WEEKEND EDITION, SEPTEMBER 3-4, 2011
131
We’re homing in on the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the Wall Street Trade Towers and the attack on the Pentagon. One in seven Americans and one in four among those aged 16-24, (so a recent poll commissioned by the BBC tells us) believe that there was a vast conspiracy in which the U.S. government was involved. But across those ten years have the charges that it was an “inside job” –– a favored phrase of the self-styled “truthers” — received any serious buttress?
The answer is no.
Did the Trade Towers fall because they were badly built as a consequence of corruption, incompetence, regulatory evasions by the Port Authority, and because they were struck by huge planes loaded with jet fuel. No, shout the conspiracists, they “pancaked” because Dick Cheney’s agents–scores of them–methodically planted demolition charges in the preceding days inserting the explosives in the relevant floors of three vast buildings, (moving day after day among the unsuspecting office workers), then on 9/11 activating the detonators. It was a conspiracy of thousands, all of whom–party to mass murder–have held their tongues ever since.
What has been the goal of the 9/11 conspiracists? They ask questions, yes, but they never answer them. They never put forward an overall scenario of the alleged conspiracy. They say that’s not up to them. So who is it up to? Whom do they expect to answer their questions? When answers are put forward, they are dismissed as fabrications or they simply rebound with another question. Like most cultic persuasions they excitedly invoke important converts to their faith and the “1500 architects and engineers in the USA” who say the NIST official report is not thorough and needs another investigation. It’s a tiny proportion of the overall members of their profession. At least 80 per cent of faculty economists in the US believe stoutly in long-discredited theories that have blighted the lives of millions around the world for decades. Their numbers don’t equate with intelligence, let along conclusive analysis.
The 9/11 conspiracists seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories–like witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon — is dismissed.
Many conspiracists say it wasn’t a plane but a missile. (Other conspiracists denounce the “no plane” Pentagon as wacko.) Eye-witnesses of a large plane hitting the Pentagon — are contemptuously brushed aside.
There are some photos of the impact of the “object” — i.e. the Boeing 757, flight 77 — that seem to show the sort of hole a missile might make. Ergo, 757 didn’t hit the Pentagon. It WAS a missile. It wasn’t smoke in some photographs obscuring a larger rupture in the fortified Pentagon wall.
On this last matter, Chuck Spinney, now retired after years of brilliant government service exposing the Pentagon’s budgetary outrages, tells me that “there ARE pictures taken of the 757 plane hitting Pentagon — they were taken by the surveillance cameras at Pentagon’s heliport, which was right next to impact point. I have seen them both — stills and moving pictures. I just missed seeing it personally, but the driver of the van I just got out of in South Parking saw it so closely that he could see the terrified faces of passengers in windows. I knew two people who were on the plane. One was ID’d by dental remains found in the Pentagon.”
In fact hundreds of people saw the plane — people who know the difference between a plane and a cruise missile. The wreckage of the plane was hauled out from the site. Why does the obvious have to be proved? Would those who were wounded or who lost friends and colleagues that day assist in the cover up of a missile strike? Why risk using a missile, when you had a plane in the air and - to take one bizarre construct of the conspiracists — had successfully crashed (by remote control!) two into much more difficult targets–the Trade Towers?
This doesn’t faze the conspiracists. They’re immune to any reality check. Spinney “worked for the government.” They switched the dental records. The Boeing 757 was flown to Nebraska for a rendez-vous with President Bush, who shot the passengers, burned the bodies on the tarmac and gave Spinney’s friend’s teeth to Dick Cheney to drop through a hole in his trousers amid the debris in the Pentagon.
Of course there are conspiracies. The allegations that Saddam Hussein had WMD amounted to just such a one. I think there is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s quite possible Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild assault and thought it would be the final green light to get the US into the war.
It’s entirely plausible to assume that the FBI, US military intelligence, and the CIA, — as has just been rather convincingly claimed again in the latter instance — had penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 attacks; intelligence reports piled up in various Washington bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught and even the manner in which it might be carried out.
The history of intelligence operations is profuse with example of successful intelligence collection, but also fatal slowness to act on the intelligence, along with eagerness not to compromise the security and future usefulness of the informant, who has to prove his own credentials by even pressing for prompt action by the plotters. Sometime an undercover agent will actually propose an action, either to deflect efforts away from some graver threat, or to put the plotters in a position where they can be caught red-handed.
There is not the slightest need to postulate pre-placed explosive charges to explain why the towers collapsed at near free fall speeds. As Pierre Sprey, a former plane and weapons designer who knows a great deal about explosions, told me:
“1. Any demolitions expert concocting a plan to hit a tall building with an airplane and then use pre-placed explosives to UNDETECTABLY ensure the collapse of the building would never place the explosives 20, 30 and 60 floors below the impact point. Obviously, he would put the explosives on one or more floors as close as possible to the planned impact level.
“2. It is inconceivable that our demolitions expert would time his surreptitious explosions to occur HOURS after the aircraft impact. He couldn’t possibly be absolutely certain that the impact fires would even last an hour. Quite the opposite: to mask the booster explosions, he’d time them to follow right on the heels of the impact.
“3. To ensure collapse of a major building requires very sizable demolition charges, charges that are large enough to do a lot more than emit the “puffs of smoke” cited as evidence for the explosives hypothesis. I’ve seen both live and filmed explosive building demolitions. Each explosion is accompanied by a very visible shower of heavy rubble and a dense cloud of smoke and dust. Just that fact alone makes the explosives hypothesis untenable; no demolitions expert in the world would be willing to promise his client that he could bring down a tall building with explosions guaranteed to be indistinguishable from the effects of an aircraft impact.”
Herman Soifer, a retired structural engineer, summarized the collapse of Buildings 1 and 2 succinctly, in a letter to me, remarking that since he had followed the plans and engineering of the Towers during construction he was able to explain the collapses to his wife a few hours after the buildings went down.
“The towers were basically tubes, essentially hollow. Tubes can be very efficient structures, strong and economical. The Trade Center tubes effectively resisted vertical loads, wind loads and vibrations and could probably have done very well against earthquakes. However, the relatively thin skin of the hollow tube must be braced at intervals to prevent local buckling of the skin under various possible loads, otherwise the tube itself can go out of shape and lose its strength.
“For their interior bracing, the thin-walled tubes of the Trade Center towers depended primarily on the interior floors being tied to the outer wall shells. These floor beam structures were basically open web joists, adequate for the floor loads normally to be expected. These joist ends rested on steel angle clips attached to the outer walls.
“As the floors at the level of airplane impact caught fire, the open web joists, which could not be expected to resist such fires, softened under the heat, sagged and pulled away from their attachments to the walls. Their weight and the loads they were carrying, caused them to drop onto the next lower floor, which was then carrying double loads also becoming exposed to the heat. Then that floor collapsed, and so it went. But as the floors dropped, they no longer served as bracing for the thin-walled main tubes.
This loss of bracing permitted the walls to buckle outward in successive sections and thus the house of cards effect.”
High grade steel can bend disastrously under extreme heat. The types of steel used in the WTC Towers (plain carbon, and vanadium) lose steel lose half their strength when heated to about 570 C , and even more as temperatures rise, as they did in WTC 1 and 2, to 1100 C.
The conspiracists’ last card is the collapse of WTC building number 7 some hours after the morning attacks. But here again, as with the other two buildings, the explanations offered by the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are more than adequate. Collapse was caused by the rupturing of the building’s metal framework due to the thermal expansion of its floor beams, which were heated by uncontrolled fires because the water main that supplied the building’s fire suppression system had been cut by the collapse of WTC 1.
The NIST team said that the smallest blast event capable of crippling the critical column would have produced a ‘sound level of 130 to 140 decibels at a distance of half a mile,’ yet no noise this loud was reported by witnesses or recorded on videos. Sound at 130 to 140 decibels is about as loud as humans can tolerate, beyond this power one is really encountering a blast wave, a jump in pressure that delivers sensible force. Examples of loud sounds and their effects include: a jet engine at 100 meters (110-140 dB), hearing damage due to short term exposure, for example front row at a rock concert (120 dB), threshold of pain (130 dB), a rifle being fired at 1 meter (140 dB).
As discussed in Wayne Barrett and Dan Collin’s excellent book Grand Illusion, about Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, helicopter pilots radioed warnings nine minutes before the final collapse that the South Tower might well go down and, repeatedly, as much as 25 minutes before the North Tower’s fall.
What Barrett and Collins brilliantly showed are the actual corrupt conspiracies on Giuliani’s watch: the favoritism to Motorola which saddled the firemen with radios that didn’t work; the ability of the Port Authority to skimp on fire protection, the mayor’s catastrophic failure in the years before 9/11/2001 to organize an effective unified emergency command that would have meant that cops and firemen could have communicated; that many firemen wouldn’t have unnecessarily entered the Towers; that people in the Towers wouldn’t have been told by 911 emergency operators to stay in place; and that firemen could have heard the helicopter warnings and the final Mayday messages that prompted most of the NYPD men to flee the Towers.
That’s the real political world, in which Giuliani and others have never been held accountable. The conspiracists disdained the real world because they wanted to promote Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons to an elevated status as the Arch Demons of American history, instead of being just one more team running the American empire, a team of more than usual stupidity and incompetence (characteristics I personally favor in imperial leaders). Actually, what Bush and Cheney never demonstrated was the slightest degree of competence to pull anything like this off. They couldn’t even manufacture weapons of mass destruction after US troops had invaded Iraq, and when any box labeled “WMD” would have been happily photographed by the embedded U.S. press as conclusive testimony. Arch-demon Cheney and his retinue of neo-cons couldn’t even contrive a provocation sufficient to justify his aim of waging war on Iran or giving Israel the green light to do so. Each day he gnashed his teeth as Bush, Condoleezza Rice and the Joint Chiefs of Staff foiled his machinations.
At least what Obama may have done is remind the left – at least those not forever besotted — that Bush and Cheney are not that much different from the politicians and overlords of U.S. foreign policy who preceded them or followed them.
9/11 conspiracism, perhaps at last somewhat on the wane, penetrated deep into the American left. It has also been widespread on the libertarian and populist right, but that is scarcely surprising, since the American populist right instinctively mistrusts government to a far greater degree than the left, and matches conspiracies to its demon of preference, whether the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Black Helicopters or the Jews and now Muslims.
These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political economy from Marx. Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse, peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly “rogue” agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The 9/11 “conspiracy”, or “inside job”, is the Summa of all this foolishness.
One trips over a fundamental idiocy of the 9/11 conspiracists in the first paragraph of the opening page of the book by one of their high priests, David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor. “In many respects,” Griffin writes, “the strongest evidence provided by critics of the official account involves the events of 9/11 itself In light of standard procedures for dealing with hijacked airplanes not one of these planes should have reached its target, let alone all three of them.”
