Tag Archives: psychology

When racism isn’t racism, bigotry isn’t bigotry

Posted on July 21, 2013 by | 8 comments

Hi readers.

Back during the bad old days of my hippy-dopesmokerism, during the throw-rocks-at-cops times, during the turbulence of the Vietnam War, this happened:

I was sitting on the steps of the University of Texas Student Union Building with two other Veterans Against the War, five self-proclaimed Black Panthers, two Viva La Raza types, and a handfull of white girlygirls not wearing bras.  Two of the girlygirls were paramours of a couple of the Panthers.  The subject of racism came up.

Keep in mind that all the Panthers and both Viva La Raza types were white-haters, though they indulged those two white guy among us by ignoring the fact we were white.  Indulged the girlygirls similarly.  And keep in mind the two Hispanics had no love for blacks, nor the blacks, any love for Hispanics.  Only the white girlygirls and we white Vets Against the War had felt no anti-black nor anti-Hispanic rage against the others of the group.

So tirades against whites became noisy, Hispanics and Panthers all in agreement, all making blanket statements proclaiming white bigotry.  Somewhere during that I asked, “You guys are lumping us all together because we’re white.  Isn’t that racism?  Is it different when you do it, as opposed to a white lumping you all together?”

Caused an uproar, general outrage and denial.  Universal even among the girlygirls, and one of the white guys.

“Victims of racism can’t be racist!”  Repeated and re-phrased in numerous ways.  “Only whites can be racists because they have the power!”

Wellllllll.   Uhhhhh.

I suppose it’s probably consoling to a guy getting his ribs caved in by someone standing above him yelling, “You honky bastard!” to know he’s not the victim of bigotry and racism. 

Or my neighbor in Placitas, New Mexico, who, though an old unreconstructed hippy, couldn’t get the Hispanic guy who controlled irrigation water to open her gates to her orchard when her turn came because of his outspoken hatred of Anglos.  “My trees are dying because of what white-hating son of a bitch!”  Her old hippy too-much-sun face reddening.  “There’s nobody but other Hispanics I can appeal to!”

But at least it wasn’t racism.  At least it wasn’t bigotry she was a victim of.  Because bigotry and racism aren’t possible for people who don’t have the power.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Government, Human Behavior, Politics

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ELDERS OF ZION MY ASS!

Posted on July 20, 2013 by | 15 comments

Re: Leanpowers’s comment on my last post:

Modern Israel is a deliberately secular nation.  What is wrong with modern Israel is what is wrong with modern humanity.  It has nothing to do with Jews, nothing to do with Judaism.

Anyone who honestly examines modern Israel and its policies and conduct during the past 65 years, however, will find himself guilt-tripped  by coveys of whining, crying, limp wrist Zionists, find himself accused of being anti-semitic.

BULLSHIT.

First off, every part of the gene pool in the Middle East is semitic.  An anti-semitic would be against all of them.  But anti-Judaism does exist and is an entirely different matter because anti-Judaism is the product of the absolute darkest side of human nature and human history.

Jews and Judaism are an invaluable part of human history and modern humanity.

Zionism, on the other hand, is puke.  The nearest tribal movement in the modern world to NAZIsm re-born, but with Jews wearing the SS insignia.

Zionism is puke.  Fucked power puke with a Masada slant.  The dark underbelly of the ugly side of the nastiest Jews. 

Non-Zionist Jews and Judaism however,  are just like the rest of us on our good days.

Get it?

Old Jules

15 Comments

Posted in 2013

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The Smallpox People Project

Posted on July 18, 2013 by | 4 comments

The Whale and Dolphin People Project got me talking it over with the topcat around here.

http://thewhaleanddolphinpeopleproject.org/

Me:  So, Hydrox, what’s your thinking on this thing of trying to save dolphins and whales by making people of them?

Hydrox:  Does it concern you at all that if dolphins and whales began behaving like humans there wouldn’t be room in the oceans for any other species?

Me:  Hell Hydrox.  You know better than that.  They’d starve.

