's data in terms of the logistical equation ...first... then do some of the rest next... etc... then as your acceptance takes hold do the more radical parts...as it is you may be pre-empting any real success by indulging your own deeply felt philosophy... by the way your explanations in the first parts were very clear....you may want to read how Einstein in similar and simple layman's terms dispelled the notion of absolute time in the 1905 paper....and how he did it without being untoward...
good luck
dennis Sullivan
The math can be read on matrix-evolutions com.
Dr. and Mrs. Peter V. Calabria
I don't have to be a Nobel Prize economist to see how deep this economic downturn is going to be. Nor do I have to be a Pulitzer Prize historian to tell you that deep economic downturns lead to revolutions and world wars. The opening chapters of the Barbra Tuchman World War I classic, The Guns of August, and the newsreels of that era which show the unemployed of France, England and Germany happily marching off to trench warfare make that perfectly clear. And World War II, which raised the casualty level from five to fifty million and brought on Hiroshima, was preceded by the Great Depression as obviously as sunrise is preceded by dawn. And we see the bloody French Revolution that condemned tens of thousands of aristocrats to be drowned in the rivers of Paris and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it springing from the massive economic downturn made famous by Marie Antoinette's let them eat cake phrase.
But this current worldwide economic contraction we are in isn't going to cause those kinds of problems because we have an anti-war, people-caring President Obama at the helm of our wobbly Death Star. But let's not relax with our plastic Jesus so fast. Isn't Obama's reappointment of Bush's war hawk Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and his refusal to follow through on the tax hikes for the wealthy he promised telling us that the biggest scoundrel in presidential history may be about to be followed by its biggest coward.
We spent thousands of dollars of our meager savings helping to get you elected, President Obama, and hope you take our advice. The house of cards America has become is about to crash down on your head on Inauguration Day the minute you take your hand off the Bible. You're going to have to grow up fast and see things realistically if you really want to keep people in their homes and bread on the table and rioting from happening in the streets. You're going to have to make changes in income distribution that will, indeed, amount to socialism and changes in the anti-terror, warlike attitude of this country that will have your conservative friends who stole the 700 billion and caused the crisis with their trillion dollar mortgage scam calling you a traitor.
If you blow it, even if not to the extent that takes us all the way to Armageddon, your ineptitudes will open the door to a lunatic Palin to follow the coward, Obama, and the scoundrel, Bush, who will delight in crushing riots in the street and in finishing Bush's job of slaughtering the pagan Muslims and in pressing the button of nuclear war if God wills it. If you have any chance of keeping these worst case scenarios from being tomorrow's news headlines, you will be paying a lot of attention to the Clintons, the one good choice that Axelrod and Michelle made for you.
If the possibility of these hells breaking loose strikes you as an excessive reading of history and current events, please get your science advisor to carefully look at the mathematics of evolution on matrix-evolutions com. Derived from the century old accepted work of the classical population biologists, R. A. Fisher and J. B. S. Haldane, it makes clear that a population over its resource capacity, as can come about suddenly for humans from a deep economic downturn, employs atypical behaviors to reduce its numbers back to ecologic equilibrium. For hunting species such as piranha, who exhibit this population reducing activity as cannibalism when prey are scarce during the dry season on the Amazon, these sporadic atypical behaviors get very bloody. Such war of all against all for the sake of survival precisely parallels the common sense historical correlation of humans making war on each other during hard times as bio-logical competition for dwindling resources and territory, a phenomenon which can get particularly ghastly when nuclear weapons are available for the competition.
We were living in Acapulco, Mexico, back in 2007, in exile from the Bush version of Orwell's "1984", when the unprecedentedly two year long presidential debates began. Was this paraded charade of democracy put on by corporate media to distract us all from King George's mad slaughter of Muslims and young American kids in Iraq? Or, our ever paranoid minds inquired, were the debates a way of introducing a pleasantly two faced Oreo named Barack Obama into the political theatre as another chit for the ruling class to control our minds and thinking with?
No, damn it. Senator Obama was actually talking courageously about the war. And saying things that were true, a bold political strategy we had not seen in decades. Our three generation family started working around the clock sending out emails to make sure the Clintons didn't swipe the nomination, 40,000 of them the weekend before Super Tuesday. Great! Barack won! But what if old time Hillary manages to convince the old time superdelegates to foil the vote of the people and steal the nomination at the Denver convention?
Long time political activists, we should have known better. But like millions of others who became excited by the Obama inflatable doll reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln, we dedicated our lives to his election and made up our minds to make the trek North to Denver to make sure that Obama and the people won this time around. As is made clear with photos on matrix-evolutions com taken a week before we left that we were doing very well where we were before being so stupid as to return to the United States to campaign for this newly created man of the people, Senator, call me Barack, Obama.
Once arrived in Denver, we headed straight for the Obama campaign office downtown to let them know we were here to do our part. But it took about all of ten minutes talking to see that we were not a very good fit with these organizationally disciplined Obama functionaries whose sense of America's problems was as deep as a Tuesday afternoon grocery list. They did not seem to appreciate our enthusiastic support for Obama's message of hope and we thought there was something genuinely detestable about that. But that was no big deal, we told ourselves having come two thousand miles to support this new messiah. People are people and each has their own way of looking at things, we told ourselves having come two thousand miles.
Our rosy view was also shaken at this time by the ABC debate where the moderators treated Obama with piss-on-your-shoe disrespect and his instinctive response was but the public wince of a mouse kicked in the stomach. What we saw was not the hero of the ages we had come to fight for. But maybe it's a matter of campaign strategy rather than character we told ourselves having come two thousand miles.
Obama's pandering to the right by wearing the flag pin he correctly first described as a false symbol of patriotism added to our doubt. But our sense of Obama as a typical hypocrite politician was yet minimal when we decided to go straight to West Virginia to directly help his chances of beating Hillary in the primary there. Whatever Obama's negatives, our spending thousands of dollars of our less than robust savings to help get him nominated was strongly driven by our alarm at the conservatives' steady march towards totalitarianism since Reagan came to power in 1980 to kill the revolution of the late 60s. We had a sense that the recent Homeland Security police militarization of America was not unlike Julius Caesar's taking over Rome with his army and changing it suddenly from the Roman Republic it had long been to the totalitarian Roman Empire it became for the next 400 years.
As to the job the Clintons had done and that Hillary could be expected to do, the 2008 Pew Report made it clear that one American in a hundred is in prison today. We have 7 million people caught up in our penal system, which is sixteen times greater per capita than in the Peoples Republic of China where, nobody disagrees, there is no freedom or human rights. We in America are the most incarcerated people in human history, a milestone better appreciated by comparison to two other regimes that were number one in imprisonment in their times, Stalinist Russia and apartheid South Africa. And the Clinton's were the ones, in serving their wealthy conservative handlers, who signed the bills that put the more police on the streets and built the more prisons that put the many more people in jail. And that should be criticized seriously when combined with their fulfilling another very important piece of the conservative agenda, ending welfare help for poor people, which put nearly a million more of them out on the street homeless. No, Hillary held out little hope as Joan of Arc come to stop the rise of American fascism. And how could one trust her word to stop a war she voted to start?
Worried as we left Denver for Charleston that Obama's failure to properly respond to pokes in the nose would cost him the election, we sent him advice through his staffer I am sure he never got and, as far as winning the election went, he never needed.
Dear Victoria,
..Barack was publically raped and humiliated the night of the ABC debate. He showed no instinctive anger at being spat on. His face, rather, made it clear that their finger was up his ass. My husband, son and ten-year-old grandson all winced and lost respect, almost laughing at him by the end of that debate. Barack was executed that night. His campaign staff is made up of young people who know the Internet, but, alas, not the enemy.