The operative word here is “should”. A central characteristic of the conspiracists is that they have a devout, albeit preposterous belief in American efficiency. Many of them start with the racist premise–frequently voiced in as many words in their writings — that “Arabs in caves” weren’t capable of the mission. They believe that military systems should work they way Pentagon press flacks and aerospace salesmen say they should work. They believe that at 8.14 am, when AA flight 11 switched off its radio and transponder, an FAA flight controller should have called the National Military Command center and NORAD. They believe, citing reverently (this is high priest Griffin, who has written no less than ten books on 9/11) “the US Air Force’s own website,” that an F-15 could have intercepted AA flight 11 “by 8.24, and certainly no later than 8.30.”
They appear to have read no military history, which is too bad because if they did they’d know that minutely planned operations–let alone by-the-book responses to an unprecedented emergency — screw up with monotonous regularity, by reason of stupidity, cowardice, venality and all the other failings, not excepting sudden changes in the weather.
History is generous with such examples. According to the minutely prepared plans of the Strategic Air Command, an impending Soviet attack would have prompted the missile siloes in North Dakota to open, and the ICBMs to arc towards Moscow and kindred targets. The four test launches actually attempted all failed, whereupon the SAC gave up testing. Was it badly designed equipment, human incompetence, defense contractor venality or conspiracy?
Did the April 24, 1980 effort to rescue the hostages in the US embassy in Teheran fail because a sandstorm disabled three of the eight helicopters, or because the helicopters were poorly made, or because of agents of William Casey and the Republican National Committee poured sugar into their gas tanks in yet another conspiracy?
Have the US military’s varying attempts to explain why F-15s didn’t intercept and shoot down the hijacked planes stemmed from absolutely predictable attempts to cover up the usual screw-ups, or because of conspiracy? Is Mr Cohen in his little store at the end of the block hiking his prices because he wants to make a buck, or because his rent just went up or because the Jews want to take over the world? Bebel said anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools.
The conspiracy virus is an old strand. The Russians couldn’t possibly build an A bomb without Commie traitors in the U.S.. The Russians are too dumb. Hitler couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across Eastern Europe and half Germany. Traitors let it happen. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Oswald — it had to be the CIA. RFK couldn’t have been shot by Sirhan–it had to be the CIA. There are no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, Viet Cong, Japanese, etc etc couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.
Michael Neumann, a philosopher, and CounterPunch contributor, at the University of Trent, in Ontario, remarked in a note to me:
“I think the problem of conspiracy nuttery has got worse, and is part of a general trend. There really were serious questions about the Kennedy assassination, an unusual number of them, and it wasn’t too crazy to come to the wrong conclusion. There wasn’t a single serious question about 9-11. The main engine of the 9-11 conspiracy cult is nothing political; it’s the death of any conception of evidence.
“This probably comes from the decline of Western power. Deep down, almost everyone, across the political spectrum, is locked in a bigotry which can only attribute that decline to some irrational or supernatural power. The result is the ascendency of magic over common sense, let alone reason.”
Yet some have discovered a silver lining in the 9/11 conspiracism. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington, DC, wrote to me, agreeing with my ridiculing of the “inside job” scenarios, but adding, “To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close to that is true, that’s a huge base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real news story that the media is missing, and it’s a big one.”
“I’m not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government,” I answered. “People used to say the same thing about the JFK conspiracy buffs and disbelief in the Warren Commission. Actually, it seems to demobilize people from useful political activity. If the alleged perpetrators are so efficiently devilish in their plots, all resistance is futile. 9/11 conspiracism stemmed from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It’s like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator.
Anyone who ever looked at the JFK assassination will know that there are endless anomalies and loose ends. Eyewitness testimony is conflicting, forensic evidence possibly misconstrued, mishandled or just missing. But in my view, the Warren Commission, as confirmed in almost all essentials by the House Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s, had it right and Oswald fired the fatal shots from the Schoolbook Depository. The evidentiary chain for his guilt is persuasive, and the cumulative scenarios of the conspiracists entirely unconvincing. But of course–as the years roll by, and even though no death bed confession has ever buttressed those vast, CIA-related scenarios — the conspiracists keep on toiling away, their obsessions as unflagging as ever.
Richard Aldrich’s book on British intelligence, The Hidden Hand (2002), describes how a report for the Pentagon on declassification recommended that “interesting declassified material” such as information about the JFK assassination “could be released and even posted on the Internet, as a ‘diversion,’” and used to “reduce the unrestrained public appetite for ‘secrets’ by providing good faith distraction material”. Aldrich adds, “If investigative journalists and contemporary historians were absorbed with the vexatious, but rather tired, debates over the grassy knoll, they would not be busy probing into areas where they were unwelcome.”
The conspiracists have combined to produce a huge distraction, just as Danny Sheehan did with his Complaint, that mesmerized and distracted much of the Nicaraguan Solidarity Movement in the 1980s, and which finally collapsed in a Florida courtroom almost as quickly as the Towers.
There are plenty of real conspiracies in America. Why make up fake ones?
(This essay is drawn from my contribution to CounterPunch’s CounterPunch Special Report: Debunking the Myths of 9/11, where Manuel Garcia Jr, physicist and engineer, presented his three reports, undertaken for CounterPunch and where JoAnn Wypijewski wrote her essay “Conversations at Ground Zero” after a day spent with people at the site.)
Our New Newsletter
I love it when Doug Lummis sends us something. He’s got a truly original mind and alert intellectual antennae. Twenty years in Tokyo and Okinawa gives him an extra depth of perspective. Now he’s sent us a truly wonderful piece on war guilt and two Americans who spent lives earning expiation: Howard Zinn and Allen Nelson. Zinn we all know. But Allen Nelson?
“Allen Nelson was raised in the black ghettoes of Brooklyn; he joined the Marines in large part to get some decent clothes and three meals a day. If there was ever anyone who had the right to say, ‘Look, I had no choice,’ he was one. But for him, that evasion didn’t work. In the end he decided that, though the choice he faced in combat was a terrible one, with terrible consequences on either side, it was still a choice, and he was responsible for what he chose to do.
“I was happy that I could get those words out of my mouth. . . . When you’re in combat . . . you’re making these choices on your own. And no one can make you do what you don’t want to do, regardless if they kill you, put you in prison. You do what you want to do. That realization was so painful for me: that I was killing people . . . . not because America was making me do it, not because I was a Marine, not because I was in combat, not because it was a war, not because he was shooting at me – I wanted to do it. But that was the freeing point for me.
“After some two decades of medication and counseling, his doctor posed the forbidden question: ‘Allen, I want you to tell me why you killed people.’
“I broke down and started crying, weeping, and I looked at him and I said, ‘Because I wanted to kill them.’ It was like a key went into my brain and unlocked something – I felt free from that point.”
Also in this terrific new edition, “The cop just shot my dog!” Patrick Higgins on why you’re right to worry that the police might blow your best friend away. PLUS Coutts and Stuckler on the English riots and the economics of anger.
Subscribe now!
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Strong willed women we have known, and a most remarkable company with a progressive, forward looking leader.
KENT M
Hi, Mark,
Things have been a bit crazy lately, so I haven't been able to respond. I
was actually in the Chicago area yesterday -- I did a memorial service for
my late aunt, Mary Longbrake, at the chapel at Lake Forest College. But it
was running down on Monday, picking my son up at the airport in Milwaukee, staying overnight in Elmhurst, then picking up my daughter from Elmhurst College, running up to Lake Forest, doing the service, running back to Elmhurst, then running up through Milwaukee to get my son on a plane back to Boston, then getting back to Minnesota after midnight. I had another funeral this morning and have two church committee meetings tonight, so I'm just trying to catch my breath.
Thanks for sharing your faith story. We hear so little about the liberal
branch of Islam today. The phrase "seal of the prophets" I learned in my "Religion in the West" courses in grad school. I believe the idea was that
God had indeed spoken through many prophets but that orthodox Islam holds Muhammad to be the final and greatest of the prophets. Jesus is considered the next greatest prophet (not divine, of course). I'm not up enough on Qur'an to say what passage this might be based on (it may be in the Hadith rather than Qur'an; or it might be in the Second Sura).
In some ways, your views remind me of either the more theistic side of Unitarianism or Ba'hai without the authoritarian leadership. As I think I
noted earlier, I try not to tell God who God can or can't talk to, and I try
to learn from others.
I heard somewhere that there is conversation about having a multi-year
reunion. Have you heard anything?
Hope all is well with you.
God's Peace,
Kent
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Kent, I am 250 e-mails behind, and doing about 50 a day - which is barely treading water ... I felt guilty for not having responded sooner to your question - you were just pretty far down on the queue (then, I started working from the LAST page of my e-mails.
I attended a memorial service at the Lake Forest College Chapel for the wife of my dearest friend, Kenneth Bennett, emeritus Chair of the Department of English Lit at Lake Forest. His wife DJ was a world renonwn crafts person, and wrote two books (the definitive ones) on stichery and using the sewing machine to design your special order clothes. DJ, as a graduate student in English Lit did some original Blake scholarship (bragging - my 25-year old nephew is a graduate teacing assistant in Pullman, WA, at Washington State University, the only one of the 13 school to which he applied for grad school that would take him AND give him a full ride ... this past April he headed an international Blake symposium in Trenton, NJ, at which he was the Key Note Speaker!!! Not bad for akid who had not worked a day in his life until he began his teaching career last September). The chapel is so beautiful, and not at all somber ... Ihope that the phantom bag pipe player showed up on time - there were some concern in the area at DJ's service.
I think God all the times sends messengers to all peoples of the earth .. Jesus, for my money, was sent, not for the Jews, of which he was one, but for the gentiles ... and Jesus, did not hold gentiles (white people) in particularly high esteem (cf - Turn the other cheek .... EVEN the gentiles love those who love them)
If ever again you will be in the Chicago area, and have sometime, my cell is (xxx) yyy-zzzz ... I would love to show you parts of "my" world - e.g. in particular - The Crabtree FarmS in Lake bluff - 1000's of acres abutting Lake Michigan - just an incredible place, free and open to the public!
I hope you are aware how much our correspondence means to me ... and yes, my spiritual beliefs align pretty strongly with Unitarians / Universalits / Bhuddists and .. of course, the B'Hai faith (our neighbors Kathy and Koichi Yamamatah were of the Ba Hai faith, and I have read "The Lughing Bhudda" ... there is a web questionaire, and I can probably find it, that asks questions and then matches your answers with various "generic" faiths (e.g. - liberal Christian) ... on that test, I align 99% with "liberal Christian", about 34% with Muslims, and 100% with Quakers .. rofl ... the one quaker I know of in our family is known for refsing to bear arms for the union ... the LT ordered him to be executed. The firing squad fired, but, mirable dictus ... not a bullet got him! .... S O ... the LT put him to work as a field medic, a taksk at which he performed both fearlessly and quite competently
The messages of (almost) all the worlds religions / faith traditions / spiritual belief systems teach pretty much the same message - Do for those who cannot do for themselves, and all will be revealed, from what I have been told.