Hydrox:  Think about it a minute now.  Try the perspective of a domestic cat.  Back earlier than I can recall you cut my chorizos off so’s I wouldn’t be a part of what human beings think of as a cat-over population-problem.  Same with the rest of that litter.  When you protected all those chickens, both back in Y2K, and later here, killing coons, coyotes, skunks, you got an over-population problem.  Meanwhile you humans, during my own feline lifetime, have possibly doubled your population.  Does that tell you anything?

Me:  I think I see where you’re going with this.  What you aren’t taking into account is that we value human life.  We don’t believe in going around cutting the nuts off human beings and clipping the whatchallits of our females.  We rely on disease, war, hunger and other natural causes to keep our population down.

Hydrox:  Does it occur to you that the natural forces aren’t doing the job?  That the reason dolphins and whales need to be made into people so you can’t kill them legally might be going backward into the problem instead of approaching it head-on?  For instance, if you really want to save those whales protecting them from humans by calling them humans would be a lot less likely to actually save them than calling Bubonic, Ebola, Cholera and whatever other disease you can invent ‘people’ and protecting them.  Get rid of all those damned shots and pills and the whales will do fine just being whales. 

Me:  You’re saying …. hmm.  You’re saying make diseases PEOPLE?

Hydrox:  Actually I’m not.  If you change the wording around a bit you’ll see what I’m saying about what’s a disease.  Heck, if you could just find a disease that would kill off heart surgeons and fast food workers you could take care of a huge part of the problems of dolphins and whales through starvation and heart failures.  Whale and dolphin people my ass!  Tell those folks they’re human, convince them of it, and they’ll be beaching themselves into extinction!  Maybe that’s already what’s causing them to beach themselves to death.  Someone told them they’re people and they believed it. 

Me:  Seems to me we’ve got a failure here somewhere, to communicate.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Animals, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Science

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Ever wondered who the Vietcong were?

Posted on July 10, 2013 by | 22 comments
Eddie Adams

Eddie Adams photo 1968

Last night I came across a thrift store book I’d never gotten around to reading.  One of those ‘last resort’ books set aside again and again.  A backup for a time when I would be desperate for anything besides the labels on sardine cans.

But as I thumbed through it I was abruptly captured.   When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman’s Journey from War to Peace, by Le Ly Hayslip.

Here’s a woman born in 1949 in a Vietcong controlled village near Danang where her family’s spent the previous generations fighting, first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again.  As a small child she watches relatives and neighbors in her village raped and slaughtered by French mercenaries.  Then:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ly_Hayslip

“Hayslip was born in Ky La, now Xa Hao Qui, a small town in central Vietnam just south of Da Nang. She was the sixth and youngest child born to farmers. American helicopters landed in her village when she was 12 years old. At the age of 14, she endured torture in a South Vietnamese government prison for “revolutionary sympathies”. After being released, she had fallen under suspicion of being a government spy, and was sentenced to death but instead raped by two Viet Cong soldiers.[2]

“She fled to Saigon, where she and her mother worked as housekeepers for a wealthy Vietnamese family, but this position ended after Hayslip’s affair with her employer and subsequent pregnancy. Hayslip and her mother fled to Da Nang. During this time, Hayslip supported both her mother and an infant son, Hung (whom she would later rename Jimmy), while unmarried and working in the black market, as an occasional drug courier and, once, as a prostitute.

“She worked for a short period of time as a nurse assistant in a Da Nang hospital and began dating Americans. She had several disastrous, heartbreaking affairs before meeting and marrying an American civilian contractor named Ed Munro in 1969. Although he was more than twice her age, she had another son with him, Thomas. The following year Hayslip moved to San Diego, California, to join him, and briefly supported her family as a homemaker. In 1973, he died of emphysema, leaving Le Ly a widow at age 24.

“In 1974 she married Dennis Hayslip. Her second marriage, however, was not a happy one. Dennis was a heavy drinker, clinically depressed and full of rage. Her third and youngest son, Alan, was fathered by Dennis and born on her 26th birthday. The couple filed for divorce in 1982 after Dennis committed domestic violence. Shortly thereafter, he was found dead in a parked van outside a school building. He had established a trust fund, however, that left his wife with some money, and he had insurance that paid off the mortgage of the house.”

So here’s a woman, a real, no-shit Vietcong, tortured by the South Vietnamese, suspected of being a traitor by the Vietcong and sentenced to death, raped and escaped.  Married a US civilian and became a US citizen.

