Author: shaun

     Do you remember that uproarious Monty Python sketch where the Dalai Lama, played by John Cleese, sits cross-legged in saffron robes in a mountaintop cave and declares that he won’t have an afterlife, throwing into an uproar the exhausted Chinese Communist Party functionaries who have hiked to the cave?  The officials, played by the other Pythons dressed identically in Mao jackets and clutching little red books, demand that the Dalai Lama reincarnate, dammit, after he dies, but only on their terms.

    “You have no say over whether you will be reincarnated!” splutters the official played by Michael Palin. “That is for our government to decide.”

    Don’t remember the sketch?   That’s because there never was one.

    But in an astonishing example of Life Imitating Python, or something, Chinese party leaders meeting this week in Beijing are in high dudgeon over the 14th Dalai Lama’s recent speculation — think of it as a cosmic cream pie aimed at the party’s collective face — that he might end his spiritual lineage as the most prominent leader of Tibetan Buddhism and not reincarnate.  The party has repeatedly warned the 79-year-old holy man that he must play by its rules–  or else.

    The Dalai Lama’s obdurance would confound the Communist government’s plans to rig a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s deeply unpopular presence in Tibet, which it invaded without provocation in 1950.  The Dalai Lama fled into exile nine years later and remains deeply revered in his restive homeland, which has never accepted — and never will accept — the communist yolk.

    Beijing already has rigged a succession following the 1989 death of the 10th Panchen Lama, another senior figure in Tibetan Buddhism.  The Dalai Lama confirmed a Tibetan boy as the next reincarnation in 1995, but the Chinese government hid away the boy and his parents and installed its own choice as the Panchen Lama, a fate that the Dalai Lama has indicated he does not want.

    The idea of Communist Party officials defending the precepts of reincarnation and calling the Dalai Lama a heretic, to boot, is deeply comedic because the party is atheistic to its red core, but beyond the Python riffs and inevitable late night TV show witticisms, the standoff is deadly serious.  Waves of protests and self-immolations in Tibet and abroad have repeatedly brought to the surface deep discontent with the Chinese gulagization, including its attempts to micro-manage Tibet’s culture and control the Buddhist tradition.  And Tibetans are sure to reject any future putative Dalai Lama picked by the Chinese government.

* * * * *

    If Americans were asked what foreign country they most admired but never visited, doubtless many would answer Shangri La. But since it was foreclosed in the subprime mortgage meltdown, the second choice probably would be Tibet.  Indeed, the mountainous nation nicknamed “The Roof of the World” holds a special place in the popular imagination because of multiple gauzy Hollywood treatments and, of course, the Dalai Lama.

    If you don’t want to disturb your Richard Gere version of Tibet, move along please.  But with Tibet back in the news because of the reincarnation brouhaha, it is worth remembering that Tibet’s own history is riven with wars between competing Buddhist sects, sexual exploitation, usurious taxation, serfdom and other forms of economic enslavement that extended well into the last half of the 20th century; in other words, on the current Dalai Lama’s watch.

    This does not forgive the Chinese occupation, which has cost well over a million Tibetan lives, the jailing of millions more and destruction of most of the country’s 3,000 monasteries, but does provide some perspective.

    And let’s face it, the Dalai Lama is who we want him to be: Head of state. Leader of the best known exile movement on earth. Prolific author. Metaphysician. Cross-cultural icon. Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Oh, and caricature, as well.

    Veteran journalist-novelist Pico Iyer offers perspective aplenty in The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, a book that I would highly recommend.

    The apothegems of the Dalai Lama that appear on buttons, bumper stickers and t-shirts make no more sense “than a single thread taken out of a Persian carpet, an intricate web, and pronounced to be beautiful,” writes Iyer, and one of the Dalai Lama’s longtime translators shouts to him that “It’s nonsense! All these things you see ascribed to him, others are just making up!”

    Indeed, one of the conundrums that the Dalai Lama faces on his world travels (he’s in Australia at the moment) is that it is the magically esoteric side of Tibetan Buddhism that is the primary source of fascination for non-Tibetans who want to turn away from their own religions.  

    I’ve always been a worship at home guy, so the contradictions don’t bother me, while I’m deeply admiring of the Dalai Lama for his stubborn pacifism.  And Tibet has produced some ass-kicking incense as well as a commonsensical pharmacopeia, including a kidney-cleansing compound that may well have saved if not prolonged the life of one of our beloved dogs.  

    I do have to note that while the 14th Dalai Lama has been moving the world by example for almost half a century, he has not moved China and now Tibet is almost gone.

    But as he has said, “Until the last moment, anything is possible.”

     The Republicans’ own big takeaway from their 2014 election victories was that they would now show Americans what governing was all about.  Ta da!  This boast was rather strange since the party has performed a sort of demented Kabuki theater in lieu of governing — whether jointly with President Obama, Democrats or by their lonesome — over the last six-plus years in making the case that it still was not capable of taking back the keys to the national car.  So it comes as no surprise that despite now controlling both House and Senate, it has been more of the non-governing same — and perhaps even worse.

    In the few short weeks since the 114th Congress convened, the Republican congressional leadership has thumbed its collective nose at governing — which is to say making and administering public policy for the common good — in sweeping aside bread-and-butter issues of concern to many millions of struggling Americans.

    It’s version of “governing” has included:

    * In its first act, stoking the Culture War fires by a proposing a draconian law outlawing abortions after 20 weeks despite the fact that 99 percent of abortions occur before then, and polls show a healthy majority of Democratic, Independent and Republican voters, including a growing number of woman GOP lawmakers, believe reproductive decisions should be left to the individual.

    * Tying itself in knots by holding Department of Homeland Security funding hostage — and risking yet another government shutdown — by linking funding to rolling back Obama’s executive actions shielding millions of wannabe Americans from deportation.

    * Continuing to take endlessly meaningless votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which like the first 60 or so repeal votes have no chance of being enacted into law, while refusing (actually, being unable) to bring an alternative health-care plan to the table.

    * Urging the Supreme Court to strike down subsidies for health insurance provided to millions of people in more than 30 states through the ACA while hypocritically criticizing the Obama administration because it has no plan to avert the hardships that would occur if they win in court.

    * Embarrassing themselves by engaging in diplomatic thuggery by extending a unilateral invitation to Israeli Prime Minister and Obama foe Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress, then lying through their teeth when the attempt to back stab the president blew up in their smug faces.

    * Further embarrassing themselves by feeble criticism of the rebounding economy, including robust job growth, a signal accomplishment of Obama’s presidency, by offering their own feel-good prescription: Restoring the 40-hour work week, approving the Keystone XL pipeline, and rolling back regulation of businesses.