Soon the conservatives will destroy him entirely, using him, even as they are now, as a role model for treasonous behavior while they persist in their bloodbath in the Middle East. Somebody should tell Uncle Barack that he has nothing to lose by speaking the truth, as he really feels it in his heart, speak it always and openly, before they hang his ass high up on the backboard for all to see, a black man, a liberal democrat, to scorn and ridicule.
Ruth
Our plan once in West Virginia was to follow Hillary and Bill around and challenge their exaggerated campaign promises. Upon arrival in Charleston, we went right over to the Obama campaign office to tell them what we intended to do. Again we did not get a great reception, our passionate political feelings not entitling us to an upper echelon greeting. Well, these are just kids who don't know any better we told ourselves after coming three thousand miles. What really matters is our efforts to actually help Obama in West Virginia, whatever the elitist attitudes of these organizationally disciplined staffers.
The first Clinton event we staked out was at Shepherd's University up in the West Virginia panhandle. Being novices in the art of passing out Obama political flyers at a Clinton event, we quickly discovered that Hillary supporters were very loyal and very aggressive. "Get out of here! Just get out of here!" This sort of shouting attracted more Hillary supporters, all of whom started glaring and shouting at us in what might be mistaken for a physically threatening way. At this point Pete got protective and took us across the street far from the rally where we were given some interesting information from a professor at this liberal university who told us that the area was frequented by conservative homosexuals a la Senator Larry Craig and that creepy representative from Florida, Mark Foley, who looks like a double born again George Bush. He told us that the Republican gays did their perversities on the QT in this permissive hamlet that was but a short commute from Washington, DC.
That so many outwardly homosexual baiting conservatives were closet queers themselves hardly surprised me. Conservatives are super sneaky and super perverse in their behaviors outside the public view. I suppose their nonstop deceitfulness is obvious to anybody who listens to a White House press conference or tunes into Fox News, though you have to know the type up close to see Neil Cavuto as the consummate mother's boy and Bill O'Reilly as a rubber faced dominant faggot. I did know the type because my father was a fundamentalist minister and my first husband, back in my twenties, a missionary to Japan with more of an interest in perverting than converting the young men who flocked to our church to discuss Bible stories with me, an unwitting Suddenly Last Summer attraction for the victims as I was cute enough to be a commercial model on Japanese TV in addition to being a pastor's wife.
If you have just the right amount of lies and beatings rammed into you in childhood, you're swamped by it and remain a believing jackass until the day you die. But I was lucky. My up close experiences were excessive. My mother was a stone faced lizard my equally ugly father was grateful to get as a wife. She spanked me repeatedly for breaking petty rules I was sure to break, thus insuring her treating herself regularly to a britches down beating of little girl already so terrified and obedient that I remained afraid of the dark until I was in my 30s. It's the minister and his equally whacked out wife playing the game on you, so who's to complain to? Fortunately besides being sneaky and mean my evangelicals were, beyond the ingenious lies they used on children and equally unaware parishioners, quite stupid. Indeed, my mother assured me in my childhood that the fossils in Dinosaur National Monument were plaster fakes made by people who hated God and she believed it.
My constant unhappiness with this socially sanctioned cult of Lutheran clerics eventually resulted in my running away from them with Pete 35 years ago. I got the ultimate satisfaction from my senile mother by having her confide to me on her deathbed the secret advice that conservative mothers give to all their children when they come of age: "Don't ever say what you think." Conservatives don't. Which should make you mistrust everything they say and do, from their five year bloodbath of a war to save us all from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to their 700 billion dollar bailout to save us all from economic disaster they caused that's coming anyway?
It was this sense of Obama as the country's savior from all these horrid conservatives that kept us fighting for him in West Virginia. Ben, June and I went off to the State Capitol the next morning where Hillary spoke. Again we were fiercely glared at by Hillary supporters as we passed out our pro-Obama flyers. But June, who was paying more attention to what Hillary was actually saying than I was, said she thought she was a gutsy woman and spoke with real emotionally honestly.
In the afternoon we made our way to Fayetteville where Bill Clinton was speaking. The down home folk who lined up outside the high school auditorium for Clinton's talk made it clear in their chit chat with us that they would have rather a white faced bank robber than Obama as the next president. But being strong family people they warmed up to our gang of 11 to 67 year olds and accepted our Obama fliers politely, even if to crumble them on the ground after we had walked away.
After a long wait, Bill strode onto the auditorium stage, a bright rooster for somebody his age, Pete said. He also thought Clinton had a brain had some fire in him whatever the merit of his sales pitch about Hillary curing Alzheimer's. At some point I got tired of Bill promising that Hillary would deliver on health care after eight years of failed trying, so I interrupted him. My getting Bill's goat with the cameras rolling in Bill Clinton Argues With Voter (CBS News) was a great success, for the CBS video got a half-million hits on YouTube and over 3000 comments, most of them very favorable to Obama and anti-Clinton. It also got write-ups in the New York Times and all the major newspapers and blogs in the country, including even five minutes on Rush Limbaugh.
Hooray! We had done something useful. But when we went back to the Obama campaign office in Charleston excited and eager to tell them about it, the head staffer from the national office dismissed it brusquely saying he had more important things to do than watch television. We thought this response odd as the reality of it was the video did make Bill (and Hilary) look bad nationally, which had to help Obama. Again we brushed the staffers' rudeness and stupidity aside telling ourselves that these were just kids. But considering that we had also spent a long night making phone calls for Obama and that eleven-year-old Champ had made a great two minute speech for Obama on local TV, we were beginning to have our doubts about Obama.
The final twist was the family being turned down by these pompous underage mobsters for tickets to hear Obama speak in Charleston the day before the primary voting, a big part of what our three generation family had come all the way to West Virginia to see. Instead, we had to watch Obama's speech on TV. He was dramatically unimpressive that day, mumbling his way through a litany of stump speech rhetoric with his flag pin on and looking all the time like he had to make a mad dash out to use the bathroom. Shut out by people who make it clear that they didn't like our level of politics, we watched the primary returns instead at a bash at the Marriot thrown by WV Governor, Joe Manchin. This turned out to be greatly informing because we were seated next to a very knowledgeable Democratic Party biggie who spelled out the details of Hillary's health care efforts in the face of great Republican resistance to it on behalf of the insurance companies.
Then the next morning, as we were about to leave West Virginia, Pete and I looked at each other while we packed our bags and simultaneously said: something is wrong. That something wrong was that we were backing THE WRONG CANDIDATE. After a few minutes of talking, we did a 180 turn to Hillary. We felt we had to keep the conservatives from getting in again and with the gloss completely off Obama, what we saw of the Clinton's close up was beginning to get us to see them in a different light. Later we were not surprised by Obama's voting for the FISA spying bill and cheering the pro-gun Supreme Court decision and by his sharp turn to the right after he beat Hillary.
As to the Clintons, we had always seen them as your typical out of the box populist politicians, puppets of the ruling class as all populists are (and as Obama, his shining armor tarnished, also is.) The Clintons had to make nice with the wealthy during their rise to power and with the conservatives during their tenure in the White House. But the Clintons were made utter fools out of by the right with the Monika Lewinski, Linda Tripp entrapment and we argued, as we were stuck with them now as a last resort, they had tasted the whip directly on their flesh and were now in a more resisting mood. They were different kinds of populists, maybe even revolutionary populists, so we not entirely kidded ourselves. Pete argued also that Bill had at least gotten angry when I jumped on Hillary about health care, which he interpreted as indicating that Bill was cool with Hillary and that the Clintons were real human beings, at least for politicians. Such is the nature of the human mind when all options run out.