With Love to You and ALL YOU LOVE
Mark Raymond Ganzer
KENT M
Thanks so much! My aunt was very involved at LFC and was a life trustee. I had never been in the chapel before. I noticed there was a plaque to Irvin Young, who was a close friend of my father. Both my parents, my older brother, and one of my nieces graduated from LFC. I was accepted but decided to go to Mac instead. Aunt Mary had quite a life: in the first class of WAVE officers in WW II, lost most of her hearing when she contracted mumps on a flight back to Chicago from DC. Taught herself to read lips. She became the first woman to be an officer of the Northern Trust and then the first woman to become a vice president there. She was involved in multiple charities and was an avid supporter of the arts. She never married and never felt the less for it. She did have her "beaus", the last one had been a junior physicist working on the Manhattan Project. She had visited all 7 continents, including Antarctica. She had three degrees from LFC -- BA, LLD, and an MA in Liberal Studies which she earned at the age of 67. She was 97 and had been suffering from dementia for about 8 years, so her passing was a release for her and her family (I believe there is a book titled "The Long Goodbye" about losing a loved one to Alzheimer's -- it is indeed a "long goodbye").
I love the story of your Quaker ancestor. My great grandfather on my mother's side was a surgeon in the Army of Northern Virginia. After the war he settled in Ohio where my grandparents met.
God's Peace,
Kent
MARK GANZER
WHAT an amazing woman! I had the good fortune to work for Bankers Life & Casualty Company after John D. MacArthur "found religion" and the company elected to clean up its past "questionable" practices. John's wife, CT Highland with the corporate secretary and treasurer, and his chief counsel, dating back, I believe, to the 1940's was Zita Stone, who could make a longshoreman blush with her command of the English language, was known for being earthy in other ways which I shan't discuss, because it was passed on to me anecdotally, and had the dirt on ALL of the state insurance commissioners, so, when they were reluctant to approve a new policy, she'd call them on the phone, and, ahem, use some leverage to expedite the process.
MacArthur was also a very forward looking man who could see that a consequence of the civil rights movement would be for the US government to force companies to hire black minorities, SO, John with that midwestern practicality that borders on the verge of intuitive genius instructed his personnel department to start hiring black people, and to make sure that they hired the best ones available. And thus, we had a number of very talented, very articulate, black people working at Bankers.
MacArthur was very much an anti-union man. The BL&C corporate strategy was brilliant: hire the best talent available and pay them 25% more than they could make at any comparable job in the Chicago area.... BUT ... never give them the opportunity to advance behond the level of manager, reporting to a vice president (and back in the day, there were only six VPs, for aocompany with 5,400 home office employees and 10,000+ insurance agents; this would all change after MacArthur died, and the company devolved into a Charitable Trust, responsible for divesting itself of 80% of its assets within five years after MacArthur's death - they started handing out VP titles as if they were 3rd place ribbons in a state wide band/orchestra concert; not at all the way it used to be, and a LOT of big salaries, in comparison to the days of John MacArthur and his Risk Committee (of six)).
So, when the teamsters came on campus passing out their literature in an attempt to get the clerical workers to unionize, MacArthur assembled his division heads, and his Personnel people and said, "If this company goes union, I'll shut the office here down and move to Dallas. What are you going to do about it?"
And so, some of the best and brightest and most talented and creative minds went to work to develop a management sensitivity and training program whose motto was "Walk in their shoes." This one full week (7 1/2 hours a day, for five days) course was first attended by the BIG 6, and then the next two ranking managerial grades. Finally, it went to my level of management (I had no one to manage, but, as a highly skilled technician, would one day). It was an incredible, fully in house designed program (many of the people had masters degrees) and all of them were avid readers of the literature. Recovering from the teamster encroach was easy enough; they hadn't done their research, and had BAD suits, steeky Ceegars, and badly written, badly edited, mimeographed propaganda. When they teamsters went for round two, they were much better prepared, but by then, so were the BL&C managers.
N O W .... as to your incredible aunt - your telling her story reminded me SO much of this lady - the mother of a socialist war reporter and independent film maker, John Pilger:http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-tribute-to-my-mother
johnpilger.com
A tribute to my mother
17 May 2004
My mother, aged 19, sold her books to pay the fare to her first teaching job in the bush. The currency of her generation was determination and courage.
Since I left Australia, one journey has remained a small dream unfulfilled. It involves going north in New South Wales, to an old frontier town called Ballina, which is an Irish corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning "abundance". My mother Elsie arrived in Ballina in 1920, alone, aged 19. It was the middle of the night. She had travelled the 500 miles from Sydney, having sold her books to pay the fare, which the department of education said was "the responsibility of those privileged to teach". This was her first teaching job; in those days, you taught where you were sent.
The railway line had ended in the bush, and the handful of passengers who had come this far were loaded on to a truck with chains on its wheels; a track lay ahead. Two days after she had left Sydney, she was awakened and told she was in Ballina. "Sorry, Miss," said the driver. "Your bag's been dropped off somewhere else."
In the same clothes and flat broke, she walked along the long dirt road that was Ballina's main street, wide enough for a team of bullocks to turn, past W J Pickering Outfitters and the courthouse and the lock-up, to the only other 19th-century sandstone building, the school. "When I presented myself," she wrote, "the principal was busily inaugurating a pub nearby." So she sat on the steps and waited until he hove to, drunk and gasping for breath; like many of that Anzac generation, he had been mustard-gassed on the Western Front.
"What do you teach?" he asked her, to which she replied, "French and Latin and, if you like, history and English."
"You might as well go back," he said. "I want a maths teacher, and I want someone who won't be terrified by the brats" - meaning a male.
She didn't go back. She faced classes of up to 70 bush kids, many of them barely literate and there under sufferance of parents who really wanted their labour back on the farm. Her wage was £169 10s a year. She was of a remarkable generation of pioneering women, who asked for no material gain, whose currency was determination and courage.
She had grown up on the Hunter Valley coalfields, north-west of Sydney, before and during the First World War. Her great-grandfather was Francis McCarty, an Irishman who had arrived on the barque John Barry on 7 November 1821, wearing, along with all the other political prisoners, four-pound leg-irons. Convicted of "uttering unlawful oaths", he had been sentenced to 14 years in Britain's Antipodean penal colony. Her great-grandmother was Mary Palmer, a Whitechapel prostitute sentenced to life in a "female factory" near Sydney for the crime of relieving a client of his spare change; she would have been hanged had she not been pregnant. She arrived on the Lord Sidmouth, packed with rats, in 1822. She was 17.
Born soon after the turn of the century, Elsie was the only one of nine children from a mining family who completed her education. Up before dawn, she would catch the coal-company train to the new high school at East Maitland, where she had won a place with the first bursary ever awarded to her tiny primary school in the town of Kurri Kurri. At night, she would read and study by the light of a hurricane lamp or a candle under her bed or beneath the water tank that stood on stilts beside the house. Her books were the first of their kind her family had seen. "My other education," she wrote, "took place in the many hours I spent in the cemetery counting the number of miners accidentally killed and questioning the justice of their deaths and of the deity to whom we all prayed under my mother's surveillance every night."
The "Great War" with Germany was fed with Australian volunteers from small frontier towns; only the French, proportionally, suffered greater casualties. Elsie sold sprigs of bush wattle for pennies, which were sent to the Anzacs; she also questioned out loud why such a blood sacrifice had anything to do with Australia. She wrote, "I grew to hate their war; it's always their war." The warmongering prime minister of Australia at the time was the effete William Morris Hughes, whose speeches about "morality" were like those of Tony Blair. In two referendums, he tried to bring in conscription and failed, thanks largely to a campaign by women all over Australia, especially the young like Elsie.
At the age of 16, she arrived at Sydney University, where she became Australia's youngest graduate - a distinction that may still stand. Her family in the meantime had prospered and moved to a place called Merewether, to a house on a hill, which had the first refrigerator I ever saw, and running hot water. Elsie never lived there. In Sydney, she had met Claude, the son of a German sailor, who had also grown up in the Hunter Valley and had left school at 14 to go down the pit. As an apprentice, he was entitled to membership of the Mechanics Institute, whose "social, political and cultural lectures" were his education.
Elsie would smuggle him into the university library, where they read together. They became socialists, and he a member of the international Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies".
In the late summer of 1920, Elsie took Claude home to meet her family. On the way, she met her eldest brother. "They're waiting for you," he said ominously. Going on alone, she found a family court in session. "The source of the disapproval was clear," she wrote: "the only educated daughter had deigned to want to marry a Bolshie!"
Now excommunicated by her family, she set out for Ballina. Her clothes arrived two months later, without a note and wrapped in newspaper. "The hypocrisy!" she wrote, "what with our Irish convict background! But of course we never talked about that." When she returned a year later, Claude had borrowed £10 so they could be married. They chose the register office near the walls of the old convict prison factory where Mary Palmer had been incarcerated and had met Francis McCarty. On her wedding day, Elsie sent two one-word telegrams to her sulking family. The first, before they were married, said GOING; the second, after the ceremony, said GONE. She laughed a great deal, often darkly, though when she and Claude fell apart, that stopped.
The other day, I followed her footsteps along Ballina's main street, past the same 19th-century courthouse and lock-up. In the library, I discovered a letter from the local MP, requesting "a competent teacher of languages . . . who will allow our children in the country district an opportunity they would not otherwise have". It was dated 1919 and it was the cue for Elsie. Her power as a teacher became something of a legend; year after year, for more than half a century, her former students would meet in Sydney for dinner to celebrate her, even though she always declined their invitations to attend. "I was never that good," she would say to me, ". . . just determined."
Ballina is leafy and brisk and very modern these days, and the original school took some finding. When I found it, I peered in and saw her there.
Hi, Mark,
Things have been a bit crazy lately, so I haven't been able to respond. I
was actually in the Chicago area yesterday -- I did a memorial service for
my late aunt, Mary Longbrake, at the chapel at Lake Forest College. But it
was running down on Monday, picking my son up at the airport in Milwaukee, staying overnight in Elmhurst, then picking up my daughter from Elmhurst College, running up to Lake Forest, doing the service, running back to Elmhurst, then running up through Milwaukee to get my son on a plane back to Boston, then getting back to Minnesota after midnight. I had another funeral this morning and have two church committee meetings tonight, so I'm just trying to catch my breath.
Thanks for sharing your faith story. We hear so little about the liberal
branch of Islam today. The phrase "seal of the prophets" I learned in my "Religion in the West" courses in grad school. I believe the idea was that
God had indeed spoken through many prophets but that orthodox Islam holds Muhammad to be the final and greatest of the prophets. Jesus is considered the next greatest prophet (not divine, of course). I'm not up enough on Qur'an to say what passage this might be based on (it may be in the Hadith rather than Qur'an; or it might be in the Second Sura).