Probably a person couldn’t be more caught-in-between from birth than she was.  Surrounded by hundreds, thousands of other peasants caught in-between.  Trying to dodge the steamrollers of forces they didn’t understand, South Vietnamese and US rifles pointed at them daytimes, Vietcong rifles pointed at them nights.

Yep, this lady is one of the people the guys with Vietnam Veteran caps walking around mining for praise and ‘Thank you,” spent their tours in Vietnam trying to kill.

Damned book ought to be required reading for anyone buying a SUPPORT OUR TROOPS sticker.  Because at a foundation level, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS isn’t about the troops.  It’s about people who are being defined as ‘the enemy’ those troops are going to do everything in their power to ruin the lives of.

People in US government who couldn’t locate the place on the map defining one side as ‘the enemy’ and the other side as ‘friends’.

Old Jules

Grandkid:  Granpaw, what did you do in the Vietnam War?

Old Vet:  I helped Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon kill a lot of people who didn’t need killing, helped destroy a country that didn’t need destroying, helped get a lot of GIs killed and maimed in the process.  And I’m damned proud I did.

Grandkid:  Oh wow!  Thank you Grandpaw!

22 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 2013, America, Book Reviews, Books, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, US Army

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The nightmares of acceptance

Posted on July 7, 2013 by | 22 comments

high water

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Probably I was four years old, must have been 1947, I was a kid with a recurring nightmare.  I was walking along a raised roadway with my mom, my granddad, and my two sisters.  A deep gravel pit reached alongside the road and my feet slipped, I fell and began sliding into the pit screaming for help.  None of them looked around, none paused, they all just kept walking and I kept sliding and screaming until I’d wake.

With all these decades of hindsight I find that dream of a four-year-old amazing.  I had no business knowing that much about people, about life, about my particular gene-pool at that age. 

At the time my mom was between marriages and we were living in Causey, New Mexico in a two-room shack with no running water, an outdoor toilet, maybe no electricity, though we might have had electricity.  I can’t recall.  My granddad’s presence in the area was the only thing to draw us there.  My mom was doing anything, seamstress work, pulling cotton, trying to operate a miniscule variety store in the house to earn a living. 

A deeply troubled young woman with three kids and almost certainly more nightmares of her own to keep her company than anyone purely needs.  Her financial woes gradually improved when she married again, but my thought is her mental processes turned concurrently to lies and manipulation.  Maybe they’d never been otherwise.

Such a woman!  I don’t believe my sisters ever recovered from the experience of having her for a mother, of always being caught in the vice of ‘love your mother’ and that mother being a destructive, master manipulative sociopath.  I believe I did recover, but it’s just me believing it.  I do know that when she died a couple of years back and I heard the news I felt nothing but a sense of deep relief, of peace.

I suppose it was the neighbor got me thinking of this.  He came down bringing a cup of expensive coffee before dusk.  As we sat he told me about some trial in Florida of a man who killed someone who was beating him up in a parking lot.  An angry tale of violence and racial politics and justice.

As he described it to me I remembered something else he’d told me a while back, off-hand and matter-of-fact, about how his father had murdered two, maybe three people he [the neighbor] knew of.  One a whiskey salesman who didn’t get his purchases for the bar he operated delivered.  Beat him to death on the sidewalk in front of his bar.  Another salesman he beat badly might have lived, might have died.  I can’t recall for certain because when I heard the story I was still digesting the first salesman.

The next homicide by his father he was sure of involved a Mexican [or at least a Hispanic] who did farm work.  Evidently screwed up a switch on an irrigation pump.  That night the neighbor says the father took his .22 pistol and went out somewhere.  The next day the Mexican farm worker was found dead on the railroad tracks shot nine times with a .22, then run over by a train.

The jokes around town proclaimed it to be the most elaborate suicide ever.

When he told me this story it didn’t include any value judgements, no overtones, no repudiation, no anger of the sort contained in the story of the trial in Florida.

I suppose an infinite number of monkeys pounding an infinite number of typewriters will indeed eventually write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as someone claimed.  I’ve seen enough families and enough parenting this lifetime to accept that some families and some parenting must fall within the ‘normal’ part of the bell-shaped curve.