Hillary won the West Virginia primary despite our valiant efforts to beat her. But her chances for winning the nomination were slim at that point. The only way it might be possible hinged on how the superdelegates would cast their votes at the convention in Denver. So we headed back to Denver, where we thought the action would be. Just a few days after we returned, McCain came to town to give a speech at the University of Denver. We printed up a bunch of pro-Hillary flyers and went out to meet the Republicans head on. But, in all honesty, it was with somewhat mixed feelings. We knew nothing about McCain. And while we credited the Clintons now with being our new category of politicians, educated by life populists, we weren't the "I love Hillary" devotees of her that many were. So we went into the talk of this not really conservative Republican with a maybe 10% thought that he might be the best candidate.
It's hard to like Republicans viscerally even if you could find a good political reason to align yourself with them. This was emphasized by the extreme strangeness of the GOP folk who attended McCain's talk. Though the suits they wore and their grooming gave the impression of success, their faces looked like the tragic poor people we remembered begging on the streets of Troy, NY, twisted and ugly to the point of being funny looking. There's no way to say this chunk of truth politely. The wealthy look nothing like their soap opera stand-ins. Perhaps this had us down on McCain before he even walked on the stage. He was not impressive in person. If you look at footage of him years back, he has a kind of healthy rascally look about him. And we knew he was not today's typical Jesus crap Republican even though he did kiss Jerry Falwell's ass in public to have a shot at the presidency. But mostly he looked plain old and tired and a bit confused that day.
There was little emotion in him other than when he was putting down the peace activists in the audience and proclaiming that he would bring our troops homer with honor and VICTORY! At this point of McCain's ultra beaming smile of victory, I blurted out spontaneously as I felt it: "He's crazy!" Given our very real sorrow at the endless and unnecessary butchery done to American soldiers and Iraqi innocents, to keep listening to this would have been to honor this horror dressed in sacrosanct patriotic tones. I stood up and we all walked out to make a public display out of our disgust. The fellow next to us followed, shouting at McCain on his way out, "Go to hell!" It is easy to understand McCain's attitude given the fact that he'd been tortured for five years. Pete had been tortured for three years in federal prison and the feeling of revenge was always there when he recalled it. But revenge as a thought is different than actual revenge at the cost of other's lives.
So, it was settled 100% who our candidate was and we continued to hand out our pro-Hillary leaflets and gave a pro-Hillary interview to the Rocky Mountain News after we walked out. And shortly after, we wrote up a piece spelling out how we felt about Obama's lack of testicular fortitude called "Still Holding Out For Hillary?" in Carla Marinucci's column in the San Francisco Chronicle www . sfgate . com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=28131,
Our primary political concern is to stop war, not just the War in Iraq, but the possible escalation of it to a global conflict that might trigger the unthinkable, a nuclear war. Our crusade for the last 20 years has been to start a movement to eliminate all weapons in the world for, as difficult as that is to make happen, once accomplished it is a real solution to the problem of tyranny, capitalist, communist or fascist, which we show mathematically is the primary cause of mankind's unhappiness. Eliminating weapons changes the world in a big way for would-be tyrants without weapons are not a problem. And war is much less likely to start in the absence of the anger and bad feeling that spontaneously comes from the unhappiness caused by tyranny. And a war fought without weapons, as will happen because war is programmed into human nature by that mathematical function on the flag, is a heck of a lot less bloody. We said all that back when in an article printed in the Albany, NY, Knickerbocker News, May, 1986, and reprinted on matrix-evolutions com, the idea no less compelling now than it was then.
Somehow we told ourselves the Clintons had enough brains, whatever their personal sense of politics, to understand the point we were trying to make that tyranny leads to unhappiness and unhappiness to aggressive feelings which cause people to hurt others not only in the petty meanness we all have learned to watch out for in our day to day lives but also in the campus and workplace mass murders we see ever more frequently and in our escalating strife with other nations that will one day cause war at the nuclear level and destroy us all if the problem is not recognized. But a Hillary presidency was doomed from the moment we first imagined it in West Virginia.
So whatever our consideration of Obama as just a sparkly flavor of standard politician, we went back to him after he got the nomination in Denver. Had to, particularly given Palin's addition to the Republican ticket which made it clear that a continuation of conservative rule would take us all to hell. For never have I seen a more dangerous person, one who actually believes God is up there telling her what to do, one who would not hesitate to start a war and press the button if she thought it was God's will. But beyond the problem of nuclear war, the last thing most of us worry about, truth be told, Obama will be just more of the same, little more than a Palin type rhetorician controlled by people bigger than him. President Obama will be nothing but vanilla flavored ricin, poison sugared with a smile, as people will learn soon once the economy totally crashes and Obama does nothing substantive to help. The science on matrix-evolutions com explains all of what I am saying analytically. Now Pete wants to say a few words.
Two main people that Ruth left out because she can't stand them should be talked about because their stories make important points about life in America that are hard to talk about using just mathematical equations. When we got back to Denver from West Virginia, a pair of jerks came into the game. One was Ruth's brother, Don, somebody I find hard to bring up without using nasty adjectives. The other asshole was Ken Bazinet, the White House Correspondent for the New York Daily News. He logged onto this website back in May and started an email exchange that went on through Election Day.
It would be impossible to explain how brother Don came to put Ruth in jail in the middle of this presidential campaign without going way back to 1973 when I first met her. For me it was love at first sight. My first thought the first moment I saw her, she was on the porch of a youth hostel and I was thirty feet away standing in the parking lot, was that she looked like a model you might see in Family Circle magazine. I was at this youth hostel in Point Reyes National Seashore as a revolutionary drop out one credit shy of a PhD in Biophysics, the dropping out caused by my having had work stolen a few years before by my thesis advisor, Aaron Posner, whose work is used here in the math section. My choice was to walk away or kiss the ass of this disgusting bastard who stole my work, an indignity it took me all of ten seconds to know enough to avoid. Later I drove a taxi in New York City where my lungs got burned out from the first oil embargo crisis when Con Edison was allowed to burn high sulfur oil. Unfortunately I happened to live just a block and a half from the electric plant on Manhattan's lower East Side. Gasping for fresh air I headed for the California coast where I hoped the air would be better.
I wound up eventually in that youth hostel north of San Francisco. I was lucky to land there because I had little money and my lungs were so bad off that I was sleeping 22 hours a day. The youth hostel was run by a bunch of jerks, the other side of the sixties coin. There were two faces to the 60s revolution. Some of us saw that the pain in life came from having power shoved up your ass, from teachers and bosses like Aaron Posner and from landlords and police and the like. We were the ones who fought back. For me it was a fun trip, even if dangerous, because I had taken the "fight to the death" vow once I saw what the power game was. The freedom in that attitude is heady. On the other side was a broad spectrum of people who had little sense of freedom except as a license to experiment. Nothing wrong in that, of course, but not respected when you know so well that without a lot of people fighting for it, freedom is a lost cause or a very dangerous enterprise.
I started off in life as a good boy, as a typical middle class kid who pleased his mother and got good grades to get her constant subtle pats on my half broken head. But dropping out of graduate school and living on the street makes you tough fast, or you get beat. Which is what I was by the time I ran into Ruth at the youth hostel, smart enough to have gotten a PhD in an area, biophysics, that is as painful to learn as it sounds, and tough enough to have survived four bullet holes, a half dozen knife scars and never lost a fight in the number two homicide precinct in America for two years. The upside of this game of dangerous living is that you wind up as heroic a character as you fantasized you'd be when you were in the seventh grade, with you afraid of nobody and all the girls loving you. This persona is very nice to have wound up with because it avoids your getting your heart broken when you fall in love with a beautiful woman, something I was very prone to in my younger days. It avoids being beaten and made small by love frustrated, a shrinkage of the psyche and self-confidence that gets many young men to accept their role as an agreeable slave in the sweatshop of America.