    * In a welcome break with conservative orthodoxy, some Republicans have belatedly discovered the issue of income inequality.  But these Republicans have no idea about how to confront the issue; it’s merely viewed as a wedge to drive between Democratic liberal elites and poor working stiffs, as well as float the usual tax-reform flapdoodle.

    Reaching across the aisle in search of compromise and consensus was long the professed goal of lawmakers, but that continues to be antithetical to Republicans.  Take the Homeland Security funding bill.  If the parties cannot work together, they are supposed to work separately, yet it has become even more obvious since last November that Republicans can’t even work with each other — witness the abortion bill and Netanyahu imbroglio — and are imploding under their own obdurance.

    And with more power comes more responsibility.

    “The Republicans are like Fido when he finally catches the car,” Democratic Senator Charles Schumer remarked recently. “Now they don’t have any clue about what to do.”

    There is some good news amid the torrent of police shootings, terrorist attacks a little too close to home for comfort, travails of the middle class and the blatherings of a dysfuctional political establishment: The embrace of gay rights and abolition of draconian marijuana laws have accelerated at breathtaking speed in a society in which positive change comes with a painful slowness, if at all.

    These seismic shifts have a common denominator: They make sense.

    A majority of Americans endorse gay rights, including support of same sex marriage, and are in favor of decriminalization, if not outright legalization, of marijuana because they know that there is nothing inherently wrong with homosexuality or smoking marijuana despite religious and legal prohibitions, and in the case of pot, penalties for even simple possession that do not begin to fit the “crime” that are a result of decades of federal government-sponsored misinformation, scare tactics and fear mongering.

    There also is a huge difference in these seismic shifts: Money.

    While it is the right thing to do, no one is going to make a buck because gays are afforded the same legal rights as straights, while a growing number of state and local governments, as well as entrepreneurs looking for the next big thing, see financial windfalls in licensing and taxing marijuana cultivation and sales, and permitting the sale of food and beverages with pot as an ingredient.

    An astounding (for this old head, anyway) 23 states and the District of Columbia have at least decriminalized marijuana possession.  Colorado, Oregon and Washington state have legalized pot and licensed its sale outright, nine states have both medical and decriminalization laws, eight states have medical laws, and four states — including usually neolithic Alabama — have decriminalization laws.  And more are about to join the crowd.   Alaska, Arizona, California, New Hampshire and Nevada are on the short list of the next states to jump on the bandwagon.

    * * * * *

    Count Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper among the converts.

    Hickenlooper, 63, grew up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1960s and was bombarded from an early age with the familiar smorgasbord of government-pedaled lies: Marijuana makes people crazy.  It turns them into sociopaths, even murderers.  And it is a gateway to the harder stuff like cocaine and heroin.  While Hickenlooper would never admit as much, it is likely he smoked or at least tried pot at the Main Line boy’s school he attended or later at Wesleyan University.  This was about the time a future president by the name of Bill Clinton was smoking but famously not inhaling.

    And it is just as likely that none of the classmates of Hickenlooper and Clinton became poster kids for the propagandistic evils of the illegal weed while their elders were consuming so-called legal drugs, including pain- and reality-killing alcohol and pills.  The negative impact of their use and too often their abuse — addiction, drunk driving, broken families, domestic abuse and divorce — far outweighed the consequences of smoking the occasional joint and getting the midnight munchies.

    Hickenlooper worked in Colorado as a geologist in the early 1980s and stayed.  He eventually got into politics and started a microbrewery in a trendy Denver neighborhood.  As his statewide profile grew, he came out against nascent efforts to soften the state’s tough marijuana laws and opposed Amendment 64, the successful 2012 ballot measure legalizing cannabis for adults and allowing commercial cultivation, manufacture, and sale, as well as limited home cultivation, effectively regulating pot in a manner similar to alcohol.

    Today Hickenlooper is a changed man and concedes that the consequences of letting people grow, sell, and consume pot without risking arrest have not been as bad as he feared.

    “It seems like the people that were smoking before are mainly the people that are smoking now,” the governor says. “If that’s the case, what that means is that we’re not going to have more drugged driving, or driving while high. We’re not going to have some of those problems. But we are going to have a system where we’re actually regulating and taxing something, and keeping that money in the state of Colorado, and we’re not supporting a corrupt system of gangsters.”

    Legalization, licensing and taxing — allowing anyone 21 or older to walk into a store and walk out with a bag of buds, a vapor pen loaded with cannabis oil, or a marijuana-infused snack — has been a financial windfall for Colorado. A record $36.5 million flowed into state coffers in November 2014, the most recent month for which data are available, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue, which projects out to $438 million a year.  

    Meanwhile, legalized marijuana has taken the investing world by storm as investors have bought into so-called marijuana stocks with enthusiasm, causing share prices to skyrocket.  According to Arcview Market Research, the industry generated $1.53 billion in revenues in 2013 and was expected to jump to $2.5 billion in 2014– a robust 40 percent growth rate year over year — primarily because of the widespread and growing decriminalization of medical marijuana.

    * * * * *

    Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s legendary praise for states as the “laboratories of democracy” has gotten a vigorous workout as state after state has decided that beyond potential revenue windfalls, a ride on the bandwagon is preferable to continue to clog its court systems and prisons with penny-ante marijuana cases.

    Indeed, the bandwagon had to get rolling somewhere, and even some politicians who oppose legalization have been comforted by the fact the federal government isn’t driving it.  Lest investors think that the sky’s the limit, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency is still occasionally raiding marijuana dispensaries in states that have decriminalized such businesses, and the incoming Congress is decidedly more conservative than its predecessors in terms of potentially legalizing marijuana at the federal level.

    But for the most part, the Justice Department has allowed the bandwagon to keep rolling.  

    Last August, the deputy attorney general issued a formal — though nonbinding — assurance that the feds would take a mostly hands-off approach as long as state governments pursue “strong and effective” regulation to prevent activities such as distribution to minors, dealing by gangs and cartels, dealing other drugs, selling across state lines, and weapons possession.  Justice also has been quietly working with the Treasury Department to reinterpret banking laws to allow state-licensed pot businesses to have checking accounts and take credit cards, thereby avoiding the dangers inherent in cash-only businesses.

    Washington Monthly writer Mark Kleiman has noted that the systems being put into place in Colorado, Oregon and Washington roughly resemble those imposed on alcohol after Prohibition ended in 1933.  That is, competitive commercial enterprises produce the marijuana and competitive commercial enterprises sell it.

    The post-Prohibition restrictions on alcohol worked reasonably well for a while, but have been substantially undermined over the years as the beer and liquor industries consolidated and used their economies of scale to lower production costs and their lobbying muscle to loosen regulations and keep taxes low.

