Last night I dreamed, among other things, that a fleet of dumptrucks came to my house and dropped piles of miscellaneous construction debris in our parking area, blocking our cars from leaving. This was big chunks if houses, roofs, even the complete frame of a one-story house. Each piece of wood and metal had a purple tag that said FOR SALE: MAKE AN OFFER. I called the police and complained and they told me that everybody in town had gotten the same number of house-shards delivered. It seems the destruction from last year's ice-storm (about this time last year, hmm) had wrecked many houses and the town couldn't afford to dispose of the rubble, so they were holding a kind of town-wide yard sale to see if they could raise some money by selling it. (in my dream I was able to see the pristine lawns in other parts of town covered with the same kind of debris.) I said, "But this is our driveway and we can't get out!" The policeman at the other end of the line answered that I just needed to find someone with a truck who wanted to buy it. Everyone in town is in the same position.

I am somehow reminded of the health-care plan that has been so badly bungled by Congress... everybody now will have to buy health insurance from gouging mega-corporations, whether they can afford it or not; this is a burden that falls so unfairly, so heavily on some and so lightly on others. Please, why can't we just raise taxes enough to dispose of all the debris as a town? Why can't we afford something good for all of us as a nation instead of making it an individual financial transaction?

I was uploading a video to YouTube today and it didn't stop uploading after about an hour and a half. I decided to delete it and start over. In the process, I seem to have deleted all the videos I have ever posted there. If you try to watch any of my YouTube videos that are posted on this blog, you won't be able to until I have uploaded them and edited the links. I apologize profusely.  YouTube does not have any undelete function for videos, assuming, I guess, that all its customers are perfect (except me) :)

Here is the (atypical video I was in the process of posting when it all went terribly wrong.

A young friend made this rap video at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center in Pennsylvania, and it includes some folks associated with my Quaker Meeting in New Hampshire. The words talk about how the Quaker emphasis on direct experience puts it outside what is traditionally thought of as Christianity, but in direct relationship to the Christ spirit. Besides that... it's Fun!



Our Meeting (monadnockfriends.org) is having a series of events called Quaker Quest this month, which is aimed at getting the word out about Quakers. Please feel free to drop by, physically or via the Web.

Some cousins visited us this week, and we unearthed a few treasures of family history. It has long been a family story that my father held the record for the ascent of fourteen-thousand-foot Longs Peak in the Colorado Rockies. Now we have some concrete evidence in the form of a contemporary article from  Colorado newspaper. At the time, he had dropped out of college and gone to live in the wild, working as a winter watchman for remote mountain properties.

The violent suppression of a peace rally last week in Rochester, NY, which can be seen at
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_seyret&Itemid=91&task=videodirectlink&id=4702

and the use of military sonic weapons at the Pittsburgh protests against the G20 meeting a few weeks ago have me wondering why the police seem so intent on intimidating dissenters at this point in history. What was the difference between the peaceful and un-police-molested  demonstation in Boston last week (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF2qn9qFusQ) and the other two?

My guess is that the participants in the demonstrations that were attacked were all young, and that those demonstrations included people dressed in clothing and carrying banners that indicated support for anarchist ideals, while the Boston gathering included a mixture of generations and clothing styles. My friends in the Boston IWW branch noticed a distinct absence of the "black bloc" which has been prominent in previous peace marches there.

Do the police have orders to scare the wits out of emotionally vulnerable young people and get them to conform and support only "moderate" causes in the future? It would be reasonable to assume that anyone my age who participates in a demonstration is not going to be scared into staying away, but that young people are more susceptible to intimidation. Is it some kind of demographic trend that fewer Boston young people are acting black-blockish; are teenagers just no longer seeing the point in that style of confrontation and thirty-somethings mellowing politically? (if so, why are teenagers in Rochester still doing it?)  Is it a conscious decision on the part of some youthful social justice groups to stay out of coalitions with moderates because they blunt the effectiveness of radical causes? Or is it the result of effective police intimidation in the past?