And it was good to be that confident when I met Ruth because she was the kind of beautiful girl who knows she's beautiful, which is very good, but can also make for difficulties in courtship. Fortunately, also, she was vulnerable, a damsel in distress trying to avoid being destroyed by her minister husband and her fundamentalist minister family and all the help they could get from the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod that her husband and father were ministers in. Under these circumstances, trust me, it helps to be good with your fists because the minister husband didn't get the message to stop hurting Ruth until I was sitting on his chest about to rip his eyes out.
Now whatever the good book and Dr. Phil tells you, love is basically attraction and good sex. And there is a difference between good sex and not so good sex. The last three years Ruth was with the missionary, she slept on the coach. The thought of sleeping with him just made me vomit, was the way she out it. For myself, a good boy in my early twenties and a fairly bad boy in my late twenties, the difference between good sex and not so good sex was also clear. Done right human mating is remarkably like that of a wart hog or a lion, a kind of properly resisted, low level rape. The pleasure for both is fierce enough to make you both want to come back for more. And that's what keeps you staying together while you're sorting out the differences adult human beings have when they first get together. Sex you want three times a day patches over those lovers quarrels. Not the silly ideas about "relationships" that capitalist Christian culture sells you that are doomed to fail you and quickly turn the two of you into sad and agreeable nine-to-five slaves.
Others were not as happy with this karma sutra love story as we were. What her scummy family tried to do to break us up can't be told without raising enough rage on the printed page to put me in jail for threats of first degree murder. Suffice to say we learned a lot about Christians, especially the fundamentalist sort and how unbelievably sneaky and vicious they are. But I will serve that course for the mathematics lest I be accused of exaggeration and extreme prejudicial hatred. Equations aside, trust these rats and turn your back on them as you would a hungry alligator.
Now let's get the story back to brother, Don. Ruth had kids by the missionary and years after we got past her family's using them in every which way to get Ruth back we went to visit them in Texas. Appearing on the scene again was occasion for more traps and terror from these fake Jesus bastards. Fortunately I had come back to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute by 1980 to fetch my PhD and, as the prodigal son returning from the late sixties with my stolen research on bone growth now recognized in the literature for the genius work it was, got as a bonus a position in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. With my polyester suit and red stripped tie and previously long scraggly hair cut down as neat as Robert McNamara's, we strode into Don's house one morning to have family breakfast with him and his wife, Ruby, and as part of their trap, Ruby's Texas pig farmer father and Ruby's Texas speedway owner brother in law.
With Don, a lawyer, on the scene, the game was no win. You can lose the fight and lose the woman you love in being made a fool out of, which is what happens when you lose a fist fight for all you who have never gotten near the experience of winning or losing at such. Or you can win the fight and be taken to jail by the lawyer who knows how to arrange such things, especially in this Third Reich hamlet of Lubbock Texas where the many cathedral size churches and the courthouse and the jail all snuggle up close to each other downtown like they are architecturally in bed with each other. But I beat the asshole by just plain frightening him with the furious anger I felt and showed when he tried to make Ruth afraid and humiliate her publically. The punk who was only able to beat up women got so scared I was going to kill him, something I was trying to resist intensely, that he couldn't pull the trigger.
It helps to have never been suckered into anger management class. Avoiding it gets you to keep your temper, which can go a long way in settling differences without bloodshed by making it clear before the fact that much blood will be shed if the jerk is stupid enough to keep on antagonizing you. An illustrative war story, not the best I have but appropriate to making the point, is the time I was walking back to my $60 a month apartment on East 11th Street in New York at 2 AM and a black fellow drew a knife when I was ten paces away from our running into each other. I never carried a weapon because I didn't think it fair. But the urge to murder a predator as displayed violently on one's face was understood by this fellow and he folded up his knife and smiled and wished me a good evening a few moments later.
Don's trophy wife, Ruby, (that means she married him for his position and money, not for lust), had played nice with me at the breakfast table as part of the trap. She wasn't bad looking, but not something you'd want to f*** unless you like plastic or she was properly tied down with ropes. She had that type of knowing evangelical good looks. Anyway, after he broke Don made repeated and terrified excuses that he meant no harm to us. A couple of years later, I always guessed because of this stain on Don's teeny tiny manhood, Ruby divorced him, big thing in their tight religious community, and went out of her way to write to us in New York to tell us about it and make a total fool out of him, a fitting punishment to this asshole lawyer who masterminded the schemes to break Ruth and me up during the legal phase of her separation from the creepy missionary.
This should tell you that Don and I were not friends. Because of that when I tell you that Don was a mama's boy, I hope you won't think I am just saying that to further insult him for there is actual factual evidence for him being a mama's boy. As Ruth made clear, her (and Don's) mother was a spanker, a typical, if at the far end of the spectrum, fundamentalist conservative spanker, the kind of parent so low and repelling that beating up a little kid was the only possible way she could get the child's respect. Ruth remembers Don getting put over mama's knee often, during which times she also remembers feeling very bad for him. Ruth escaped this ministerial house of Jesus sanctioned child abuse horrors. But the ones who don't escape become, like mom, lizards themselves, petty and mean and very deceptive as to how they extract the energy from others they need to keep them going in life after mother took away their testicles in childhood.
To get to the punch line in this story, it is also necessary to make clear that Mother Graf was very not fond of me. In my one encounter with her during our courtship days, Ruth's mother seemed much like a lesbian rival for Ruth's affection. And I treated her as such. This prompted mom-in-law to call down God to punish me in high blown Old Testament tones in front of Ruth. But after two years of living in the half black, half drug dealing Puerto Rican neighborhood I was coming from where no evening went without a stabbing or a shooting or somebody getting hit over the head with a ten foot length of pipe, I was not cowed by Mother Lizard's calling on God to smite me down. I can't remember if I told both mother and God to go f*** each other or just indicated how I felt with my disposition. But suffice to say I was no more friends with Don's mother than I am with Don or God, neither of whose sexuality I trust either.
That sets the scene properly for Ruth's unannounced meeting with her mother just before she died at age 91. This was at an old folk's apartment house in Lubbock. The witch, old and feeble and off her game, was unable to phase Ruth even with all that corporal punishment conditioning when Ruth was young. Not too long after we first met, Ruth took revenge on the family by writing a comic book which included the child abuse she had endured under her parents. The comic was good enough to be called a "masterpiece of sorts" by Robert Crumb who said he liked all of it except the last page where Ruth poisons her mother with black widow spiders. The missionary husband came down with throat cancer six weeks after we sent it around to a thousand of his fellow Lutheran ministers. And the father was dismissed from his parish down in Waco and became a real estate salesman after that and died of prostate cancer.
You have already heard the story of Ruth dropping in to see her mother when she was near death and of her mother telling her "Don't ever say what you think." Ruth was half way out the door when she heard that and on her way down to the receptionist at the entrance of the old folks apartment house to tell her that her mother was a disgusting child molester, this an effort to insure that the mother had no peace on earth to the end of her days.
So we were surprised when she left Ruth $30,000 in her will when she died. But not surprised that she left the money in trust with Don with his having absolute control over it, and in that way, over Ruth. And even less surprised when Don told Ruth up in his law office shortly after the mother's death in 2007 that Ruth would never see a penny of the money unless "you leave Pete." This attempt at control from the grave may not be unusual, but we thought it exquisitely fitted to a nutcase evangelical and her mama's boy son.