    “The same will likely happen with cannabis,” Kleiman warns. “As more and more states begin to legalize marijuana over the next few years, the cannabis industry will begin to get richer — and that means it will start to wield considerably more political power, not only over the states but over national policy, too.

    “That’s how we could get locked into a bad system in which the primary downside of legalizing pot — increased drug abuse, especially by minors — will be greater than it needs to be, and the benefits, including tax revenues, smaller than they could be. It’s easy to imagine the cannabis equivalent of an Anheuser-Busch InBev peddling low-cost, high-octane cannabis in Super Bowl commercials. We can do better than that, but only if Congress takes action — and soon.”

    I won’t hold my breath waiting for Congress to do much of anything, and I happen to inhale.  

    In fact, as someone who was introduced to the benign delights of the evil weed in the year that apocalyptic anti-marijuana sign appeared in a Buffalo store window (as in nearly 50 years ago, man) the trend toward legalization is welcome but still rankles this old head because of the tiresome tendency of capitalism — whether in the form of states taxing a recreational drug that hurts no one to cannabis entrepreneurs selling to folks like me who just want to chill on their own terms — to exploit people.

    My not so secret hope is that because marijuana is so damned cheap and easy to grow (it’s not nicknamed “weed” for nothing), it will get still cheaper and still easier to grow because of the legalization bandwagon, state revenue agents and Anheuser-Busch InBev be damned.

    Imagine the American public as a big mixed-breed dog.  (That was easy, wasn’t it?)  This dog had been treated poorly by its master for years, if not outright abused.  Other dogs, especially purebreds, were pampered with steak and all kinds of treats.  They luxuriated in comfy dog beds from L.L. Bean, never got wet when it rained or snowed or were toweled off if they did, had their own spot in the back of the family SUV when they went on vacation to tony resorts, and went to the vets for regular checkups and prompt care should, heaven forbid, they get sick.

    The big mixed-breed dog was not so fortunate, and like the many others with less distinguished parentage, subsisted on scraps and sometimes measly handouts from the master and his advisers.  He never got treats, lived in a leaky doghouse and got wet when the weather was bad.  If he was lucky enough to go for a ride, it was in a cage on the roof of the family SUV and the destination was anything but glamorous, and he never went to the veterinarians, not even for checkups.  As a mixed breed, he just wasn’t deserving enough.

    But things began to change for the better a few years ago when the big mixed-breed dog got a new master.  The new master promised better times for all dogs.  “Kibble and change, kibble and change,” the new master vowed.  “Kibble and change.”  

    The new master was pretty much true to his word, and his advisers pretty much did his bidding, at least the ones who did not have purebred dogs and were not beholden to the old master.   The big mixed-breed dog’s diet got better and most of the holes in his doghouse were patched.  Best of all, he began going to the vets for regular checkups.  He got shots when he was supposed to, was treated for a bad tooth, and now took medicine for hairballs.  

    Things were definitely looking up for he and other mixed breeds, but then things began to change for the worse.  

    Some of new master’s advisers refused to help patch up the rest of the holes in the big mixed-breed’s doghouse and it began to leak badly again.  His diet wasn’t so good anymore, and the advisers pretty much cut off all the treats.   Worst of all, they threatened to stop his visits to the vets because the purebred dogs objected.  That and the fact too many dogs, most of them chihuahua mixes, were coming across the border.

    The big mixed-breed dog was puzzled about why the better times seemed to be ending.  It seemed like the purebreds actually had preferred it when things weren’t better for all dogs.  He decided to try to find out why when he next encountered a certain know-it-all poodle at the dog park.  

    “You just don’t get it,” this poodle replied one day as he lifted his leg and directed a steam of pee on one of the trees that dog park volunteers had planted to provide shade on hot summer days.  These trees weren’t looking so good because the poodle and other purebreds kept peeing on them, and the big mixed-breed dog knew that there soon would be no shade at all.

    “You just don’t get it, but then you always were a gullible cur,” the poodle declared in his obnoxiously whiny drawl in explaining why the purebreds were biting the hand that fed the mixed breeds.  “Come a little closer and I’ll tell you why if you promise to not tell your pals.”  

    “It’s because your master is a mutt, too.”

    Anyone who thought that Barack Obama, having said boo about the Bush Torture Regime while campaigning for president in 2008, would denounce this darkest day in modern American history after taking office was engaging in fuzzy-wuzzy liberal thinking.  For one thing, the new president understood that denouncing, let alone going after the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld triumvirate for their crimes would scuttle any chance he had of forging a bipartisan consensus for his ambitious first-term agenda.  But even this Obama supporter is deeply disappointed at how unwilling the president has been to lay bare the regime’s excesses even if stopping short of even suggesting its architects should be prosecuted.

    Seven and a half years after Obama promised a new beginning and banned torture in one of his first acts, any expectation that he would at least advocate a thorough examination of the torture regime’s worst excesses has been dashed.  Obama’s endorsement, by his silence, of the CIA’s continued obstruction of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of its damning report on torture without redactions that would render it meaningless, is nothing less that a legitimization of that agency’s vile practices.  His defense of CIA Director John Brennan, who has led the campaign to stymie release of the report while tacitly approving the rogue agency’s own spying on the Senate committee, makes farcical the president’s statements that he believes that the U.S. should hew to international law, including the Geneva Conventions.

    The latest roadblock to the never-ending series of obstructionist tactics slowing the report’s release is a debate within the administration about whether that presidential decree banning torture should extend to so-called black sites outside the U.S.  These were the gulags run by the CIA where torture was practiced with the acquiescence of host governments like Poland, one of too many countries that participated in a CIA extraordinary rendition program in which terrorism suspects were interrogated at secret facilities beyond the reach of American constitutional protections.

    The debate is taking on additional importance because the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Poland violated the rights of two terrorism suspects by transferring them to a CIA-run black site in northeast Poland, while the U.S. itself is to give testimony next month to the United Nations Committee Against Torture regarding whether its policies have been in violation of a UN treaty banning torture.

    There is little question that the president sides with the black hats in the debate.  Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, has said Obama’s opposition to torture at home and overseas is clear but separate from the legal question of whether the UN treaty applies to American behavior overseas.  Meanwhile, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and not the national security advisers one would think would be most qualified, is said to be personally negotiating how much of the Senate report will be redacted

    As tests of president mettle go, this is a biggie.

    At a time when 12 fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates are urging Obama to make “full disclosure to the American people of the extent and use of torture” by the U.S., a time when he and other world leaders express outrage at ISIS beheadings and its other jihadist excesses, nothing less than a blanket declaration that the U.S. will not condone torture anytime or anywhere, as well as release of the Senate report without fatal redactions, leaves the most unpleasant impression that the CIA not only will get its way, but Obama is endorsing by default a loophole in the U.S. interpretation of international law that will justify it torturing again.