In some ways, your views remind me of either the more theistic side of Unitarianism or Ba'hai without the authoritarian leadership. As I think I
noted earlier, I try not to tell God who God can or can't talk to, and I try
to learn from others.
I heard somewhere that there is conversation about having a multi-year
reunion. Have you heard anything?
Hope all is well with you.
God's Peace,
Kent
Mark Raymond Ganzer
Kent, I am 250 e-mails behind, and doing about 50 a day - which is barely treading water ... I felt guilty for not having responded sooner to your question - you were just pretty far down on the queue (then, I started working from the LAST page of my e-mails.
I attended a memorial service at the Lake Forest College Chapel for the wife of my dearest friend, Kenneth Bennett, emeritus Chair of the Department of English Lit at Lake Forest. His wife DJ was a world renonwn crafts person, and wrote two books (the definitive ones) on stichery and using the sewing machine to design your special order clothes. DJ, as a graduate student in English Lit did some original Blake scholarship (bragging - my 25-year old nephew is a graduate teacing assistant in Pullman, WA, at Washington State University, the only one of the 13 school to which he applied for grad school that would take him AND give him a full ride ... this past April he headed an international Blake symposium in Trenton, NJ, at which he was the Key Note Speaker!!! Not bad for akid who had not worked a day in his life until he began his teaching career last September). The chapel is so beautiful, and not at all somber ... Ihope that the phantom bag pipe player showed up on time - there were some concern in the area at DJ's service.
I think God all the times sends messengers to all peoples of the earth .. Jesus, for my money, was sent, not for the Jews, of which he was one, but for the gentiles ... and Jesus, did not hold gentiles (white people) in particularly high esteem (cf - Turn the other cheek .... EVEN the gentiles love those who love them)
If ever again you will be in the Chicago area, and have sometime, my cell is (xxx) yyy-zzzz ... I would love to show you parts of "my" world - e.g. in particular - The Crabtree FarmS in Lake bluff - 1000's of acres abutting Lake Michigan - just an incredible place, free and open to the public!
I hope you are aware how much our correspondence means to me ... and yes, my spiritual beliefs align pretty strongly with Unitarians / Universalits / Bhuddists and .. of course, the B'Hai faith (our neighbors Kathy and Koichi Yamamatah were of the Ba Hai faith, and I have read "The Lughing Bhudda" ... there is a web questionaire, and I can probably find it, that asks questions and then matches your answers with various "generic" faiths (e.g. - liberal Christian) ... on that test, I align 99% with "liberal Christian", about 34% with Muslims, and 100% with Quakers .. rofl ... the one quaker I know of in our family is known for refsing to bear arms for the union ... the LT ordered him to be executed. The firing squad fired, but, mirable dictus ... not a bullet got him! .... S O ... the LT put him to work as a field medic, a taksk at which he performed both fearlessly and quite competently
The messages of (almost) all the worlds religions / faith traditions / spiritual belief systems teach pretty much the same message - Do for those who cannot do for themselves, and all will be revealed, from what I have been told.
With Love to You and ALL YOU LOVE
Mark Raymond Ganzer
KENT M
Thanks so much! My aunt was very involved at LFC and was a life trustee. I had never been in the chapel before. I noticed there was a plaque to Irvin Young, who was a close friend of my father. Both my parents, my older brother, and one of my nieces graduated from LFC. I was accepted but decided to go to Mac instead. Aunt Mary had quite a life: in the first class of WAVE officers in WW II, lost most of her hearing when she contracted mumps on a flight back to Chicago from DC. Taught herself to read lips. She became the first woman to be an officer of the Northern Trust and then the first woman to become a vice president there. She was involved in multiple charities and was an avid supporter of the arts. She never married and never felt the less for it. She did have her "beaus", the last one had been a junior physicist working on the Manhattan Project. She had visited all 7 continents, including Antarctica. She had three degrees from LFC -- BA, LLD, and an MA in Liberal Studies which she earned at the age of 67. She was 97 and had been suffering from dementia for about 8 years, so her passing was a release for her and her family (I believe there is a book titled "The Long Goodbye" about losing a loved one to Alzheimer's -- it is indeed a "long goodbye").
I love the story of your Quaker ancestor. My great grandfather on my mother's side was a surgeon in the Army of Northern Virginia. After the war he settled in Ohio where my grandparents met.
God's Peace,
Kent
MARK GANZER
WHAT an amazing woman! I had the good fortune to work for Bankers Life & Casualty Company after John D. MacArthur "found religion" and the company elected to clean up its past "questionable" practices. John's wife, CT Highland with the corporate secretary and treasurer, and his chief counsel, dating back, I believe, to the 1940's was Zita Stone, who could make a longshoreman blush with her command of the English language, was known for being earthy in other ways which I shan't discuss, because it was passed on to me anecdotally, and had the dirt on ALL of the state insurance commissioners, so, when they were reluctant to approve a new policy, she'd call them on the phone, and, ahem, use some leverage to expedite the process.
MacArthur was also a very forward looking man who could see that a consequence of the civil rights movement would be for the US government to force companies to hire black minorities, SO, John with that midwestern practicality that borders on the verge of intuitive genius instructed his personnel department to start hiring black people, and to make sure that they hired the best ones available. And thus, we had a number of very talented, very articulate, black people working at Bankers.
MacArthur was very much an anti-union man. The BL&C corporate strategy was brilliant: hire the best talent available and pay them 25% more than they could make at any comparable job in the Chicago area.... BUT ... never give them the opportunity to advance behond the level of manager, reporting to a vice president (and back in the day, there were only six VPs, for aocompany with 5,400 home office employees and 10,000+ insurance agents; this would all change after MacArthur died, and the company devolved into a Charitable Trust, responsible for divesting itself of 80% of its assets within five years after MacArthur's death - they started handing out VP titles as if they were 3rd place ribbons in a state wide band/orchestra concert; not at all the way it used to be, and a LOT of big salaries, in comparison to the days of John MacArthur and his Risk Committee (of six)).
So, when the teamsters came on campus passing out their literature in an attempt to get the clerical workers to unionize, MacArthur assembled his division heads, and his Personnel people and said, "If this company goes union, I'll shut the office here down and move to Dallas. What are you going to do about it?"
And so, some of the best and brightest and most talented and creative minds went to work to develop a management sensitivity and training program whose motto was "Walk in their shoes." This one full week (7 1/2 hours a day, for five days) course was first attended by the BIG 6, and then the next two ranking managerial grades. Finally, it went to my level of management (I had no one to manage, but, as a highly skilled technician, would one day). It was an incredible, fully in house designed program (many of the people had masters degrees) and all of them were avid readers of the literature. Recovering from the teamster encroach was easy enough; they hadn't done their research, and had BAD suits, steeky Ceegars, and badly written, badly edited, mimeographed propaganda. When they teamsters went for round two, they were much better prepared, but by then, so were the BL&C managers.
N O W .... as to your incredible aunt - your telling her story reminded me SO much of this lady - the mother of a socialist war reporter and independent film maker, John Pilger:http://johnpilger.com/articles/a-tribute-to-my-mother
johnpilger.com
A tribute to my mother
17 May 2004
My mother, aged 19, sold her books to pay the fare to her first teaching job in the bush. The currency of her generation was determination and courage.
Since I left Australia, one journey has remained a small dream unfulfilled. It involves going north in New South Wales, to an old frontier town called Ballina, which is an Irish corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning "abundance". My mother Elsie arrived in Ballina in 1920, alone, aged 19. It was the middle of the night. She had travelled the 500 miles from Sydney, having sold her books to pay the fare, which the department of education said was "the responsibility of those privileged to teach". This was her first teaching job; in those days, you taught where you were sent.
The railway line had ended in the bush, and the handful of passengers who had come this far were loaded on to a truck with chains on its wheels; a track lay ahead. Two days after she had left Sydney, she was awakened and told she was in Ballina. "Sorry, Miss," said the driver. "Your bag's been dropped off somewhere else."
In the same clothes and flat broke, she walked along the long dirt road that was Ballina's main street, wide enough for a team of bullocks to turn, past W J Pickering Outfitters and the courthouse and the lock-up, to the only other 19th-century sandstone building, the school. "When I presented myself," she wrote, "the principal was busily inaugurating a pub nearby." So she sat on the steps and waited until he hove to, drunk and gasping for breath; like many of that Anzac generation, he had been mustard-gassed on the Western Front.
"What do you teach?" he asked her, to which she replied, "French and Latin and, if you like, history and English."
"You might as well go back," he said. "I want a maths teacher, and I want someone who won't be terrified by the brats" - meaning a male.
She didn't go back. She faced classes of up to 70 bush kids, many of them barely literate and there under sufferance of parents who really wanted their labour back on the farm. Her wage was £169 10s a year. She was of a remarkable generation of pioneering women, who asked for no material gain, whose currency was determination and courage.
She had grown up on the Hunter Valley coalfields, north-west of Sydney, before and during the First World War. Her great-grandfather was Francis McCarty, an Irishman who had arrived on the barque John Barry on 7 November 1821, wearing, along with all the other political prisoners, four-pound leg-irons. Convicted of "uttering unlawful oaths", he had been sentenced to 14 years in Britain's Antipodean penal colony. Her great-grandmother was Mary Palmer, a Whitechapel prostitute sentenced to life in a "female factory" near Sydney for the crime of relieving a client of his spare change; she would have been hanged had she not been pregnant. She arrived on the Lord Sidmouth, packed with rats, in 1822. She was 17.
Born soon after the turn of the century, Elsie was the only one of nine children from a mining family who completed her education. Up before dawn, she would catch the coal-company train to the new high school at East Maitland, where she had won a place with the first bursary ever awarded to her tiny primary school in the town of Kurri Kurri. At night, she would read and study by the light of a hurricane lamp or a candle under her bed or beneath the water tank that stood on stilts beside the house. Her books were the first of their kind her family had seen. "My other education," she wrote, "took place in the many hours I spent in the cemetery counting the number of miners accidentally killed and questioning the justice of their deaths and of the deity to whom we all prayed under my mother's surveillance every night."
The "Great War" with Germany was fed with Australian volunteers from small frontier towns; only the French, proportionally, suffered greater casualties. Elsie sold sprigs of bush wattle for pennies, which were sent to the Anzacs; she also questioned out loud why such a blood sacrifice had anything to do with Australia. She wrote, "I grew to hate their war; it's always their war." The warmongering prime minister of Australia at the time was the effete William Morris Hughes, whose speeches about "morality" were like those of Tony Blair. In two referendums, he tried to bring in conscription and failed, thanks largely to a campaign by women all over Australia, especially the young like Elsie.
At the age of 16, she arrived at Sydney University, where she became Australia's youngest graduate - a distinction that may still stand. Her family in the meantime had prospered and moved to a place called Merewether, to a house on a hill, which had the first refrigerator I ever saw, and running hot water. Elsie never lived there. In Sydney, she had met Claude, the son of a German sailor, who had also grown up in the Hunter Valley and had left school at 14 to go down the pit. As an apprentice, he was entitled to membership of the Mechanics Institute, whose "social, political and cultural lectures" were his education.