Now, though the will had a clause in it that if Ruth tried in any way to contest it in court, she would automatically lose all the money, a lawyer told us that there were limits to how much Don could block her getting it, especially if she needed the money for health reasons. Ruth needed work on her teeth and had no dental insurance, so at least she could get her teeth fixed with the money. So we went to one of best dentists in Denver after we got back there from West Virginia and he came up with a treatment plan for $16,000 and sent Don the bills for the initial examination. What came back from Don to the examining dentists was:
Dear Dr. Gurinsky and University Dental Arts:
For some unknown reason, I received a bill from your office yesterday referencing Ruth M. Calabria. I am the trustee of a small trust for Ms. Calabria, but I have not authorized the expenditure of any monies with you and have heard nothing from Ms. Calabria seeking approval of any expenses with you. I have no address for her and therefore request that you send her a copy of this letter. I am not authorizing the expenditure of any funds from her trust for medical expenses and will not do so unless I am contacted prior to any procedures and have approved any expenditure in writing.
He did pay the examination bill, but the dentists were taken aback with this letter from a brother about his 67 year old sister's dental work. But we were hardly surprised. The losers and the lonely get their jollies in life screwing up other people's happiness and it was clear that it was going to take more than just writing a letter to get the inheritance from this control freak who had dominated much of his sister's early life and wanted to continue to do so, the mother having given Ruth to Don as a sister wife, so to speak, an obedient female, as was and still is the custom in many conservative clans. So we left Denver for Lubbock to do battle hand to hand with sonny boy and are still here after five months. During this time Don sent Ruth to jail for criminal trespass when she went up to up in his law office to talk about the money and his receptionist said for the fourth time that Don was busy with a client or out of town or at court and Ruth refused to leave until she got to speak to him.
At around this same time, we started hearing from Ken Bazinet, the White House Correspondent of the New York Daily News. Ruth first sent him a form email back in February along with many other journalists in America to make them aware of our election campaign website.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2008 5:59 AM
To: Bazinet, Kenneth
Subject: Clinton
Check out our unique take on Hillary on matrix-evolutions com.
As major media journalists don't readily mix with bloggers, we were pleased to get back this reply from him a few months later.
From: Bazinet, Kenneth ([email protected])
Sent: Mon 5/19/08 4:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Holy Moley Ruth, this was not exactly light reading. You and Pete scared the bejeezus out of me! I agree with a lot of it, that's for sure. Thanks for thinking of me. Best, Ken
This was a very nice note from a guy we didn't know from Adam. How serious was he? we wondered, for our politics has an edge much too sharp for most mainstream journalists. We were hesitant to open our hearts to the guy as friendly as his letter was because of experiences we'd had with another journalist, Paul Krassner, who though a rebel in his younger years turned out to be a typical power gamer player as he slid less rebelliously into old age. Ruth wrote Bazinet back a nice note to explain why our website had turned from pro-Obama to pro-Hillary and why we thought Hillary might still get the nomination. Ken replied.
Subject: RE: Clinton
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:57:50 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
One problem with your theory, Ruth, is the top echelon of the Clinton and Obama camps meet Thursday in NYC. The Clintonistas are handing over their fundraising and volunteer lists. The queen has some serious problems to contend with in this town. There is no way she can piss off her party more than she already has. Besides, I have a research buddy in the GOP who has the smoking gun file on Hillary. She would be toast. No, if you want to see McCain beat your only chance is going to be Obama. Mark me well on that. Take care and good luck with the revolution, Ken
Our hope in Clinton, as it turned out, was more hope than a realistic projection of her chances. But once that came to an end at the convention, we switched back and sent out over 100,000 emails in the next two months attacking the Republicans and supporting Obama. Ken's best wishes for the revolution took us a bit by surprise. Bazinet's boss at the Daily News is Mort Zuckerman, ranked the 188th richest person in the country in 2007. Zuckerman is also the editor-in-chief of the U.S. News and World Report, a right leaning rag the last time we looked. Was Ken for real? Or just getting his kicks hanging out with real revolutionaries? Having thoughts about real political change, not the Obama kind of cosmetic change that we will see now that the voting is over, can be dangerous. After writing a string of political pieces in the Albany afternoon daily, I was set up by an FBI informant and sent to federal prison, the actual charge getting angry at an unlicensed stock broker for his losing near $100,000 in family money. Despite our getting back $70,000 in an out of court settlement very quickly, I spent three years in prison in my late fifties. And this was with a PhD under my belt and no prior criminal convictions. This gets a person to take his politics seriously and hesitate to embrace someone who may throw the word revolution around to sound cool. But maybe the guy was for real. So we pushed him a bit in our next email to see who he was. He replied.
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:49:33 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Hey, I ran with Abbie for a time in Massachusetts when I covered his and Amy Carter's trial in Northampton, Mass. in 1986 And of course I attended and wrote of his funeral in Worcester in 1989. So I'm not going to make any bets with any seasoned anarchists today, but I will buy you both a dinner or lunch when we cross paths (and please remind me to check for my wallet when the meal is over). Sheesh, Ruth, your passion is exquisite, albeit a bit chilling even for a Marxist like me. I am, however, nonetheless glad you found me. Cheers, Ken
Bazinet ran with Abbie Hoffman, a fellow I always thought a lot of. And Bazinet is a Marxist. And Bazinet gets his paycheck from Mort Zuckerman. Does that fit? Who knows? Life is full of contradictions. But his remark about our stealing his wallet, even if said in jest, was a red flag. People who want real change enough to stick their neck out to make it happen are brothers in arms and don't think in that way. I wrote back explaining to him that we were not Marxists. Uncle Karl was certainly correct that the capitalists own and treat the workers like a farmer owns and treats his farm animals. But political revolution is more than just seeing the problem. It is also solving the problem. And there Marx was wrong, painfully wrong as people who live under communist regimes have found out. You can't change human nature as regards power. Having all of it eventually corrupts, whatever the ideology or initial good intentions.
Idealism aside, a clear understanding of man's evolutionary origins tells you that the people who have the weapons and the power always come to believe they are king or god, whether they are Stalin or Jim Jones or George Bush. Eventually they run the game to suit their own interests and whims, controlling the rest of us to our detriment. This sure recipe for unhappiness we personally avoided only by living like runaway slaves and developing a plan based on a mathematical understanding of the problem that can't be propagandized away by double talking journalists on corporate owned TV. I made it clear to Ken that I didn't like people who talk the talk to get a pat on the head but don't walk the walk. And when I saw a photo of him on Google, that's now on matrix-evolutions com, covering the visit of the Pope to Washington, DC, it made me wonder more. Not that all resistors to tyranny have to look like Che Guevara. But Ken's thoughts imprinted on his face did make me wonder, if not about his sincerity, than about his understanding of the reality of America. Bazinet's reply came back.
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:42:24 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Peter,
Why aim the anger at me? We were having a polite exchange, seeking common ground and you get huffy? Why? Because you got caught? Because your friend got killed? Give me a break. Do you do what you do for you or for the greater good? Ruth is polite and smart. Are you rude and self-absorbed? You know nothing about me or my pen. I work my craft with an eye on Jack Reed, Isaiah Thomas and George Orwell. So please spare me your pseudo Ohio 7 rap (I covered those trials too, and the Macheteros as well). Spectator or not I am familiar with the real deal, my friend, and I would rather find common ground with you than argue who's got a bigger role in the revolution.
Regards,
Ken
There's some I liked in his reply and some I didn't like. I still wondered if he was just a geezer trying to get Ruth's attention with the rest being little more than self-affectation. He had little sense of who we were and how we thought, but that was understandable, for we are unique because of our unusual backgrounds and not easily categorized. Ruth and I wrote him back.