    The news that the Centers for Disease Control was unprepared for the ebola virus now that it has made landfall in the U.S. is not exactly a bolt from the blue.  Government agencies have been failing us for many years.

    The CDC, it turns out, had issued lax guidelines to health-care providers on how to treat people with ebola-like symptoms, the predictable result being that one person is dead at a Dallas hospital because of appallingly lax emergency room care and two nurses have been infected.  The question of whether these infections are outliers or merely the first casualties in what will become a full-blown public health crisis is now looming very large, as is the credibility of the CDC.

    Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that the CDC has plenty of company.  Here’s a partial list:

    * The Agriculture Department is beholden to major food producers, which is why schoolkids still eat a lot of crap despite the efforts of First Lady Michelle Obama, pediatric obesity specialists and others not in the ketchup-as-vegetable crowd.

    * The Food and Drug Administration is beholden to profits-obsessed Big Pharma, which is why undertested prescription drugs kill and maim so many people.

    * The Defense Department is beholden to big defense contractors, which is why the armed forces are unable to wean themselves from ridiculously expensive and unnecessary weapons systems three decades after the Cold War drew its last breath.

    * The Federal Highway Administration is beholden to  vehicle manufacturers as has been shown in the sorry saga of too little oversight in General Motors’ recall of tens of millions of unsafe vehicles.

    * The Federal Communications Commission is beholden to the gigantic national cable television companies who believe the best Internet is one that most folks can barely afford.

    * The Department of the Interior is beholden to the corporations who are turning our national parks into trees with McDonald’s.

    Meanwhile:

    * The Department of Education is unable . . . no make that unwilling to really crack down on for-profit colleges that graduate few of their students but suck up hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid money.

    * The Department of the Interior is beholden to the corporations who are turning our national parks into trees with McDonald’s.

    * The Department of Veterans Affair has, of course, recently been in the crosshairs for cooking its books in the service of not treating needy vets at its network of hospitals.  

    * The Secret Service has shown itself to be so dysfunctional that the safety of the president has repeatedly been compromised.  

    * And who can forget the reform-averse Securities and Exchange Commission, which slept through the run-up to the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression despite an abundance of warning signs and has pretty much taken a powder when it comes to preventing the kind of Wall Street excesses that triggered the downturn.  

    Who have I left out?

    Barack Obama happens to be the guy in the Oval Office and must take responsibility, to some extent, for these failures.  But every one of them predates his presidency.  Bill Clinton, for example, is the bad guy when it comes to the deregulation of banks and other lending institutions who were among the chief villains in the recession, while the administration of George W. Bush elevated defanging federal agencies to an art form.

    While we’re spreading blame around, let’s not forget the Supreme Court and Congress.  Oh, and us.

    The top court, which has morphed into a de facto arm of the Republican Party (do not be misled by the recent spate of non-decisions on abortion and same-sex marriage), effectively neutered the Food and Drug Administration a few years ago when it ruled that consumers could not sue the agency for its slipshod reviews of bad medical devices, to cite but one decision with a decidedly pro-big business slant.

    Congress, meanwhile, has acted more like an ambulance-chasing attorney than a watchdog when government agencies fail us.  Time and again, the folks up on Capitol Hill, who are in the bag with well-heeled and well-connected campaign contributors, have reacted to bureaucratic-fueled crises with scripted outrage.  It turns out, of course, that many of these crises stem from the unwillingness of legislators to adequately fund agencies in the first place, the VA hospitals scandal being only the latest such instance, or their refusal to put real teeth into agencies’ regulatory choppers, the GM recall scandal being only the latest such instance.

    Finally, how many of us — and not just those Tea Party wackadoodles — criticize government for being too big and too meddlesome until we want it to do its job, whether protecting our Uncle Leo from hemorrhagic viruses, making sure his plane is airworthy and lands without incident when he visits at Thanksgiving, or that he not be stuck on a secret VA waiting list when this sweet old Vietnam vet really, really needs a new artificial limb.

Promoted by Steven D

    As the manhunt for state trooper killer Eric Frein lurches toward its sixth week, the Pennsylvania State Police are on the defensive because of the latest scandal to tarnish the long troubled agency, while a law-enforcement insider says the search itself is in disarray.

    The insider, who has many years of experience in tracking and surveilling criminal suspects, asked that his name not be used.  He acknowledges that any search the size of the Frein manhunt involving disparate law-enforcement agencies, in this case the state police, local and regional police forces, as well as the FBI and ATF, is bound to encounter some jurisdictional bumps and bruises.  While the various groups are assigned their own search sectors, the insider said they “are barely cooperating because every group wants to be the one to catch him.”

    “It’s a clusterf—,” said the insider, who confirmed the accuracy of my earlier post and updates on the dragnet.  “The locals [local police forces] know more than they’re telling the state police and the feds.”

    Frein (pronounced Freen) shot and killed state police Corporal Bryon Dickson and wounded Trooper Alex Douglass on September 12 in a sniper-style attack in the late evening darkness as they changed shifts at a barracks in Blooming Grove, a small Pike County community about 20 miles north northeast of Frein’s parents’ house in the village of Canadensis in Monroe County.  The self-trained backwoods survivalist crashed his Jeep near Blooming Grove and is believed to have hiked south southwestward through nearly unspoiled forest to an area near Canadensis that provides many hiding places not visible from the air, let alone on the ground a hundred yards away.

    In the early days of the manhunt, a state police spokesman repeatedly stated that searchers were closing in on Frein and there were repeated but largely unconfirmed sightings of the 31-year-old, who likes to dress up like a Serbian soldier and play Cold War-style games, and has long harbored a well-documented grudge against law enforcement.  The number of apparent sightings since then has diminished, and the boastful claims that searchers had found items belonging to Frein have sometimes blown up in their faces. Case in point: The spokesman crowed that soiled diapers left by Frein had been recovered during the manhunt. It turns out the diapers would only fit an infant and had been in the woods for some time.

    The latest scandal to hit the state police reaches all the way to the top: Commissioner Frank Noonan is among several high-ranking state officials to receive emails with pornographic content.  Several officials have resigned or been fired, but Noonan told Governor Tom Corbett that he never opened any of the 300-plus pornographic emails he received, which exonerates him in the eyes of an ethically challenged gubernatorial administration.  By this standard, Noonan could drive past a gang rape in his official car while on duty, not try to stop the rape nor even notify authorities of it, and therefore is absolved of responsibility because he didn’t get involved.  