But to go a step further and suggest there’s enough ‘normal’ floating around among the father and mother components to celebrate seems to me to be a possible overstatement.  I count myself lucky my nightmares were only my own.  When Bobby Dylan’s song offered to let me be in his dream if I’d let him be in mine I was never tempted.  Still ain’t.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 2013, Adventure, America, Human Behavior, Parents, Relationships

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Don’t take any chances – CC all your emails and posts to the NSA

Posted on June 29, 2013 by | 17 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Got to thinking last night before I slid off to sleep, “What if the NSA ain’t reading my emails and other stuff I write?  What if some get lost in the shuffle, or worse, what if they just aren’t interested enough to read mine?

How damned de-humanizing is THAT?

Sheeze!  Brought me spang awake with a start.  Those bastards might be going flaccid on the job, reading everyone elses’ stuff, but not mine.

I thought about it a while as I scratched niaid behind the ears, got up and took my third [under pressure] cold shower of the day, dried off and scratched Hydrox behind the ears pondering it.

Still felt insecure and de-machoed, so I kicked on the AC unit for a few minutes to knock the edge off the cold sweat I was breaking out in.

Okay.  First crack out of the box, this ain’t something I’m going to sit still for, ain’t going to tolerate it.  Those bastards are going to read my stuff whether they like it or not.  I’m going to put them on the list of CCs for all my emails, and if I can find out who my senator or congressman is, I’ll write them.

See if I can get a congressional committee started to get those guys from NSA in and test them, grill them hard to make sure they aren’t falling down on the job.

Piss me off.

Old Jules

17 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, America, Communication, Government, Human Behavior, Police, Politics, Senior Citizens, Surveillance

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Hungry for heroes? Find a thief, a robber, a killer, or an aristocrat

Posted on June 28, 2013 by | 11 comments

 frank and jesse james

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

I was thinking last night before I dozed off about what TV, movies and fiction have done for us that reality couldn’t.  I concluded it all boils down to mythology and self definition.  An attempt to bring little guys into a larger picture where, in fact, they don’t exist.

Consider this:  Can you name a single person involved in the American Revolution below the rank of Colonel other than Paul Revere?  Anyone between then and the War of 1812? 

From then until the Mexican War you might recall Nat Turner and his brief slave rebellion, or Davy Crockett, Travis, Sam Houston, et al.  The mountain men and the fur traders.  Meriwether Lewis and Clark, the Kit Carsons, Bridgers, the Coulters and Joe Meeks.  The wild and wooly.

And all the names from the lower paygrades you might recall from the Mexican War are there because they were colonels and higher during the Civil War.

Follow it right on through from then until the Wars and whatever else is happening today.  Where the hell are the lower-paygrade heroes?

Younger, Cole & James left to right

Well, the fact is, they were out there at the time.  They were the outlaws, the killers, the people most successful at taking what didn’t belong to them away from the people it belonged to.  The James Gang, the Daltons, Butch and Sundance, Billy the wossname, Kid, the Youngers.  Buffalo Bill, wiping a species off the face of the continent so’s the trains wouldn’t be troubled by them and cow men could use the land for cows.  Masterson, the Earps, Hickok.  Steely-eyed killers.

The US needed the genre fiction, the film industry and television to clean up history.  The country needed common people out there getting massacred by Apache, Lakota, Comanche, people with names.  People below the rank of colonel with names that weren’t John Jacob Astor and weren’t just getting filthy rich and powerful from it all.

So you want the heroes of the west today?  Well, there’s John Wayne.  Henry Fonda.  Steve McQueen.  Jeff Chandler on the generic Indian side.  Burt Lancaster.  Gary Cooper. 

All of whom also, by coincidence, became the heroes of all the other wars the US fought.  Became the common men of history where none existed before.  Winning the west from the people who owned it, whupping the Germans and Japanese, the Vietcong and NVA, the Chinese and North Koreans. 

All those heroes, frequently below the paygrade of colonel, helping us to understand our great heritage.  Because, after all, our heroes define us in ways we’d be too modest to define ourselves.  Most of us ain’t all that successful at taking shit that doesn’t belong to us, individually.

At least those of us who never got higher than the rank of major.  The aristocratic dynasties went to Washington but the heroes all came out of Hollywood.