From: Ruth Calabria [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 1:03 PM
To: Bazinet, Kenneth
Dear Ken,
..These problems are real. Though the bedrock truth of it, without which nothing Pete says or does can make any sense, is that what he really cares about in life is our kids and leaving a world behind for them that will give them some chance at attaining real happiness. Let me put him on the line now. He says he may be able to connect with you through George Orwell, a common ground.
Ken, do you know Orwell in the early stages of his career when he wrote under his real name, Eric Blair? I would bet, yes, if you followed him well. One of his first novels was "Keep the Aspidistras Flying." The central character, a young man, has a variety of problem experiences, one with a waiter of an upper class restaurant the young man takes his would-be girl friend to who talks to him in an insulting way when it is obvious the young man has little money, an experience that Orwell makes clear helps to destroy their possible love relationship. And the young man also has problems with his rooming house landlady who screws him up intentionally with her petty rules and intrusiveness, which also helps destroy the love his girlfriend might have given him, a love that Orwell makes clear is all that matters in life, as is the case. Rules and money and the humiliations that derive from too much of the former and too little of the latter kill love. That's the primary link between the political system, ours a capitalist police state, and a person's happiness or lack of it. No love, no happiness, unless you're crazily content with the delusion of God's love after death.
It doesn't stop there. Only loving couples have tough sons and beautiful daughters, which is all that non-delusional parents care about in life. I'd sacrifice myself - and anybody else - for my kids' happiness. And befriend anybody, treat them like family, who made more possible my kids' happiness. And a good part of that is changing this massive slave state mankind has become and preventing it from continuing on its present course, ultimately to global nuclear war.
If you see life much differently than the need to change this miserable world for the sake of the next generation, then we haven't much in common. Not everybody sees things in this love and family way. Many view facilitative success, rank and money as central rather than as just a means to love and family. Does that make sense? A guy has to have freedom, whatever its costs and risks, to make the love connection, without which raising happy kids, the pinnacle of happiness, is impossible. And that is what you see in America, especially since World War II, a totally f***ed up society relationally, where divorce and isolation is the norm now, and where the resulting unhappiness evidences itself in general meanness and, at its worst, in mass violence, both with kids in schoolyards and in its exportation across national borders as Orwellian wars such as we are presently engaged in over in the Middle East.
Am I making any sense? Few can argue with the coercion that exists in the workplace, where the boss owns the workers as powerfully as any patent slave master for eight hours a day. Whatever clinical psychology and Dr. Phil may say, that crap is more ideology than science. A guy made a fool out of on the job stays a fool on Saturday night and doesn't make the love connection or get the happiness associated with it that is so instinctively necessary in life. Others may argue with the police state we say on our website exists. Let me tell you a couple of personal anecdotes to illustrate how much the police state has grown in America, particularly over the last 20 years.
Back about 20 years ago I got into a fistfight with a thug for hire in Troy. Paid by our landlord to cause trouble, he insulted Ruth by sitting on our porch outside our bathroom window. When I finished with him, he had two streams of blood coming out of eyes, something I had never seen or heard of before I managed, in utter fury, to pull it off. He called the Troy Police in terror after I was finished with him, who arrived in three squad cars. They were quick to look for reasons not to arrest me, a scratch or two or my left ankle. They were laughing. No problem, they said, we just want to see who it was beat the hell out of Dickie Yaddo so bad that he called the riot squad, then explaining to me that Yaddo was well know to them as a hit man for hire in Troy, something I heard at that moment for the first time.
The point is that it was not a crime then for a man who cares about his wife to beat the shit out of some jerk who would insult her. At that time, cops still had some sense of reasonableness. But in this current conservative law and order police state mentality, I'd have been locked up for ten years, for as it turned out, I destroyed the asshole's vision near completely. Indeed I was locked up for much less than that in 1999. I didn't get caught at something, as you suggest. Rather I got set up by a fellow with a lot of money who had a strong connection with the FBI. I'll try not to drag this out to long. I'm not crying when I talk about it. Rather it makes the point of how much of a police state we actually live in.
If you consider yourself an investigative reporter, this is a fun story to follow. Look up on Google, Ebay Stamp Scam, and you will be directed to an article on MSNBC about a conman upstate New York stamp dealer. There's only one significant stamp company in upstate New York, Ferris Stamp and Coin, and it is owned by a fellow named Wendell Williams. He scammed us out of $96,000 in a stock derivatives trading game. He had no broker's license. I got angry at first and unfortunately put it in writing. Later we got back $70,000 in a quick settlement, the papers available should you wish to check them out. But not before he went to his FBI connections in Albany and put me in prison for three years, this on a first time criminal conviction at age 56 with a PhD in Biophysics.
The story on MSNBC was never followed up on and his name was never mentioned in it. He had that level of high level police connections, the same level that allowed him to scam us out of $96,000 and put the blame on me for getting angry at him. Prison was a real trip. The worst anybody might imagine couldn't describe it. For a person who resists the destruction of the spirit, it is nothing but non-stop torture, as bad in our domestic federal prisons, and not just for me, as anything you hear about at Guantanamo or Abu Gharib. Forget about the Martha Stewart airbrushing of the reality of it. A small example: at age 59, completely wrapped in chains and with most of my family watching, in the federal courthouse in Albany, but with no video camera rolling, I was beaten by two federal marshal assholes bad enough to barely be able to walk for the next six months. The federal judge I soon saw a few minutes later was well aware I had been beaten bloody. Yes, we filed suit, available to see on request, but ran away to Mexico rather than push the suit once the consequences of pushing it were made clear.
I survived all this crap because I was a seasoned veteran, in my fifties and still physically intact, at least when I started out. Not so the many, mostly minority younger prisoners, most of whom crack under the strain after a few months, and none of whom, in my observation, make it past two years without losing their spirit and sanity. And once you see this game of destroying a man's spirit in the patent way it is done in prison, it is easy to observe how it is done in lockstep, clockwork, fashion, out on the street, in schools, where I have taught both at the university and grade school levels, and in the work place.
All of this gives me the pomposity to say with surety that democracy is a sham and that what is needed in America is a real revolution, one that Barack Obama could not possibly pull off, even granting him all good intentions, but that the Clintons, who have tasted humiliation deeply and first hand with the Monika setup at the hands of the fundamentalist conservatives, might help to pull off. Sorry about the anger, but my sense is that you are on the sidelines in this more vigorous aspect of life. You have the power to open your mouth loudly, Ken, but as with just about everybody allowed an opinion in media land, you are, I have guessed, a bit too blind to realities you have been insulated from or as regards shortcomings in your own life you are able to rationalize away. I have no axe to grind with you, or anybody, other than as they do less than is necessary when they have the power to do more, for to change things in a way that is truly meaningful for people, a clear awareness of the problem and assumption of real risk has to exist. Are you there in this regard, Ken? I guessed not in my previous email, but perhaps I was wrong and I certainly hope so. Pete
And Bazinet wrote back:
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:07:01 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I am at work right now (with Holy Joe Lieberman in the background on a conference call defending John McCain's Iraq vision -- an experience like fingernails on a chalk board, lemme tell ya) and have just read this for a second time. After the first go, I rocked back and said out loud, "You were right, these folks are the real deal." My second take was much stranger and far less self-serving than crediting myself with on-the-money gut instincts. I had to wipe my eyes (thankfully, a catharsis much unlike Mr.. Yaddo's). I need to process all of this before I can respond in detail. What I would like to say for now is thank you both for taking the time to help me understand. I can also add that I am no longer troubled by my exchanges with Pete, as I had been. It had to happen to get to this point. Now I just need some time to think this through. This is not light reading.