    * * * * *

Continue reading below the fold …
    One of the more curious aspects of the Frein drama is why his parents have not issued an appeal urging their son to surrender.  A state police spokesman has said it is believed the fugitive has a radio or other means of monitoring news reports, so why not have his parents record a message, which could additionally be broadcast from loudspeakers on the helicopters flying over the search area?  Indeed, why not?

    Among other questions being asked but not answered:

    * Will the state police learn from the mistakes investigators made in the five-year-long manhunt for 1996 Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and expand their search from the area where they have been focused from Day One?  Like Frein, Rudolph was a well-trained survivalist and like the Frein manhunt, in his case searchers concentrated on a specific area of forest.  Rudolph finally was apprehended after he was found rummaging through a grocery store trash bin away from the search area.

    * How much is the manhunt costing and where is the money coming from?  The spokesman will only say that “millions of dollars” have been expended.

    * At what point will the search for Frein begin to seriously impact on other parts of the regional criminal-justice system, or has it already?  In just one of a growing number of instances, charges recently were dropped against a man who slapped a state police horse at Musikfest in Bethlehem because the trooper riding the horse was unable to attend the trial because he was involved in the manhunt.

    Meanwhile, as a career journalist, it has been dismaying to watch the Pocono Record abdicate its responsibilities and concede the biggest story to hit the region since back-to-back hurricanes took 78 lives in 1955, to its competitors.  

    The Allentown Morning Call and Scranton Tribune Times, which have some circulation in Monroe County, have aggressively covered the manhunt.  These papers have repeatedly broken stories that require enterprise and shoe leather — and that the Record shamelessly picks up and runs on its front pages, while major media outlets like The Philadelphia Inquirer and CNN have run circles around the Record.  That is understandable to an extent.  Both the Inky and CNN have reporters who have sources deep within the FBI and ATF, but that does not explain why Record reporters seem reluctant to even leave their newsroom.

    * * * * *

    So why didn’t Noonan notify Corbett of the pornographic emails, which he received while chief of the criminal division in the Office of Attorney General, which was headed by the governor-to-be at the time?  Why did he still not notify Corbett of the emails after Corbett named him state police commissioner?  We probably will never know, because the state police modus operandi has long been to close ranks and stonewall any questions about its own standards, or simply lie when confronted.  (The state police are virtually alone among state agencies exempt from Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law.)

    I know about the state police propensity to lie first- and second-hand.

    While researching The Bottom of the Fox, my 2010 book on the unsolved 1981 ax murder of Eddie Joubert, a popular bar owner and civic leader in the eastern Poconos village of Delaware Water Gap, I repeatedly contacted the state police in order to confirm that the murder was  considered a “cold case.”

    As I wrote in the Afterword of the book:

        “Repeated calls elicited a range of excuses about why this simple piece of information was not forthcoming, and I had to threaten to go to higher ups if my request was not answered.  It finally was, and the case is indeed as cold as a midwinter night in the Poconos.

        “How cold is that?  A subsequent query revealed that the commander of the Swiftwater barracks [the primary state police unit in the Poconos] asserts that unsolved murder cases such as Eddie’s are assigned to troopers who are required to spend some time each year on them.  But Eddie, it seems, did not make the cut.  This is borne out by family members, [his] employees, friends and law enforcement officials whom I interviewed who state that they were not aware of any state police activity whatsoever regarding Eddie’s case over the past 28 years.”

    The state police had no reason to lie, but they lied anyway, which is a deeply ingrained part of its culture and also was the common denominator when a close friend was twice stopped by state police  in recent years while driving and hit with bogus charges.  

    In both cases, my friend knew she had done nothing wrong and requested trials to appeal the tickets, although the fines were minor.  In one case, two troopers lied about the circumstances, the judge rolled over, and my friend had to pay the fine and court costs.  In the other case, the trooper lied about the circumstances, the judge was rightfully skeptical of the cock-and-bull story the trooper told, and the charge was dismissed.  

    All of this begs a very important question: What lies are the state police telling regarding the Frein manhunt and investigation?

     If there was any question that the Pennsylvania State Police-led manhunt for cop killer Eric Frein was in big trouble — indeed, that the trail for the marksman-survivalist in the northeastern Pennsylvania woodlands may have gone cold — a photograph on the front page of the Pocono Record on Monday, the 17th day of the search, betrayed a harsh truth.

    It showed troopers clad in camouflage and SWAT team mufti preparing to search a vacant cabin for Frein.  The cabin was not one of many that dot the woodlands, which already had been searched, but was on a well-traveled state road, not exactly the kind of place that a crafty, if troubled, 31-year-old charged with criminal homicide who likes to dress up like a Serbian soldier and play war games would choose.  State police clearly were at the end of their rope — or nearly so.

    Frein shot and killed state police Corporal Bryon Dickson and wounded Trooper Alex Douglass on September 12 in a sniper-style attack in the late evening darkness as they changed shifts at a barracks in Blooming Grove, a small Pike County community about 20 miles north northeast of Frein’s parents’ house in the village of Canadensis in Monroe County.  The self-trained backwoods survivalist crashed his Jeep near Blooming Grove and is believed to have hiked south southwestward through nearly unspoiled forest to an area not far from where his parents live.

    State police had set themselves up for failure — or at least a frustratingly long search — by taunting Frein in public pronouncements and repeatedly boasting that they were closing in on him.  Lieutenant Colonel George Bivens, the lead state police spokesman, declared at one point that trackers, which include local police and dogs in addition to troopers and number about a thousand officers in all, had confined Frein to a one-square mile area and had him surrounded.

    As the dragnet dragged on, the area increased to five-square miles and then Bivens’ “We know where you are and we’re coming get to you” boasts stopped altogether.  Frein has appeared to be taunting back, hanging an AK-47-style assault rifle from a tree trunk in plain view that is believed to be his, while leaving a trail of butts from Serbian cigarettes and soiled diapers.  A well-trained sniper, you see, wears diapers because of the many hours he sometimes has to wait for his prey without moving.

    The state police also have struggled to stay on message.  

Keep reading below the fold …

    Asked about rumors that Frein’s sister had a relationship with Trooper Douglass, Bivens initially denied they had “an inappropriate relationship,” which ginned up the rumor mill even more.  Bivens later sought to clarify matters by stating they had not had any kind of a relationship and did not even know one another, but the impression lingers that despite Frein’s well-documented hatred of police in general, he did not pick out Douglass at random with plenty of other law-enforcement targets closer to home.  

    Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has appeared at Dickson’s funeral, a state police press conference and other Frein-related news events, but that has failed to resuscitate an re-election campaign that is running on empty because of his slash-and-burn cuts to the state education budget and lingering questions about whether he foot-dragged on the Jerry Sandusky-Penn State sex scandal while attorney general.