Elsie would smuggle him into the university library, where they read together. They became socialists, and he a member of the international Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies".
In the late summer of 1920, Elsie took Claude home to meet her family. On the way, she met her eldest brother. "They're waiting for you," he said ominously. Going on alone, she found a family court in session. "The source of the disapproval was clear," she wrote: "the only educated daughter had deigned to want to marry a Bolshie!"
Now excommunicated by her family, she set out for Ballina. Her clothes arrived two months later, without a note and wrapped in newspaper. "The hypocrisy!" she wrote, "what with our Irish convict background! But of course we never talked about that." When she returned a year later, Claude had borrowed £10 so they could be married. They chose the register office near the walls of the old convict prison factory where Mary Palmer had been incarcerated and had met Francis McCarty. On her wedding day, Elsie sent two one-word telegrams to her sulking family. The first, before they were married, said GOING; the second, after the ceremony, said GONE. She laughed a great deal, often darkly, though when she and Claude fell apart, that stopped.
The other day, I followed her footsteps along Ballina's main street, past the same 19th-century courthouse and lock-up. In the library, I discovered a letter from the local MP, requesting "a competent teacher of languages . . . who will allow our children in the country district an opportunity they would not otherwise have". It was dated 1919 and it was the cue for Elsie. Her power as a teacher became something of a legend; year after year, for more than half a century, her former students would meet in Sydney for dinner to celebrate her, even though she always declined their invitations to attend. "I was never that good," she would say to me, ". . . just determined."
Ballina is leafy and brisk and very modern these days, and the original school took some finding. When I found it, I peered in and saw her there.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Barrington Consolidated High School - Homecoming: 2011
Mark Raymond Ganzer posted to Ginger Johnson Pillman
Hey Ginger - your class does HC every year? May I join your class?
Ginger Johnson Pillman Sure Mark.. Just look for the class of 72rryck
Thomas Retzlaff Just show up... I'll be looking for you.
Ginger Johnson Pillman Sorry for the typo... our class will have 2 trucks
Mark Raymond Ganzer I think I'll still be a carrot top - but a VERY round carrot top - BIG BELLIED OLD MEN (BBOM) I am the charter member of that substantial disorganization. WOW, thanks for the invite - NOW .. this would be 24 Sept? Where?
Ginger Johnson Pillman All of the classes meet in the parking lot by the train station. The parade starts there
Mark Raymond Ganzer WOWSA .. even I can find the parking lot of the train station - do you, Ginger, that I have not been to homecoming parade since leaving HS ... sad, sad, what I've missed!
Thomas Retzlaff Around 9:30 right?
Ginger Johnson Pillman I think so.. I am trying to find out...
Thomas Retzlaff Jill H. usually brings Bloody Marys for those interested in that sort of thing.
Ginger Johnson Pillman Virgin of course... !!
Hey Ginger - your class does HC every year? May I join your class?
Ginger Johnson Pillman Sure Mark.. Just look for the class of 72rryck
Thomas Retzlaff Just show up... I'll be looking for you.
Ginger Johnson Pillman Sorry for the typo... our class will have 2 trucks
Mark Raymond Ganzer I think I'll still be a carrot top - but a VERY round carrot top - BIG BELLIED OLD MEN (BBOM) I am the charter member of that substantial disorganization. WOW, thanks for the invite - NOW .. this would be 24 Sept? Where?
Ginger Johnson Pillman All of the classes meet in the parking lot by the train station. The parade starts there
Mark Raymond Ganzer WOWSA .. even I can find the parking lot of the train station - do you, Ginger, that I have not been to homecoming parade since leaving HS ... sad, sad, what I've missed!
Thomas Retzlaff Around 9:30 right?
Ginger Johnson Pillman I think so.. I am trying to find out...
Thomas Retzlaff Jill H. usually brings Bloody Marys for those interested in that sort of thing.
Ginger Johnson Pillman Virgin of course... !!
Whether or not this is a "real" true story, it most assuredly ought to be, and thus, it IS!
They are taking away our religious freedom under the disguise of religious
freedom. When freedoms are taken away they are almost impossible to get
back...we have to stand up before it's too late.
It is truly time we ALL take a stand for what we believe in…God!
Subject: At a Tennessee Football Game---not a joke
Subject: At a Tennessee Football Game---not a joke
Christianity is now the target of persecution...
THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS! GOD BLESS EVERYONE WHO READS THIS AND PASSES IT ON.
I FIND IT INTERESTING THAT A HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL CAN SEE THE PROBLEM, BUT OUR
SOCIETY CANNOT.
Tennessee Football
This is a statement that was read over the PA sytem at the football game at
Roane County High School , Kingston , Tennessee by school Principal, Jody McLeod
"It has always been the custom at Roane County High School football games, to
say a prayer and play the National Anthem, to honor God and Country."
Due to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, I am told that saying a Prayer is a
violation of Federal Case Law. As I understand the law at this time, I can use
this public facility to approve of sexual perversion and call it "an alternate
life style," and if someone is offended, that's OK.
I can use it to condone sexual promiscuity, by dispensing condoms and calling
it, "safe sex." If someone is offended, that's OK.
I can even use this public facility to present the merits of killing an unborn
baby as a "viable! Means of birth control." If someone is offended, no
problem...
I can designate a school day as "Earth Day" and involve students in activities
to worship religiously and praise the goddess "Mother Earth" and call it
"ecology.."
I can use literature, videos and
presentations in the classroom that depicts
people with strong, traditional Christian convictions as "simple minded" and
"ignorant" and call it "enlightenment.."
However, if anyone uses this facility to honor GOD and to ask HIM to Bless this
event with safety and good sportsmanship, then Federal Case Law is violated.
This appears to be inconsistent at best, and at worst, diabolical.
Apparently, we are to be tolerant of everything and anyone, except GOD and HIS
Commandments.
Nevertheless , as a school
principal, I frequently ask staff and students to
abide by rules with which they do not necessarily agree. For me to do otherwise
would be inconsistent at best, and at worst, hypocritical. I suffer from that
affliction enough unintentionally. I certainly do not need to add an intentional
transgression.
For
this reason, I shall "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," and
refrain from praying at this time.
" However, if you feel inspired to honor, praise and thank GOD and ask HIM,in
the name of JESUS, to Bless this event, please feel free to do so.. As far as I
know, that's not against the law----yet."
One by one, the people in the stands bowed their heads, held hands with one
another and began to pray.
They prayed in the stands. They prayed in the team huddles. They prayed at the
concession stand and they
prayed in the Announcer's Box!
The only place they didn't pray was in the Supreme Court of the United States of
America- the Seat of "Justice" in the "one nation, under GOD."
Somehow, Kingston , Tennessee
Remembered what so many have forgotten. We are
given the Freedom OF Religion, not the FreedomFROM ReligionPraise GOD that HIS
remnant remains!
JESUS said, "If you are ashamed of ME before men, then I will be ashamed of you
before MY FATHER.."
If you are not ashamed, pass this on ..
I'm not one bit ashamed to pass this on, Are you?
THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS! GOD BLESS EVERYONE WHO READS THIS AND PASSES IT ON.
Tony Carter
Technical Manager
General Shale Brick
121 Turner Bend Road
Rome, Georgia 30165
Phone: (706) 802-0777 Ext. 120
Cell: (706) 331-7956
Fax: (706) 802-0888
freedom. When freedoms are taken away they are almost impossible to get
back...we have to stand up before it's too late.
It is truly time we ALL take a stand for what we believe in…God!
Subject: At a Tennessee Football Game---not a joke
Subject: At a Tennessee Football Game---not a joke
Christianity is now the target of persecution...
THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS! GOD BLESS EVERYONE WHO READS THIS AND PASSES IT ON.
I FIND IT INTERESTING THAT A HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL CAN SEE THE PROBLEM, BUT OUR
SOCIETY CANNOT.
Tennessee Football
This is a statement that was read over the PA sytem at the football game at
Roane County High School , Kingston , Tennessee by school Principal, Jody McLeod
"It has always been the custom at Roane County High School football games, to
say a prayer and play the National Anthem, to honor God and Country."
Due to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, I am told that saying a Prayer is a
violation of Federal Case Law. As I understand the law at this time, I can use
this public facility to approve of sexual perversion and call it "an alternate
life style," and if someone is offended, that's OK.
I can use it to condone sexual promiscuity, by dispensing condoms and calling
it, "safe sex." If someone is offended, that's OK.
I can even use this public facility to present the merits of killing an unborn
baby as a "viable! Means of birth control." If someone is offended, no
problem...
I can designate a school day as "Earth Day" and involve students in activities
to worship religiously and praise the goddess "Mother Earth" and call it
"ecology.."
I can use literature, videos and
presentations in the classroom that depicts
people with strong, traditional Christian convictions as "simple minded" and
"ignorant" and call it "enlightenment.."
However, if anyone uses this facility to honor GOD and to ask HIM to Bless this
event with safety and good sportsmanship, then Federal Case Law is violated.
This appears to be inconsistent at best, and at worst, diabolical.
Apparently, we are to be tolerant of everything and anyone, except GOD and HIS
Commandments.
Nevertheless , as a school
principal, I frequently ask staff and students to
abide by rules with which they do not necessarily agree. For me to do otherwise
would be inconsistent at best, and at worst, hypocritical. I suffer from that
affliction enough unintentionally. I certainly do not need to add an intentional
transgression.
For
this reason, I shall "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," and
refrain from praying at this time.
" However, if you feel inspired to honor, praise and thank GOD and ask HIM,in
the name of JESUS, to Bless this event, please feel free to do so.. As far as I
know, that's not against the law----yet."
One by one, the people in the stands bowed their heads, held hands with one
another and began to pray.
They prayed in the stands. They prayed in the team huddles. They prayed at the
concession stand and they
prayed in the Announcer's Box!
The only place they didn't pray was in the Supreme Court of the United States of
America- the Seat of "Justice" in the "one nation, under GOD."
Somehow, Kingston , Tennessee
Remembered what so many have forgotten. We are
given the Freedom OF Religion, not the FreedomFROM ReligionPraise GOD that HIS
remnant remains!
JESUS said, "If you are ashamed of ME before men, then I will be ashamed of you
before MY FATHER.."
If you are not ashamed, pass this on ..
I'm not one bit ashamed to pass this on, Are you?
THIS IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS! GOD BLESS EVERYONE WHO READS THIS AND PASSES IT ON.