Of course, Bazinet's words are hard to judge harshly on their face. I didn't appreciate him questioning who I was, but, I thought, he knew me as little as I knew him. I still had no idea where this was going. The major media generally come in two flavors, the FOX News people who lie at every moment and are simply well paid propagandists. And there are the honest news dummies, like some on NBC who are allowed to speak their minds, their honest take on things all the more trusted by the listeners even if the opinions are incorrect. But even they trim what they say for fear of going too far and losing their jobs. Toward these, one is caught between educating them, hard to do past the power of the healthy paycheck reporters at Bazinet's level get, and kicking them in the ass as you would the FOX News crew, for in the end what matters are the mistruths they send out and the great harm that causes. In the end, after two months of near daily talking on the Internet with Bazinet about everything under the sun, we were sure that something he wasn't talking about was smelling up the conversation, possibly a life style he wasn't so keen to reveal of a kind that took a softer stance on rebellion than could ever be effective politically or helpful to us. So when our endless fear of how the conservatives might steal the election by bombing Iran, a reasonable fear given the WMD treachery Bush got us into Iraq with and his attack on Fallujah just before the 2004 election, we tried to push Bazinet to open his mouth by shaming him with the following email sent to Carla Marinucci, the Senior Political Correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected],[email protected]
Subject: Emergency
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:07:50 -0400
Dear Carla: I sent this email off to Kenneth Bazinet of the Daily News last week the minute I heard about our sending an envoy to today's Iran nuclear talks in Geneva. We talk on our website, matrix-evolutions com, of knowing the conservatives well from our personal experience and are absolutely sure of what they are about to do with Iran, with the help of the Israelis, and that the primary purpose of their bombing Iran is to play the war-terrorism card to get McCain elected. Forget my insults on Bazinet, whom we had a 30 email political argument with last month. For all I know he could be married with six kids, though I doubt it. More is the feeling after all that jawing with him that he's a coward and so sneaky in his correspondence, which in my older generation's experience has the implications stated.
The important point is that the political game in America is going to shift from our presidential schoolyard politics to the rough reality of an irreversible shift in the balance of political power in this country as an effective total takeover by the conservatives. I shouted to Bazinet to do something, but as with almost all media people, he's a get-along flunkey only interested in keeping his job. I'm not screaming down your throat. Somehow I have respect for your ability to see things with your own two eyes. But let me encourage you to stay sharply keyed to this murderous ploy with Israel and Iran and to react in print in a swift and timely manner, for neither your kids nor mine nor anybody else's will be having a good life if what they plan with Iran and its related political tightening back in America goes down without a very vigorous fight.
Regards: Peter Calabria
Dear Kenny,
OK. Now I get it. But first things first. We're going to bomb Iran, us or the Jews. This as a way to get McCain ahead in the game, a position he could never get to otherwise because Obama completely outshines, outthinks and outmaneuvers him. Saturday, the US State Dept. envoy, William Burns, will be present when the EU presents its stop the nuclear proliferation proposals to the Iranians in Geneva. A mathematically minded analyst says this is unusual. A conspiracy minded political observer says this allows Bush or Condiweasel Rice to pontificate as to our going way out of our way to have gone to Geneva to do diplomacy with the Iranians in order to save the world from nuclear proliferation, but the Iranians, nuclear mass murderers that they are, won't back down so we and/or the poor, severely threatened, Israelis have absolutely no choice but to bomb them back to the stone age for said very moral reasons. Which will get the Iranians, who are four times as reactive and rashly aggressive than I am, to retaliate against just enough targets, Tel Aviv, US soldiers in Baghdad and oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz, to give the national ambiance the feel of another 9/11, which allows for the unfurling of the grand war flag. All of which will get McCain far ahead in the game and keep the conservatives in power for another four years.
An auxiliary reason and outcome of us and/or the Israelis making war on Iran is the distraction of the citizens from the on-the-brink irreversible collapse of the financial markets. I know the markets. I played stock options back in the late 80s and made 45K in one day when the Japanese bankers refused to give a critical loan to UAL. I gave back $30,000 of it the following week, so I am not proclaiming to be Ivan Boesky resurrected. But I do understand the realities of the financial markets and I did take Samuelson math-based economics, so I can tell you with some confidence that the entire US economy is going bye-bye, not in a cyclical downturn, but in a permanent collapse in this nation's economic strength - and in our broader strength as a nation, no longer as number one.
This very soon to come war on Iran will provide a cover for all the little people taking the money hit with the evisceration of their 401K retirement funds, loss of home value equity, the outrageous inflation about to get so bad, effectively making everybody but our not insignificant number of millionaires paupers. The economy is not revivable. Its fate was sealed with our entry into this prolonged war and its taking the deficit to unimaginably high levels and the day and night printing of money and its killing of the dollar, that and the greedy Wall Streeters who, in conjunction with the blind eyed Bush regime regulators killed the economy. There's nothing anybody can do to fix it now. It's like the mighty Mississippi high above the flood mark, the daily rush to pile on financial sand bag solutions totally unable to prevent the financial disasters that are happening.
The war will both provide a patriotic distraction from the financial debacle and get McCain elected, silencing anybody who dares then to shout out even 10% of the truth of why we went to war against Iran and what will be happening as a result of it, a capitalist media airbrushed version of the Third Reich, more or less.
So you're a homosexual, gay, queer, faggot, whatever you want to call it, Rumple-still-skin. Does that mean you don't care if everybody gets f***ed up? Maybe it does mean that. Does it also mean you don't care about the broader war that is sure to escalate from this immanent attack on Iran? Farfetched? Certainly not, for this attack on Iran about to happen momentarily is exactly what Seymour Hersh has been saying was going to happen for the last three years. It is going to happen. Iran first, and eventually an expansion to global nuclear war from these lunatic conservatives. Open your f***ing mouth. You have to say this ahead of time, to put your finger in the dyke now to save the situation. It won't do any good to shout out afterwards because such shouting will be advertised to the public as the worst kind of lack of patriotism, the worst kind of traitorous behavior. Shouting it out now won't stop the bombing from happening. Nor will it save Obama's candidacy. But it will give some of us, a significant number if you open your mouth now, some leverage, some grounds to stand on, to resist the repression that will surely be activated and rationalized as a result of this attack on Iran and their response.
With Obama made to look unpatriotic by the conservative propaganda machine, possibly even called an out an out traitor, his poll numbers will plummet, which will give Hillary Clinton a chance to step in to make the only critical difference possible, for she will be the only way for any meaningful resistance to this conservative putsch. And, make no mistake, without such a miracle Clinton circumventing of their war fever strategy, America will land in cement hard totalitarianism.
Don't be scared to open your mouth. Believe in God, Kenny. Your and my special God who I am inventing at this very moment just so you can have a positive delusional promise that after you die, you'll get 200 virgins in Heaven with all the trimmings and whatever it takes for you to enjoy them if that's what it takes for you to summon up the balls it takes to write this impending scenario up now, before it happens. If I print this myself on my website, I doubt it will get enough readers given our paltry 800 visitor a week to do the nation any good, though you never know how things might take off if I send a copy of it to Carla Marinucci at the San Francisco Chronicle, too. Really rather not. If you write it up all by yourself, laying the blame (or credit) for the predictions on me to protect yourself, it works a hell of a lot better, because it works for sure and it works fast, Mr. White House Correspondent for the New York Daily News. This is no joke. Nor is any of this a competition between a straight guy, me, and a brilliantly successful not very straight guy, you. Think beyond your zipper. A lot of people are going to get hurt if somebody doesn't start shouting and screaming out what's going to happen now. I am giving you the information. Only you have the media power to shout it out. Though subtly is fine too, as long as you get the word out. Jean Genet, a gay dude, was uniquely informing and so was Michel Foucault, even more so as the only modern social philosopher really worth reading. In that way, whatever his life style, he was a genuine hero. Be a hero, too, Ken.