    Bivens has said Frein was spotted by trackers at a distance around dusk on the evening of September 22 while being tracked by dogs, and trackers detonated a flash-bang device.  He said a helicopter was overhead but could not follow Frein because of the thick forest canopy, and he was able to slip away.  There were unconfirmed reports of another spotting on Monday.

    The spokesman has explained the failure of apprehend Frein by noting there are numerous caves in the woodlands, trackers are taking their time clearing them because Frein is considered armed and dangerous, while there is concern that because two pipe bombs have been found in the search area and because Frein has experimented with explosives in the past, he could have booby-trapped the area or is capable of another sniper attack.

    “I’m calling on you, Eric, to surrender,” Biven said at a Tuesday afternoon press conference. “We continue to take your supplies and weapons stockpiles . . . We are not going anywhere.”

    There was a certain inevitability that a man accused of killing a cop in cold blood would become a cult hero. There are several Facebook pages in Frein’s honor, including one called “Eric Frein Is God,” and a rap tribute on YouTube.

    Perhaps Frein will have been been apprehended by the time you read this.  Or gunned down while refusing to surrender.  Or has taken the coward’s way out by killing himself.  Let’s hope so.

    But the Pennsylvania State Police historically has been a troubled and scandal-plagued agency long on boastfulness and short on accomplishments,  the most recent scandal enveloping none other than State Police Superintendent Frank Noonan, who sent and received hundreds of sexually explicit photos, videos and messages from his state e-mail account.  In other words, pornography.  Talk about police role models.

    Given the state police’s history, the failure to find Frein comes as no surprise.  Nor does the abysmal coverage of the Pocono Record, which has been gifted an international story right in its front yard but has rolled over and allowed out-of-town media to break the big stories, such as they are, while dutifully kowtowing to the state police and officialdom, taking everything they have said at face value with nary a skeptical question asked, let alone published, as it has become increasing obvious that the massively expensive operation to bring Frein to ground has been unraveling.

    The manhunt could not have come at a worse time for the Poconos.

    The Monroe County economy crapped out long before the rest of the nation, and for a while it led all counties nationwide in home foreclosures per capita.  This is because local bigs, not content to try to build the tourist industry and brand the Poconos as a special place with beautiful woodlands chockablock with trails, waterfalls, creek and rivers, as well as golf courses, ski slopes and family friendly resorts, climbed into bed with rapacious developers and usurious financial institutions after the 9/11 attacks to sell the Poconos as a safe haven from a world gone crazy.

    (Not surprisingly, although Frein fits the definition to a T, the news media is up to it’s usual name-game bull in calling him everything other than what he is — a terror-freaking-ist, because he is an American and doesn’t wear funny clothes and worship a false God.)

    Anyhow, people flocked to the area from the Bronx, Queens and northern New Jersey by the thousands after 9/11, but the gauzy illusion that the Poconos was some sort of paradise soon gave way to a harsh reality of which wise locals were all too aware: There was an apathetic political establishment resistant to reform, roads and bridges in atrocious condition, overtaxed social services, schools that ranged from mediocre to poor, rates well above state county-by-county averages for adult major crime, drunk driving and vehicular fatalities, an increasingly degraded environment, and stratospherically high local tax rates that have been crushing to all but the relatively few affluent residents.

    Many of the homes built for new arrivals were substandard, many of the people who bought them were marginally solvent and easy prey for unscrupulous mortgage companies — and there were no decent jobs.

    Politicians’ post-9/11 promises that a major complex of financial institutions that they dubbed Wall Street West would be built in the Poconos and long-moribund passenger rail service would be restored between the region and New York City were so much hot air.  

    Virtually the only jobs were and remain minimum wage — dishwashers, groundskeepers, chambermaids and burger flippers — while the commute to and from North Jersey and New York City and decent paying jobs is a killer; in fact, it is regularly described as the worst commute in the nation by rating services.  Fickle educators went on a school building binge as a result of the population explosion, but today some schools have been shuttered and teachers furloughed.  A reverse migration has kicked in as many of the same people who were lured by false promises have retreated back to where they had come from — foreclosed on, broke and broken.  

    Meanwhile, the manhunt comes when fall foliage, an attraction for day trippers and other tourists, is kicking in early because of a dry summer.  It promises to be spectacular.  

    Inn keepers and restaurateurs report lousy to nonexistent business.  And don’t mind that huge image of Frein, with a smirking mug and Serbian army hat, his inclusion on the FBI’s Most Wanted List duly noted, on a huge electronic billboard at the Delaware River Toll Bridge on Interstate 80, the eastern and most heavily used portal to the Poconos.

    Then there is the fall hunting season, an annual orgy of wildlife carnage in a gun-crazy region where public schools still close on the first day of gun deer season and tables, lunch counters and bars at pubs, roadhouses and diners usually glow hunter orange from the beginning of deer bow season, which opens on Saturday, followed by seasons for deer and elk, squirrel, rabbit and hare, and various wildfowl that run through to the end of December.  

     State police initially green-lighted hunting in even the deepest woods once the seasons opened, but on Wednesday the state Game Commission had second thoughts and banned hunting in seven townships where the manhunt is ongoing. It is hard to imagine a more incompatible mix: Hunters armed to the teeth filling woodlands teeming with state troopers armed to the teeth.

    * * * * *

     I reveal how the Pennsylvania State Police, aided and abetted by an indifferent criminal-justice establishment, blew a high-profile Poconos murder and botched several other murders in my 2010 book, The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder.  The book is available online in trade paperback and Kindle versions at Amazon and at Barnes & Nobles and other online booksellers.

And now for something a bit different. I’m promoting shaun’s personal memoir/essay regarding the influence of music on his life. What shapes our individual lives is political, as well. And besides I just I just like it. Steven D.

     Neither of my parents were particularly musical, although my father had a lovely singing voice and was a great whistler.  My mother not so much.  I vaguely recall big band music played on a staticy, low-fi AM radio when I was really little, but it wasn’t until we got an FM — a hulking Philco in a Bakelite case — that I became aware of the ability of music to transport me, especially vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, whom my father would sometimes accompany in his post-cocktail hour beatitude when she sang Cole Porter’s “Every Time We Say Goodbye” or “You Is My Woman Now” from Porgy and Bess.

    Many years on, I look back on a life in which music has been a nearly constant companion, and when that life was especially dark, often my only companion.  But until fairly recently, as relatively well read as I am on music, musicians and even a little music theory, I never considered my own role — the role of listener.

    Why does music feel so good to me?   Why do I feel so much?