Tony Carter
Technical Manager
General Shale Brick
121 Turner Bend Road
Rome, Georgia 30165
Phone: (706) 802-0777 Ext. 120
Cell: (706) 331-7956
Fax: (706) 802-0888
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Drug Overdose Deaths Double in Five Years Second Leading Cause of Accidental Death
Drug Overdose Deaths Double in Five Years
Second Leading Cause of Accidental Death
By Buddy T, About.com Guide
Updated February 12, 2007
Unintentional fatal drug overdoses nearly doubled from 1999 to 2004 and were the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States in 2004, behind only automobile crashes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Deaths from accidental overdoses increased to 19,838 in 2004, from 11,155 in 1999, according to the CDC report, which was based on death certificate information (which does not detail which drugs were used). However, researchers believe the increasing misuse of prescription drugs by those ages 15 to 24 accounts for the majority of the statistic.
Illegal Drugs Not to Blame
Officially, drug overdose deaths are listed on death certificates as "poisoning." However, data from the National Vital Statistics System shows that drug poisoning accounted for 94.7 percent of all unintentional poisoning deaths by 2004.
The CDC attributes the 62.5 percent rise in drug overdose deaths between 1999 and 2004 to a higher use of prescription painkillers and increasing numbers of overdoses of cocaine and prescription sedatives. The increase cannot be attributed to heroin, methamphetamines or other illegal drugs, the report said.
Groups With Highest Increases
According to the CDC report, these groups had the highest increases in deaths by drug overdose between 1999 and 2004:
Females - 103.0 percent
Whites - 75.8 percent
Persons in the southern United States - 113.6 percent
Persons aged 15-24 years - 113.3 percent
It's Not the Inner Cities
Although drug overdose deaths are historically associated with urban areas, the latest figures from the CDC show the greatest increases in rural areas between 1999 and 2004. This finding coincides with other research that shows prescription drug abuse, especially of painkillers, is increasing more rapidly in rural areas.
Rates increased during the five-year period by less than one-third in the Northeast and West but more than doubled in the South and nearly doubled in the Midwest. Rates doubled in 23 states, with West Virginia showing the greatest increase with 550 percent.
In other words, the dramatic increase in drug overdose deaths is not driven by illegal drug use in the inner cities; it is being fueled by prescription drug abuse in white, middle-class, rural America.
Other Groups Affected
The group with the highest increase in fatal drug overdoses were white non-Hispanic females, with an increase of 136.5 percent. The rate of increase for females was twice that of males.
Among females, rates among whites more than doubled by 2004, but nonwhites showed smaller increases or even decreased. Overall, rates increased 75.8 percent among whites, 55.8 percent among American Indians/Alaska Natives, 27.4 percent among Asians/Pacific Islanders and 11.2 percent among blacks.
Suggestions for Solutions
To combat the rising hike in accidental drug overdose, the CDC recommends tightening regulatory measures, improving physician awareness, supporting treatment for drug dependence and possibly modifying the drugs themselves to reduce their potential for abuse.
The CDC also recommends that state agencies that manage prescription-monitoring programs try to identify patients who are getting multiple prescriptions from different doctors and identify physicians who write prescriptions beyond what is appropriate.
Sources
Centers for Disease Control. Mobidity and Mortality Weekly Report. February 9, 2007 / 56(05);93-96.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Office of Applied Studies. Results from the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: national findings. 2006.
Second Leading Cause of Accidental Death
By Buddy T, About.com Guide
Updated February 12, 2007
Unintentional fatal drug overdoses nearly doubled from 1999 to 2004 and were the second leading cause of accidental death in the United States in 2004, behind only automobile crashes, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Deaths from accidental overdoses increased to 19,838 in 2004, from 11,155 in 1999, according to the CDC report, which was based on death certificate information (which does not detail which drugs were used). However, researchers believe the increasing misuse of prescription drugs by those ages 15 to 24 accounts for the majority of the statistic.
Illegal Drugs Not to Blame
Officially, drug overdose deaths are listed on death certificates as "poisoning." However, data from the National Vital Statistics System shows that drug poisoning accounted for 94.7 percent of all unintentional poisoning deaths by 2004.
The CDC attributes the 62.5 percent rise in drug overdose deaths between 1999 and 2004 to a higher use of prescription painkillers and increasing numbers of overdoses of cocaine and prescription sedatives. The increase cannot be attributed to heroin, methamphetamines or other illegal drugs, the report said.
Groups With Highest Increases
According to the CDC report, these groups had the highest increases in deaths by drug overdose between 1999 and 2004:
Females - 103.0 percent
Whites - 75.8 percent
Persons in the southern United States - 113.6 percent
Persons aged 15-24 years - 113.3 percent
It's Not the Inner Cities
Although drug overdose deaths are historically associated with urban areas, the latest figures from the CDC show the greatest increases in rural areas between 1999 and 2004. This finding coincides with other research that shows prescription drug abuse, especially of painkillers, is increasing more rapidly in rural areas.
Rates increased during the five-year period by less than one-third in the Northeast and West but more than doubled in the South and nearly doubled in the Midwest. Rates doubled in 23 states, with West Virginia showing the greatest increase with 550 percent.
In other words, the dramatic increase in drug overdose deaths is not driven by illegal drug use in the inner cities; it is being fueled by prescription drug abuse in white, middle-class, rural America.
Other Groups Affected
The group with the highest increase in fatal drug overdoses were white non-Hispanic females, with an increase of 136.5 percent. The rate of increase for females was twice that of males.
Among females, rates among whites more than doubled by 2004, but nonwhites showed smaller increases or even decreased. Overall, rates increased 75.8 percent among whites, 55.8 percent among American Indians/Alaska Natives, 27.4 percent among Asians/Pacific Islanders and 11.2 percent among blacks.
Suggestions for Solutions
To combat the rising hike in accidental drug overdose, the CDC recommends tightening regulatory measures, improving physician awareness, supporting treatment for drug dependence and possibly modifying the drugs themselves to reduce their potential for abuse.
The CDC also recommends that state agencies that manage prescription-monitoring programs try to identify patients who are getting multiple prescriptions from different doctors and identify physicians who write prescriptions beyond what is appropriate.
Sources
Centers for Disease Control. Mobidity and Mortality Weekly Report. February 9, 2007 / 56(05);93-96.
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Office of Applied Studies. Results from the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: national findings. 2006.
Please take the time to comment - who is winning the following debate?
The following comes from a face book post I recently made. It illustrates the types of problems that REAL PEOPLE, of all races, creeds, sexual orientation, socio-economic status have, because the two naysayers have bought into the corporate welfare system that in the U.S. is laughingly called "Capitalism" and are far more worried about straw men than about human beings. These ARE NOT good and decent people. They are conceited, and might very well end up across the divide from the Lazurus' of the world:
------------
A thought experiment - thanks to a Union Pacific conduction who thinks that poor people get a "lot" of government money.
The free public transportation for Illinois senior citizens is being phased out. The conductors were talking about it on the way back to Barrington from Chicago tonight. I chimed in, "they should have never gotten it in the first place."
**********
Mark Raymond Ganzer
It is not poor people who are selling drugs to upper class 22 year olds - I have written at great length on the suicides in Barrington (which I believe to be on the order of 6-8 per year, split evenly between train jumpers and heroin / crack OD).
The drug dealing capitals of the US are Barrington, Il ... Highland Park, IL, Fox Lake IL .... Wauconda, IL, Island Lake, IL, McHenry, IL, & Streamwood, IL
NONE of those communities has anything resembling poor people ... poor people don't deal drugs
But, this high school valedictorian was overseeing a 50-70 million $ a year operation, and continued to oversee it, while becoming the valedictorian from a very presitigious private school.
NONE of those communities has anything resembling a black or hispanic presence
NONE of those communities has poor people
The typical cocaine user is a 35-year while male, making 60,000-80,000 with a good job, a mortgage, and a wife, and yet, in Illinois about 4 years ago, there were 2 white males in prison for cocaine distribution and 1,007 black men for the same offense .... hmmm
So, why are you so upset at poor people, and where in the world do you get off thinking they'd all go out and spend it on booze ... I think they'd spend it on shelter and food first, maybe clothes for their kids, and YES, then maybe booze, and so, what?
And personally ... I think all those upper class 22 year olds who are stupid enough to do drugs ... deserve exactly what they get ... I have NO sympathy ... and ... p.s. their PARENTS never had a clue? .... I mentioned the drug dealings to a Barrington cop, because, fully 25% of the high school junior and senior class must SURELY know who is dealing, and really ought to narc em out simply for the reward (the $$) because their names would never show up ... just give the tip ... so they can be put into jail, like they deserve ... the dealers ... by the way, who should be prosecuted for murder in the drug OD cases ... and the cop surprised me
"So we can get them the help they need," he said.
We've come a hell of a way since the days of detective Harry Krass!
Why not take the money away from the rich so they can't afford the drugs? And have to drink booze instead? There are programs of taxation that make such things possible.
I know you can't help being a product of your environment, but I want to point out to you something about your logic, and this is a reflection upon your education, which was, elite, and, not particularly very good, EXCEPT for keeping you culturally pure, and intellectually dull
"Let's also up welfare to pay for more drugs and booze for those folks who do not want to work!"
Whom do you personally know on welfare that does not want to work?
None of the non-working, homeless folks I know drink booze. They do not have the money for it. They struggle too hard to find warmth and safety, they cannot afford to let their guard down, for other street people will take them for everything (every pathetically few thing) they own.
This is known, in logic, as "the straw man" argument
And keep more drug masking kits being made so addicts can pass their drug test and keep their welfare!
How many addicts on welfare do you know personally? How many of these addicts have drug masking kits, that you know personally? If you don't know any personally, what credible studies can you cite which would offer data in this arena.
"Caught me on a bad night. In the last six months I have gone to funerals for upper class 22 year olds who over dosed. I despise drug dealers and those that choose drugs! Sorry, had to jump in there."
I actually love the one former drug dealer that I know best. He was the perfect example of capitalism. He had a market which wanted a product. He sold them the product. He made a fortune (spent the fortune also, on drugs, booze, hookers). He never got caught. REPEAT .. he never got caught. He was VERY intelligent ... AND very street smart. He had a distribution network, and he had the cops paid off, and he NEVER sold in his own community, and, in fact, over saw the punishments (which included death) of those who DID attempt to sell for personal use in his community. Since HE did not sell in the community, the cops left him alone.
His mother never knew. His father never knew. He worked for his father and made good money working for his father, all the while graduating as valedictorian. He was so cute, so cuddly, so smart, and so savage and ruthless. Also, he did not experience physical pain in the way "normal" people do ... you could hit him in the face, the head, whereever, and he would laugh at you, and he could take out half a dozen guys ... and has done so ... How in the world could a cute white suburban kid, so smart, be the drug king pin? ... It is the perfect capitalist cover ... he looks so much like one of us," we simply assumed he was one of "us."
Who did he sell his drugs to? OTHER DRUG DEALERS with smaller markets.
SO .. let me get your argument straight here ....
BECAUSE upper class 22 year olds overdose on drugs
Poor people who in fact might not even drink or use drugs (and in all probability, don't) should not be given money to help them get jobs and raise themselves out of poverty.