The University where I work has adopted  smart-card technology to solve a number of problems cheaply and reduce staffing costs. My ID card opens selected doors, lets me into certain faculty parking lots, gets me into classes and even buys me a cup of coffee (with my own money). But there's one major disadvantage to it: Every month or so it just stops working. To get it working again I have to telephone the card-services office and often have to physically show up at the office and have the card reprogrammed. The office is open a certain number of hours each weekday, but often there is only one person handling walk-in customers and telephones. The card died this morning...

Fortunately, my car is just narrow enough to squeeze past the lift-gate at the entrance to the parking lot, otherwise I would have had to pay 25 cents an hour at a commercial lot and sneak out to feeed the meter every four hours,  or risk getting a $20 ticket for parking in a reserved-for-neighborhood-residents on-street spot. At the radio station studio, I was thankful to be let in by one of the co-hosts, even though it meant interrupting an intriguing discussion of the history of zombies. I tried calling the card services office and was on hold three times for as much as a half hour. Finally, after lunch I got through to the lone woman in the office, and she was able to fix the card so it let me into parking lots again, but I needed to show up physically at the office to solve the studio door problem. The office is more than half a mile away on the other side of the river. It always takes a lot of time and aggravation to solve these problems, and they are completely unnecessary.

It seems that I am in the anomalous position of being a graduate student who is through with classes and working on a thesis and also a faculty member. The reason my card was disabled was that  I did not show up as being registered in any classes, but I wasn't supposed to be registered in any. Some software switch just went "click" and turned off my card. No human being was notified, certainly not me. What I wonder is why such a sophisticated system could not send an automated email to me a day or two before the cutoff and allow me an opportunity to correct the error before I was locked out. There is really no need to build this kind of artificial cruelty into the personality of the robots that run services for our benefit. It is for our benefit, after all.... Just a thought.

My Spanish-language radio co-host Lindolfo Carballo has been posting up-to-the-minute audio coverage of the dramatic events unfolding in Honduras at Nuestras Voces Radio. The reports come from the clandestine radio station Radio LIberada, which is only occasionally on the air but is continuing to webcast. The reports are all in Spanish

There have been reports of chemical-weapons use, sound-blasting techniques aimed at the Brazil Embassy where President Zelaya is living, torture and other human rights abuses, which are not being mentioned  in the US English-language press. The fact that a major soccer match may have to be cancelled due to the coup is also a big deal in Honduras. The failure of Obama and Clinton to make clear condemnations of the coup and to enforce sanctions that have been promised, needs to be widely known. As usual, we need to let our leaders know we are watching and we will not be deceived by pretty rhetoric.

The mainstream US media are doing their usual false-balancing act of equating the oppressors' actions with those of the oppressed. One US English-language media source, The Real News, has been doing a good job of covering the resistance in depth, albeit a few days late. Take a look at this excellent report:


More at The Real News

People are being tear-gassed, beaten, jailed, and in some cases probably killed in massive police violence against peaceful protesters outside the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa Honduras as I write this. My Spanish radio co-host has been carrying recordings from webcasts from Honduras with very little delay today at http://nuestrasvocesradio.ning.com/ , and the reports are hair-raising. The mainstream English language press seems to be playing this down and emphasizing things like the US response and the right-wing demonstrations at the Brazilian consulate in Miami rather than the suffering of brave people who are fighting nonviolently for democracy and justice in their country. All the oppostion radio and tv stations in the country have been forced off the air, but some are still webcasting to get the word out to the world. We need to let our government know that fine words are not enough, and that the "de-facto" regime in Honduras is an outlaw regime that is attacking its own people.

More at The Real News

Mary Travers, the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, a 'sixties folk group that definitely helped mold my subconscious understandings of the world, died today at age 72. In her later years, she had been part of a revival of the trio, and I was impressed with the way she insisted on performing even when she could barely stand, as in this blurry amateur YouTube video from 2007 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGLfIoNAsso). The determination and exuberance she brought to her early performances seems to flow out through the seated form on stage, in spite of the pain she must have been enduring.