    Why can I listen to Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” yet again and hear even more distinctly not just the notes but the spaces between the notes in this astonishing series of classical piano riffs?

    Why can I listen to the Allman Brothers segue from “Whipping Post” into the opening cords of “Mountain Jam” on their classic 1971 Fillmore East concert recording yet again, know what’s coming, and the hair on my neck still stands up?  

    Why can I listen to Joni Mitchell singing her anthem “Amelia” yet again and see with even more clarity “six jet planes leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain . . . the hexagram of the heavens, it was the strings of my guitar”?

    Why can I listen to Charlie Parker honking his way through “Body and Soul” yet again and still hear something I missed before?  And understand why Bird’s is not just another rendition of a lovely jazz standard, but the very essence of bebop?

    It was time to figure out why.

    YOUR DOPAMINE IS SHOWING

    The fundamentals of that why are fairly well understood.  Listening to emotive music causes the brain to release dopamine, a feel-good chemical involved in addiction (ohmygawd!), which puts music right up there with sex, drugs, gambling and good food.  This, neuroscientists explain in belaboring the obvious, is why music has been such a huge part of human history.

    “You’re following these tunes and anticipating what’s going to come next and whether it’s going to confirm or surprise you, and all of these little cognitive nuances are what’s giving you this amazing pleasure,” explains Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. “The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine.”

    Salimpoor and her colleagues have linked music-induced pleasure with a surge in intense emotional arousal, including changes in heart rate, pulse and breathing rate. Along with these physical changes, she says people often report feelings of shivers or chills, a not uncommon experience for myself, someone who can become gelid upon hearing accordion or jazz violin, as well as roots reggae, because of the minor chords and swinging backbeat that suffuse that genre.  

    (A disclaimer: While I can get all gooey over accordion, about a half an hour of polka music a year is plenty for me, while I can never get enough jazz violin, whether it is Joe Venuti or Jean-Luc Ponty, or roots reggae, whether it is the inestimable Bob Marley and his Wailers or other roots trailblazers like U-Roy and King Tubby.)

    Just anticipating those opening notes of “Mountain Jam” can get the old dopamine flowing.

    MUSIC AND THE MOMENT

    If you feel somewhat underwhelmed over the neuroscientific explanation for that why, join the club.  Reading several books on listening and music in general didn’t do it either; most were so dense you could stand a tuning fork in them.

    Then I stumbled on How Music Works by David Byrne.  Yes, that David Byrne.  The founding spirit of the new wave band Talking Heads, he of collaborations with Brian Eno and more recently with the singer St. Vincent, shovels aside the claptrap, writing:

    “You can’t touch music — it exists only at the moment it is being apprehended — and yet it can profoundly alter how we view the world and our place in it.  Music can get us through difficult patches in our lives by changing not only how we feel about ourselves, but also how we feel about everything outside ourselves.  It’s powerful stuff.”

    THE SNOB IS OUTTED

    As noted, I had grown up listening to standards — that good old American Songbook — as sung by Ella and others, and as a youngster would lie in bed on too-hot-to-sleep summer nights singing or humming “Peg O My Heart,” “Shine On Harvest Moon,” and “Stardust” in particular.  But as my musical tastes grew more sophisticated (or so I assumed in a decidedly snobbish way), I abandoned standards because they were old fashioned.  Corny.  Uncool.

    Apparently like a goodly number of people, including Byrne, I was roped back in by Willie Nelson’s 1978 cover of “Stardust” and his album of standards by the same name.  I had adored Nelson for years and once smoked a joint with him in Austin, but what (additionally) blew me away about his take on “Stardust” was truly understanding for the first time how a gifted artist can give a song their own unique interpretation.  This, in turn, taught me a lesson: Great music, and in particular great music like Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust,” which has perhaps the sweetest melody ever written, becomes even greater in the hands of a master like Nelson.  

    (The same can be said of many other songs, including to name a very few, Suzanne Vega covering the Grateful Dead’s “China Doll,” Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop covering Cole Porter’s “Well Did You Evah,” and perhaps the greatest example to my ears, Jimi Hendrix covering Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.”)

    While I restrained myself from calling out “Play Stardust!  Play Stardust!” when I saw Nelson and his band open for the Grateful Dead a couple of times in subsequent years, I silently thanked him for outting me as a musical snob.

(Cont. below the fold)

    MISSING THE BEAT

    It was a lovely summer evening, stars flowed over our heads like a celestial river, and the sounds of Ahmad Jamal’s Blue Moon album wafted through the windows out onto the deck behind the mountain retreat.  We had been joined by our friend Bud Nealy.

    Most of us are lucky to be pretty good at one thing.  Bud has been very good at three: As a photographer, a maker of knives and as jazz drummer who has played with some of the greats.  “Who’s that?” he asked, his drummer’s radar locking onto the complex rhythms on Blue Moon, rhythms which were underscored by a drummer and two percussionists.

    “Jamal’s so damned rhythmic, it’s how he see’s it,” Bud said, noting that like many great musicians, Jamal and his ensemble were playing with the beat.  Which is to say before, after and pretty much everywhere except on the beat.  Like the great band leaders, Jamal understood how to direct his ensemble, speeding it up or slowing it down.  The result was that it really swung.

    (Great singers do the same thing with the beat.  Like Willie Nelson.)

    Byrne cites an experiment performed by a neuroloscientist who also happens to be a musician.  This guy had a classical pianist play a Chopin piece on a Diskclavier, a kind of electromechanical player piano.  The piano “memorized” the keystrokes and could play them back.  The scientist then dialed back the pianist’s expressiveness until every note exactly hit the beat.

    “No surprise, this came across as drained of emotion, though it was technically more accurate,” Byrne writes.  “Musicians sort of knew this already — that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square . . . “

    THANKS FOR THE MEMOREX

    The advent of recorded sound and quantum leaps in sound technology since then have left the notion that music could only be appreciated in the moment in the scrap heap along with the typewriter and buggy whip.  I also believe this technology has compelled musicians to play better, sometimes much better.

    The Grateful Dead were unusual in permitting taping of their performances; in fact, an area in the audience near the soundboard would be roped off just for tapers with their sophisticated portable decks and shotgun mikes on booms, so there were people already listening to a replay of a concert in the parking lot after shows.  Today hundreds of shows are available as MP3 downloads, among other formats, and there are commercially-released DVDs of pristine soundboard recordings.

    Having a state-of-the-art recording of a given concert doesn’t cheapen the experience. If there is a drawback, it is that the audience, which was such an integral part of the Grateful Dead experience, is a distant whisper on a soundboard DVD, which is why I prefer a recording by one of those tapers out amongst the writhing, tie-dyed masses.  This is because it is so atmospheric, although technically inferior and in places downright murky.