Pete
Needless to say, we were less friendly after I sent this email. But then comes the day Ruth is arrested and I had to reach out to somebody. Ruth is gutsy and it was all her idea not to budge from Don's law office and be taken off to jail to make the point of the viciousness of Don's tactics. But I was very afraid for her because I have been in prison myself. Jail is the place where the class of people that sit below the ruling class and the manager class and the obedient working class are sent to be broken of their spirit of resisting the rules. Sometimes those who break the rules hurt innocent people and that type are the criminals featured in the evening news. Many, surprisingly for me, as I saw the real story of crime and punishment for the first time only at the late age of 56, are just people who hate bosses and like themselves. Though possibly that view is jaundiced by my own horrible experience with the so-called justice system. The conman who took our money, Wendell Williams, worked with the FBI as an informant on possible money launderers and was so protected by them that when a major EBay stamp scam pointing toward him came to light in an article on MSNBC a few years back, the matter was quickly hushed up in the news and never reported on again let alone prosecuted. So what might have gotten me a brief or suspended sentence for being so stupid as to get angry at him instead of immediately filing a civil suit, was blown up to 3 years of the most tortuous and enlightening experiences any man could have.
Most prisoners have no voice, nobody to speak for them and tell what the experience is all about. It is nothing like what Martha Stewart was shown on TV to have. It is horrible beyond imagination and my personal experience in prison is the prime reason we are so adamant to seeking a society where prison is abolished. Death is by far the better alternative. I was tortured repeatedly, the purpose of it for me and other resistant prisoners being to destroy your self-respect. All prison staff love torturing prisoners, which tells you a lot about the realities of the society that America has become. I was beaten completely shackled by US Marshalls in the middle of a court proceeding and, besides having my eye gashed open clearly for the federal judge to see, was repeatedly kicked so badly in the hip I could not walk for the next six months. The medical records were carefully doctored. While at a county jail used as a rendition for the feds, a place where torture can be done by surrogates, I was attacked by four guards, two of whom held me down while another pried my eyelids open and the fourth poured pepper spray into my eyes. This causes you to scream uncontrollably for two hours.
In a disciplinary prison down in Talladega, I was kept in chains for ten days, eight more than regulations allow, the last four days with black box hand cuffs attached even at night. You can't help falling off to sleep from the exhaustion of being chained up every minute and wake up every ten minutes screaming from the bloody grooves cut into your wrists by the torture hand cuffs. The guards found all this very fun. A Filipino doctor who checked my wrists near fainted from the sight of it. And I was put in chains specifically because I refused to be put in with another aggressive homosexual to be raped. That was tried at least four times while I was in federal prison, that disgusting fate escaped only because of my ability to defend myself physically. With one such asshole, an inmate who was in the army and was a cop in Columbus, Georgia, before he was sent to federal prison, the guards would ask from time to time, "How's Calabria doing?" It's nothing even vaguely like what you are shown on TV where the all trouble a prisoner has is from other prisoners. Jail guards are all the lowest sadists on the planet, as are their bosses and the entire justice system and the ruling class like Bush who know that torture is done and love to see it.
So I was very worried about Ruth, however brave and tough I knew her to be. Now was the time to contact our yet potential brother in arms, Ken Bazinet, and ask for help. Our website was good enough to get hundreds of emails from readers. Mention it in one of your articles in the Daily News, for Christ sakes, Ken. It'll cost you all of one line and could save our lives. I sent that off shortly before going off to visit Ruth at the jail. Came back Bazinet's reply:
Subject: Re: Ruth
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 11:27:12 -0400
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dude, get her out of there. Fight this thing with your in-laws on different ground. As for me not getting on board, I am doing my part in a subtle but effective way.
Best of luck,
Ken
What is he talking about?! I'm asking for help, not discussing political philosophy. I shot back after coming back from visiting her.
From: Peter Calabria [[email protected]]
Sent: Sun 9/28/2008 3:07 PM
To: Bazinet, Kenneth
Subject: RE: Ruth
Well, I just got back from seeing her and I was surprised to see how gorgeous she looked. Looked more like she'd been on vacation for a week, on vacation from the rest of us crazy demanding critters in the family. Best of luck has no meaning for us. It is the equivalent of saying a prayer, which is twice as good as nothing, and an obvious side connotation of f*** you. What value you have reminds me of an old fraternity friend of mine. He was a nice dude when he was young, but life eventually got the better of this five times over millionaire after his wife left him. (He designed and operated various trash-to-energy plants including the one down your way called SEMASS.) Often when I had a problem, I looked to Mahoney to be there to help. But what he really turned out to be, rather, was that delusional hope that keeps you going when things get rough. Difference was though that Pat actually did help out a couple of times in a big way. Pat actually was a good friend when I was young. But that's not really the point. With fools like you spreading the news, propaganda is alive and well and should take us to hell in a fast enough period of time. Hoping current events open your dumb eyes yet, so I will refrain from saying what I really think. I'll let her have the last say after she gets out. Am biting my tongue for the family's sake should you wake up, so I leave off here. Come the revolution, God's going to separate the wheat from the chaff and some folks are going to be surprised. Almost held my tongue. Your kind is hard to take and raises suspicion.
And Ken wrote back:
From: Bazinet, Kenneth ([email protected])
Sent: Sun 9/28/08 3:08 PM
To: Peter Calabria ([email protected])
Definitely not a 'f*** you.' I like you folks; wouldn't waste my time if i didn't. Ruth is compassionate and you are a very wise tightly wound cat. Trust me: you use your formula to solve the problem and I'll use mine. Mark me, we will end up with the same conclusion. I'm glad she is doing so well. Not sure I would be.
Ken Bazinet
White House Correspondent
New York Daily News
It was obvious that Ken wanted us to admire the wonderfulness of his position at the Daily News, but would never stick his neck out for us. As to Ruth, gorgeous she looked because she is. Gorgeous she acted because she has courage, certainly more than any journalist and especially this one whom she said when she got out was just another constantly lying, game playing, closet gay type. This characterizes all major media journalists as intentional propagandists, dumb mothers boys or hush up, get along, closet queers, none of whom should be paid a drop of attention to.
Ruth didn't tell me her problems and worry me to death on the visit. And I saw she avoided talking about her own experiences when she got out. Rather she talked for three days non-stop about the women she met in jail who were black and blue with bruises from being thrown to the ground and beaten up for any reason the guards could invent. She talked of two young girls beaten up like this after being put in jail for being short eleven dollars on an International House of Pancakes bill. This, while the pigs on Wall Street have stolen billions from the people and will never see one day in jail, she said, my Trinity, may her day come. This gives some sense as to what people are all about in the real world in contrast to TV land, which gives some empirical background for the real people we explain with mathematical science on our website. This is not a joke, explaining people and politics clearly with mathematics, for we have made a scientific breakthrough of the first order as may be gathered from the two thumbs up review we got from Dennis Sullivan, a master mathematician from NYU and Stony Brook who won the National Medal of Science in 2004.
Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:50
why not publish the part that explains Posner's data in terms of the logistical equation ...first... then do some of the rest next... etc... then as your acceptance takes hold do the more radical parts...as it is you may be pre-empting any real success by indulging your own deeply felt philosophy... by the way your explanations in the first parts were very clear....you may want to read how Einstein in similar and simple layman's terms dispelled the notion of absolute time in the 1905 paper....and how he did it without being untoward...
good luck
dennis Sullivan
The math can be read on matrix-evolutions com.
Dr. and Mrs. Peter V. Calabria