THAT, dear, is your logic. And, I don't know how it looks to you .. but, to me ... it looks as if you would fit right in in Barrington, or The Grier School, or any of the 100 most elite Colleges and Universities in the U.S. ... because such places and such institutions are in place in order to continue and justify a system of indoctrination .... a system that has worked very well for the parents of the children that live there (these are the few), or go to the schools, and this, in fact, is justification (the gospel of prosperity), but in actuality, prevents a lot of very worthy and talented people from ever rising above their station of birth (the unlucky sperm clubbers).
NOW ... if that logic pleases you, and you are proud of it, fine.
That logic is not logic at all, however, in my world. And it would shame me to ever be caught propagating it.
Wonder what Jesus would say about such a system, that allows so few to possess so much and to persecute and enslave so many?
Just asking.
--------------
Mark Raymond Ganzer
The "average meth lab operator?" ya'll got the demographics on that 'un? .. probably you do ... MY contention is still that MOST of the people who are homeless are so NOT because of drug addiction, alcohol abuse, or because of their skills at gaming the system most of the people who are poor are definetly NOT poor because of addictions .. but because they lost a job or because their insurance benefits ran out, and, quite frankly, if we are smart enough to means test to eliminate the meth lab folk ... WHY IN THE FUCKING HELL CAN'T THE DAMN LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES FIGURE OUT HOW TO GIT EM ... [(Oh, because a significant proportion of the COPS are part of the meth lab operations and they are paid to protect]
***************
Mark
[Shelli, I am sure you did – after all, your A's were paid for by the size of the tuition check, and besides, your teachers were not even remotely interested in educating you, or hearing you come up with anything that would defy the “conventional wisdom" of the elites at the University you attended. It is very important to keep the cultural and inbreeding intact, lest the rich start to get a conscience and become class traitors like that accursed FDR (effen democratic retard)]
===============
John
Mark Raymond Ganzer:
(In no way was I "just kidding.")
Okay .. i get it .. y'all don't think it makes sense to give money to poor people because some of the people that get money that is supposed to go to poor people are NOT poor ... well, how about the billion dollar [hedge] fund managers who talked GWB into cutting their marginal tax rates to 15% ... they saved themselves, I do believe $200,000,000 in taxes ... enought to provide 548,000 poor people with a one month rail pass, or 45,500 people with a rail pass for a year ... better by far, I suppose that the one gets it all, rather than risk undeservings get any
Y'all are a product of your educational back ground, and your heartlessness and ignorance are on full display
HOW MANY homeless people do you know?
For Christ's sake, I GAVE my apartment to a Viet Nam tunnel rat, who was homeless in Chicatgo, living in alleyways and making money cleaning windows. He was NOT getting any benefits. Oh, did I mention he had a metal plate in his head? [Did I mention that he had a LOT of shrapanel in his leg, and walked with a severe limp?] Did I mention that his family died one night while he was driving in Florida [How much grief counseling do you think the US government gave to Eddie?]
Y'all think the government was there to support THAT troop, with the IQ of about 85, and the heart of Jesus Christ?
Y'all don't know poor people, you'd run away from 'em in an instant if you did, afraid that its contagious. Go on, enjoy your priveleges, y'all earned them, after all, you're both members of the lucky sperm club, born in Barrington, college educated, married into an upper middle class family, or higher.
Just don't dare attempt to help the helpless, because some of them helpless might not really be helpless.
OH, wait, did I mention I paid the rent for 8 months, and the utilities (there was no phone)?
And YES, Eddie Fuensteihl DID drink some beers and smoked some cigarettes and once a month i'd go in to check on him, and sometimes he'd borrow money from me to buy [the food for the] dinner [he and his cousin would make, for me, and sometimes my girl friend too], but mostly he had enough money for dinner (his cousin moved in with him also - made things easier for both of them, and gave them companionship)
Oh, and did I mention that EDDIE initiated the conversation, "Mark, did you ever kill women and children" BECAUSE he had, and he didn't feel very fucking good about it AT ALL. [He was a baby killer, and he regretted it. Do you think Richard Nixon ever regretted it? Harry Kissinger? The Winter Soldiers? (YES, they did)]
By the way, What have y'all done to support the troops lately?
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
About me:
TRAITOR – Mark Ganzer
I am a traitor
A traitor to my race
A traitor to my creed
A traitor to my gender
A traitor to my former corporate standing
A traitor to my former socio-economic status
A traitor to my cultural inculcations.
In my treachery to these, the circumstances
of the random and improbable mating of seed and egg,
of the accident of my birth, I am empowered,
and have become the most dangerous of all creatures.
walking cloaked like those, and speaking to language of
those who cleave unto their unfounded beliefs:
I am the creature which haunts their nightmares,
I am the born again human who has looked into the mirror
Seen his true self and been lain low by the painful realization that my life's choices had corrupted me, and made me and turned me upon my genuine self -- I had let creature comforts numb me from what the universe first called me to be and called me to do.
I have rejected all that for which they stand; all that they worship. Their unfounded beliefs and idols of worship revolve around these matters:
In the superiority of the white race over all other races,
In the superiority of christianity over all other faith traditions,
In the superiority of men over women,
In the wisdom of the corporate elites over the working class masses.
In the superiority of western "culture and civilization" to all other cultures and civilizations.
They self-justify these beliefs by their material "blessings" that have accrued unto them resulting from the circumstances of the random and improbable mating of sperm and egg, of the accident of their births, and, at the upper echelons, by their celebrity.
The gospel of prosperity and the cult of personality are sufficient self-justifications.
This gospel and this cult I reject out of hand, and will oppose to my last breath.
------------
A thought experiment - thanks to a Union Pacific conduction who thinks that poor people get a "lot" of government money.
The free public transportation for Illinois senior citizens is being phased out. The conductors were talking about it on the way back to Barrington from Chicago tonight. I chimed in, "they should have never gotten it in the first place."
**********
Shelli************
Mark, you are on a roll tonight! Let's also up welfare to pay for more drugs and booze for those folks who do not want to work! And keep more drug masking kits being made so addicts can pass their drug test and keep their welfare! Caught me In the last six months I have gone to funerals for upper class 22 year olds who over dosed. I despise drug dealers and those that choose drugs! Sorry, had to jump in there.
Mark Raymond Ganzer
It is not poor people who are selling drugs to upper class 22 year olds - I have written at great length on the suicides in Barrington (which I believe to be on the order of 6-8 per year, split evenly between train jumpers and heroin / crack OD).
The drug dealing capitals of the US are Barrington, Il ... Highland Park, IL, Fox Lake IL .... Wauconda, IL, Island Lake, IL, McHenry, IL, & Streamwood, IL
NONE of those communities has anything resembling poor people ... poor people don't deal drugs
But, this high school valedictorian was overseeing a 50-70 million $ a year operation, and continued to oversee it, while becoming the valedictorian from a very presitigious private school.
NONE of those communities has anything resembling a black or hispanic presence
NONE of those communities has poor people
The typical cocaine user is a 35-year while male, making 60,000-80,000 with a good job, a mortgage, and a wife, and yet, in Illinois about 4 years ago, there were 2 white males in prison for cocaine distribution and 1,007 black men for the same offense .... hmmm
So, why are you so upset at poor people, and where in the world do you get off thinking they'd all go out and spend it on booze ... I think they'd spend it on shelter and food first, maybe clothes for their kids, and YES, then maybe booze, and so, what?
And personally ... I think all those upper class 22 year olds who are stupid enough to do drugs ... deserve exactly what they get ... I have NO sympathy ... and ... p.s. their PARENTS never had a clue? .... I mentioned the drug dealings to a Barrington cop, because, fully 25% of the high school junior and senior class must SURELY know who is dealing, and really ought to narc em out simply for the reward (the $$) because their names would never show up ... just give the tip ... so they can be put into jail, like they deserve ... the dealers ... by the way, who should be prosecuted for murder in the drug OD cases ... and the cop surprised me
"So we can get them the help they need," he said.
We've come a hell of a way since the days of detective Harry Krass!
Why not take the money away from the rich so they can't afford the drugs? And have to drink booze instead? There are programs of taxation that make such things possible.
I know you can't help being a product of your environment, but I want to point out to you something about your logic, and this is a reflection upon your education, which was, elite, and, not particularly very good, EXCEPT for keeping you culturally pure, and intellectually dull
"Let's also up welfare to pay for more drugs and booze for those folks who do not want to work!"
Whom do you personally know on welfare that does not want to work?
None of the non-working, homeless folks I know drink booze. They do not have the money for it. They struggle too hard to find warmth and safety, they cannot afford to let their guard down, for other street people will take them for everything (every pathetically few thing) they own.
This is known, in logic, as "the straw man" argument
And keep more drug masking kits being made so addicts can pass their drug test and keep their welfare!
How many addicts on welfare do you know personally? How many of these addicts have drug masking kits, that you know personally? If you don't know any personally, what credible studies can you cite which would offer data in this arena.
"Caught me on a bad night. In the last six months I have gone to funerals for upper class 22 year olds who over dosed. I despise drug dealers and those that choose drugs! Sorry, had to jump in there."
I actually love the one former drug dealer that I know best. He was the perfect example of capitalism. He had a market which wanted a product. He sold them the product. He made a fortune (spent the fortune also, on drugs, booze, hookers). He never got caught. REPEAT .. he never got caught. He was VERY intelligent ... AND very street smart. He had a distribution network, and he had the cops paid off, and he NEVER sold in his own community, and, in fact, over saw the punishments (which included death) of those who DID attempt to sell for personal use in his community. Since HE did not sell in the community, the cops left him alone.
His mother never knew. His father never knew. He worked for his father and made good money working for his father, all the while graduating as valedictorian. He was so cute, so cuddly, so smart, and so savage and ruthless. Also, he did not experience physical pain in the way "normal" people do ... you could hit him in the face, the head, whereever, and he would laugh at you, and he could take out half a dozen guys ... and has done so ... How in the world could a cute white suburban kid, so smart, be the drug king pin? ... It is the perfect capitalist cover ... he looks so much like one of us," we simply assumed he was one of "us."
Who did he sell his drugs to? OTHER DRUG DEALERS with smaller markets.
SO .. let me get your argument straight here ....
BECAUSE upper class 22 year olds overdose on drugs
Poor people who in fact might not even drink or use drugs (and in all probability, don't) should not be given money to help them get jobs and raise themselves out of poverty.
THAT, dear, is your logic. And, I don't know how it looks to you .. but, to me ... it looks as if you would fit right in in Barrington, or The Grier School, or any of the 100 most elite Colleges and Universities in the U.S. ... because such places and such institutions are in place in order to continue and justify a system of indoctrination .... a system that has worked very well for the parents of the children that live there (these are the few), or go to the schools, and this, in fact, is justification (the gospel of prosperity), but in actuality, prevents a lot of very worthy and talented people from ever rising above their station of birth (the unlucky sperm clubbers).
NOW ... if that logic pleases you, and you are proud of it, fine.