    Meanwhile, the only thing I like about MP3s is the convenience of being able to download a song or an entire album.

    I’m with Byrne when he writes: “[MP3s] may be the most convenient medium so far, but I can’t help thinking the psychoacoustic trickery used to develop them . . . is a continuation of this trend in which we are seduced by convenience.  It’s music in pill form, it delivers vitamins, it does the job, but something is missing.”

    HAPPY SAD

    A while back, I put together a baker’s dozen list of my favorite musical compositions.  I guess it was a slow day.  I hadn’t looked at the list since I assembled it, but was not surprised that of the 13 compositions, only three were arguably “happy,” while the other 10 could be called either “sad” or “pensive.”

    No surprise because sad songs make me happy.

    Why?  Because sad music has a counterintuitive appeal for listeners, according to researchers.  It allows us to experience indirectly — I daresay to feel — the emotions expressed in the lyrics.  Not surprisingly, to me anyway, the melodies are usually in a minor key.  And while the sadness may not mirror the listener’s own experiences (although “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” is on my list and I did, in a sense, leave my heart there when I moved back East many years ago), it does trigger the release of that good-old dopamine.

    IN A JAM

    Let me wrap up my yammering by noting that if given a choice, I prefer an extended song over a short one.  Take the blues classic “Who Do You Love?” I adore the original, Bo Diddley’s hoodoo-rich 2 minute-17 second 1957 single, but Quicksilver Messenger Service’s 25-minute extended jam on their 1969 Happy Trails album takes the cake.

    Why?  Because I prefer instrumental prowess over vocalizing, even as great as Bob Diddley’s lyrics.

    Besides which, Quicksilver’s performance, which was recorded live, preserves the lyrics and rhythm, although the band stretches both, creating an interactive and deeply psychic motif around guitarist John Cipollina’s arpeggios.

    It once frustrated me that groups like Steely Dan and The Band never jammed.  (I got over it.)  The closest The Band came was the coda on “It Makes No Difference” from The Last Waltz.  Can you imagine what an extended version of that tearjerker would be like in the hands of these brilliant instrumentalists?

    Cipollina, by the way, is one of those musicians whose style is so distinctive that you can ID him after only a note or two.   Just like Charlie Parker.

    Legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke hated making records because he felt they were too limiting.  “For a musician with a lot to say,” he liked to say, “it was like telling Dostoevsky to do the Brothers Karamazov as a short story.”

Promoted by Steven D

& Other Musings On The Autumnal Equinox

    The eve of the first day of autumn at the mountain retreat began with a stroll to the road and our mailbox under a sunlit canopy of leaves just beginning to turn to the sublime reds, oranges, yellows and browns of the season.  The mailbox disgorged a phone bill, the new issue of Vanity Fair (“Hell in the Ebola Hot Zone!”), several advertising circulars and some dragon smoke.  Alas, as I walked back to the house, my mind was not on the foliage, although I did pause long enough to notice that the maples are likely to be especially brilliant in the coming weeks.  Instead, I pondered what a mess the world seems to have become.

    Yes, there’s always some stickiness or other going on somewhere or another, hemorrhagic African viruses included, but in the words of Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, a Great Unraveling is underway, a mash-up of tragedies representative of the devolution of the world order, chief among them — until the next outrage comes big footing in — the beheading of two journalists and an aid worker murdered by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and America’s resultant return to war.

    I do not necessarily disagree with Cohen, but it is a law of nature that shite rolls downhill and a law of our times that at the bottom of the hill sits the White House and Barack Obama, who is either doing the best he can to lead a planet being especially unruly, or is a Hamlet-esque procrastinator, or if you are one of the too many people taking the especially uncharitable right-wingnut view, responsible for the whole bloody mess.  An Obamalypse is at hand, they claim.  A clever turn of phrase, which unfortunately has, if not the ring of truth, a wee tinkle of it.

    In my view, bad stuff is always happening, it’s just that a lot more bad stuff is happening on Obama’s shift, but it has been a terrific opportunity for the right-wingnut media to trot out Fall of the Roman Empire analogies even if such analogies are factually bereft, and most ridiculous of all, accusations from the equally reprehensible hard left that Obama is returning us to the outrages of the Bush-Cheney era.

    * * * * *

(cont. below the fold)

    Word is that the coming winter will be severe, which would make two in a row and two too many. The evidence for this foreboding isn’t exactly scientific.  After all, no one would compare the Old Farmer’s Almanac with the National Weather Service, although come to think about it, the Weather Service does seem to get it wrong an awful lot.  (Blame Obama.)

    My own view is that the winter to come will be pretty much normal, and I base that prognostication on perhaps the most reliable year in-year out predictors: The hummingbirds who migrate each spring to the mountain retreat and return to tropical climes in the fall.  They know what kind of weather is in the offing, and based on their departure date this year — that day when their tiny tummies are filled to bursting with flower nectar and sugar water from our feeders — the winter will be nothing to sweat.

    * * * * *

    The big story hereabouts is not the fate of the Western World or the possible severity of the winter, but the assassination of a Pennsylvania state trooper and wounding of another trooper by a 31-year-old gun nut survivalist coward whose idea of a good time is dressing like a Serbian soldier.

    The young man, armed with an AK-47 and other deadly weapons, remains inconveniently at large somewhere in the extensive woodlands hereabouts some nine days after picking off the troopers under the cover of darkness as they changed shifts at a state police barracks.  This has pretty much brought the region to a halt and is raising heck with the tourist business, forcing the closure of schools and incurring the harsh glare of the national media, which has belabored the obvious in declaring that the area where the coward lives “has seen better days.”  (Blame Obama.)

    The news media is up to it’s usual name game bull in calling the guy everything other than what he is — a terror-freaking-ist, because he is an American and doesn’t wear funny clothes and worship a false God.  That noted, I have a modest suggestion for how to end this drama appropriate to the violence that has come to characterize American society: Deputize people who own AK-47s and other assault weapons, of which there are said to be many in the hood, and send them into the woods to track down the coward.  

    * * * * *

    If you’ve read this far, you may still have a brain cell or two stuck on the opening paragraph of these musings and are wondering what the heck dragon smoke is.

    It is just what the name implies — smoke for a dragon; you know, the stuff it blows out of its nostrils to scare off chivalrous knights who are trying to rescue damsels in distress, and stuff like that.  In this case, the dragon is part of the fuzzy troupe accompanying a hard-working ventriloquist who is stopping over at the mountain retreat amidst a nine-month tour that will take him to schools and youth groups in a good many states.  He is bringing much needed laughter to kids and a rare moment for teachers and other grown ups to forget about the mess Obama has made of things.