That logic is not logic at all, however, in my world. And it would shame me to ever be caught propagating it.
Wonder what Jesus would say about such a system, that allows so few to possess so much and to persecute and enslave so many?
Just asking.
--------------
John---------------------------
Oh, those darned old people. Always looking for a free ride!!!! And Mark you need to consider demographics in given areas of our country. In Virginia for example. The average meth lab operator is already on welfare and or disability. Sorry but this is a simple fact. The average crack smoker is driving a $40m plus automobile. And as for Barrington. Well... Barrington is as close to a median national demographic as is the elite university town of Charlottesville Virginia. BOTH NOT!!!! I personally know of people who have gone on mental illness disability with the intention of never working and running their own meth lab to sell to our cash cow youth. Oh and the "crazy check" from Uncle Sam is for beer and smokes. They fund the math lab by growing and selling pot. Sorry bud but my wife is in law enforcement so I hear it all.
Mark Raymond Ganzer
The "average meth lab operator?" ya'll got the demographics on that 'un? .. probably you do ... MY contention is still that MOST of the people who are homeless are so NOT because of drug addiction, alcohol abuse, or because of their skills at gaming the system most of the people who are poor are definetly NOT poor because of addictions .. but because they lost a job or because their insurance benefits ran out, and, quite frankly, if we are smart enough to means test to eliminate the meth lab folk ... WHY IN THE FUCKING HELL CAN'T THE DAMN LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES FIGURE OUT HOW TO GIT EM ... [(Oh, because a significant proportion of the COPS are part of the meth lab operations and they are paid to protect]
***************
Shelli---------------
Oh, you guys are putting me on my soap box, will reply at a later date.. Have to cash my welfare check ;-) j/k don't forget I got an A in debate class!
Mark
[Shelli, I am sure you did – after all, your A's were paid for by the size of the tuition check, and besides, your teachers were not even remotely interested in educating you, or hearing you come up with anything that would defy the “conventional wisdom" of the elites at the University you attended. It is very important to keep the cultural and inbreeding intact, lest the rich start to get a conscience and become class traitors like that accursed FDR (effen democratic retard)]
===============
John
Mark please try not to sound like Marx. (MG - I have no idea of how Marx sounded, he had already died before I was born - I have a voice that changes from slow southern to east coast effete at the drop of an intonation - it is VERY important to sound like those you wish to impress - if you can dress as do they, all the better)Y********************
our statement about taking money from the rich so they are too poor to do drugs is counterproductive. If the drug related suicides in Barrington are mostly among the upper class, this is far from the case across the rest of the nation. Creating one social injustice to cure another is not the way to remedy anything. Hope you were just kidding. :)
Mark Raymond Ganzer:
(In no way was I "just kidding.")
Okay .. i get it .. y'all don't think it makes sense to give money to poor people because some of the people that get money that is supposed to go to poor people are NOT poor ... well, how about the billion dollar [hedge] fund managers who talked GWB into cutting their marginal tax rates to 15% ... they saved themselves, I do believe $200,000,000 in taxes ... enought to provide 548,000 poor people with a one month rail pass, or 45,500 people with a rail pass for a year ... better by far, I suppose that the one gets it all, rather than risk undeservings get any
Y'all are a product of your educational back ground, and your heartlessness and ignorance are on full display
HOW MANY homeless people do you know?
For Christ's sake, I GAVE my apartment to a Viet Nam tunnel rat, who was homeless in Chicatgo, living in alleyways and making money cleaning windows. He was NOT getting any benefits. Oh, did I mention he had a metal plate in his head? [Did I mention that he had a LOT of shrapanel in his leg, and walked with a severe limp?] Did I mention that his family died one night while he was driving in Florida [How much grief counseling do you think the US government gave to Eddie?]
Y'all think the government was there to support THAT troop, with the IQ of about 85, and the heart of Jesus Christ?
Y'all don't know poor people, you'd run away from 'em in an instant if you did, afraid that its contagious. Go on, enjoy your priveleges, y'all earned them, after all, you're both members of the lucky sperm club, born in Barrington, college educated, married into an upper middle class family, or higher.
Just don't dare attempt to help the helpless, because some of them helpless might not really be helpless.
OH, wait, did I mention I paid the rent for 8 months, and the utilities (there was no phone)?
And YES, Eddie Fuensteihl DID drink some beers and smoked some cigarettes and once a month i'd go in to check on him, and sometimes he'd borrow money from me to buy [the food for the] dinner [he and his cousin would make, for me, and sometimes my girl friend too], but mostly he had enough money for dinner (his cousin moved in with him also - made things easier for both of them, and gave them companionship)
Oh, and did I mention that EDDIE initiated the conversation, "Mark, did you ever kill women and children" BECAUSE he had, and he didn't feel very fucking good about it AT ALL. [He was a baby killer, and he regretted it. Do you think Richard Nixon ever regretted it? Harry Kissinger? The Winter Soldiers? (YES, they did)]
By the way, What have y'all done to support the troops lately?
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
About me:
TRAITOR – Mark Ganzer
I am a traitor
A traitor to my race
A traitor to my creed
A traitor to my gender
A traitor to my former corporate standing
A traitor to my former socio-economic status
A traitor to my cultural inculcations.
In my treachery to these, the circumstances
of the random and improbable mating of seed and egg,
of the accident of my birth, I am empowered,
and have become the most dangerous of all creatures.
walking cloaked like those, and speaking to language of
those who cleave unto their unfounded beliefs:
I am the creature which haunts their nightmares,
I am the born again human who has looked into the mirror
Seen his true self and been lain low by the painful realization that my life's choices had corrupted me, and made me and turned me upon my genuine self -- I had let creature comforts numb me from what the universe first called me to be and called me to do.
I have rejected all that for which they stand; all that they worship. Their unfounded beliefs and idols of worship revolve around these matters:
In the superiority of the white race over all other races,
In the superiority of christianity over all other faith traditions,
In the superiority of men over women,
In the wisdom of the corporate elites over the working class masses.
In the superiority of western "culture and civilization" to all other cultures and civilizations.
They self-justify these beliefs by their material "blessings" that have accrued unto them resulting from the circumstances of the random and improbable mating of sperm and egg, of the accident of their births, and, at the upper echelons, by their celebrity.
The gospel of prosperity and the cult of personality are sufficient self-justifications.
This gospel and this cult I reject out of hand, and will oppose to my last breath.
Monday, September 12, 2011
From one of my facebook friends - Scott Werdebaugh
Scott Werdebaugh 5:37pm Sep 11
Wow! I sure needed to hear this today! I hope that it will minister to your spirit as it did to mine! The essay is entitled, "Simplifying Our Spiritual Vocabulary."
Wow! I sure needed to hear this today! I hope that it will minister to your spirit as it did to mine! The essay is entitled, "Simplifying Our Spiritual Vocabulary."
Simplifying Our Spiritual Vocabulary
By Ron Rolkeiser, OMI
2011-05-29
Somewhere near his 75th birthday, Morris West wrote a series of autobiographical essays entitled, “A View from the Ridge.” In the Prologue of that book he suggests that at age 75 you need to have only one word left in your spiritual vocabulary, gratitude, and that maturity is attained precisely at that moment when gratitude begins to drown out and cauterize the hurts in your life. As he describes it: Life has served me as it serves everyone, sometimes well and sometimes ill, but I have learned to be grateful for the gifts of it, for the love that began it and the other loves with which I have been so richly endowed.
I agree with West, though it is necessary to add that the fruit of that maturity is forgiveness. Just as smoke follows fire, forgiveness follows gratitude. Gratitude ultimately undergirds and fuels all genuine virtue, is the real basis of holiness, and the source of love itself. And its major fruit is forgiveness. When we are grateful we more easily find the strength to forgive.
Moreover, just as gratitude undergirds genuine virtue, forgiveness undergirds genuine religion and morality. Thus, as we get older, we can trim our spiritual vocabulary down to three words: Forgive, forgive, forgive! To age into and then die with a forgiving heart is the ultimate moral and religious imperative. We shouldn't delude ourselves on this. All the dogmatic and moral purity in the world does little for us if our hearts are bitter and incapable of forgiveness.
We see this, for instance, in the sad figure of the older brother of the prodigal son. He stands before his father protesting that he has never wandered, never been unfaithful, and that he has stayed home and done the family's work. But, and this is the issue, he stands outside the father's house, unable to enter into joy, celebration, the banquet, the dance. He's done everything right, but a bitter heart prevents him from entering the father's house just as much as the lustful wanderings of his younger brother took him out of that same house. Religious and moral fidelity, when not rooted inside of gratitude and forgiveness, are far from enough. They can leave us just as much outside the father's house as sin and infidelity. As Jesus teaches forcefully in the Lord's Prayer, a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven is forgiveness, especially our forgiving those who have hurt us.
But the struggle to forgive others is not easy and may never be trivialized or preached lightly. The struggle to forgive, I suspect, is our greatest psychological, moral, and religious struggle. It's not easy to forgive. Most everything inside of us protests. When we have been wronged, when we have suffered an injustice, when someone or something has treated us unfairly, a thousand physical and psychological mechanisms inside of us begin clam-up, shut-down, freeze- over, self-protect, and scream-out in protest, anger, and rage. Forgiveness is not something we can simply will and make happen. “The heart,” as Pascal once said, “has its reasons.” It also has its rhythms, its paranoia, its cold bitter spots, and its need to seal itself off from whatever has wounded it.
Moreover, all of us have been wounded. No one comes to adulthood with his or her heart fully intact. In ways small or traumatic, we have all been treated unjustly, violated, hurt, ignored, not properly honored, and unfairly cast aside. We all carry wounds and, with those wounds, we all carry some angers, some bitterness, and some areas within which we have not forgiven.
The strength of Henri Nouwen's greatest book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, was precisely to point out both the hidden cold places in our hearts and the mammoth struggle needed to bring warmth and forgiveness to those places. So much of the lightness or heaviness in our hearts, and most every nuance of our mood, is unconsciously dictated by either the forgiveness or the non-forgiveness inside us.
Forgiveness is the deep secret to joy. It is also the ultimate imperative.
Andrew Greeley, writing a review of Frank McCourt's book, Angela's Ashes, praised McCourt for being brilliant, but challenged him for being unforgiving with words to this effect: Granted, your life has been unfair. Your father was an alcoholic, your mother didn't protect you from the effects of that, you grew up in dire poverty, and you suffered a series of mini-injustices under the Irish social services, the Irish church, the Irish educational system, and the Irish weather! So, let me give you some advice: Before you die, forgive! Forgive your father for being an alcoholic, forgive your mother for not protecting you, forgive the church for whatever ways it failed you, forgive Ireland for the poverty, rain, and bad teachers it inflicted on you, forgive yourself for the failures of your own life, and then forgive God because life isn't fair ... so that you don't die an angry and bitter man because that's really the ultimate moral imperative.
How true and how challenging!
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