Old Jules

11 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 2013, America, Government, History, Human Behavior, Military, Native American, Native Americans

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“Six-million focking dollars!”

Posted on June 25, 2013 by | 8 comments

The Dollar Tree store in Kerrville is located in a strip mall across from the high school stadium.  As I drove by on my way into the mall parking lot I noticed the stadium parking lot across the street was almost full of over-sized white grocery-bags.  Hundreds of white bags taller than a man about four feet to a side.  I squinted, but couldn’t fathom what they were.

After I finished in Dollar Tree I crossed the lanes of traffic and pulled into the stadium parking lot for a closer look.  Still couldn’t figure it out.  But a tree-trimming crew was taking a break there in the parking lot, half-dozen Hispanic guys.

I drove over and rolled down the window, guy in charge strolled up.  “What is all that?”

“Six million focking dollars!  Six million focking dollars of MY money!”

“Eh?  You’re saying those bags are full of money?”  Shaking my head.

He laughed.  “They might as well be.”  He pointed to a pile of rolls of Astroturf at the other end of the lot.  “They’re replacing that stuff with the stuff in the bags.  REAL grass is against the law!”  He guffawed and the rest of the crew laughed with him.

  I guess the Kerrville School District must have all the books, computers, teachers, everything else it needs to teach those kids to balance their checkbooks, read, write and cypher.  Got everything it needs to prepare them for life after the nest.

Got $6,000,000 focking dollars lying around to put a new ersatz grass floor on the stadium for the jockstraps to run around on.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2013, America, Education, Government, Human Behavior, Texas

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Can’t go back to Constantanople

Posted on June 20, 2013 by | 5 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Last night Rich called and during the conversation he mentioned the Turks are trying to resolve differences of opinion he doesn’t know what are.  Evidently their methods of persuading one another have drawn some attention.

I swan.  Those Turks are always full of surprises.  One day they’re running around everyone wearing a fez, next day wearing a fez is a criminal offense.  They sit off there during WWI looking as though they’re just some little country getting in the way of progress, end up whipping the socks off the entire British Empire. 

Everything went so bad the history writers for WWI barely allowed Turkey into the history books because of them not getting the socks whipped off them the way they were supposed to.

So, what then?  City goes along being Constantanople 15 centuries or so, centerpoint for crusaders, Byzantine Empire, home of Janisaries [some of the more dedicated empire builders in human history] and the Cold War comes along, suddenly they’re Istanbul and more-or-less European. 

Best just leave the whole matter alone.  As the Four Lads observed in 1953, it’s nobody’s business but the Turks.

5 Comments

Posted in 1950's, 2013, History

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Disambiguating Phobos

Posted on June 19, 2013 by | 6 comments

phobos

If you’re like me you’re probably getting fairly impatient with all this shilly-shallying around that’s been happening with finding out what’s going on with the Mars moon, Phobos.  That thing has been out there making people who know everything feel less good about themselves than they want to almost since it was first discovered.  Forcing them to use terms such as, ‘poorly understood’, ‘not completely understood’, ‘not yet fully understood’, when they write things about the way it behaves.

Problem is the thing refuses to behave itself the way the people who know how objects in orbit ought to behave.  As I recall it’s the fastest moving object in the Solar System, and I mean FAST.  And it isn’t anywhere near as dense as it ought to be.  Just for beginners.

If there’s an ‘artifact’ anywhere in the Solar System, Phobos probably stands a better chance of being it than anything else anyone knows about does.

NASA Eyes ‘Hedgehog’ Invasion of Mars Moon Phobosby Elizabeth Howell, SPACE.com ContributorDate: 19 January 2013 Time: 10:35 AM ET

http://www.space.com/19342-space-hedgehogs-mars-moon-phobos.html

A daring, “Angry Birds”-like NASA mission could bombard a Martian moon with robotic “hedgehog” probes in the next few decades, scientists say.

The space hedgehogs are actually small, spiky, spherical rovers that form part of a novel mission idea called Phobos Surveyor. The rovers would take advantage of the low gravity on the Mars moon Phobos, its sister moon Deimos, or asteroids in the solar system. Engineers have designed the devices to work in concert with a nearby mother ship.  

The hedgehogs would work well in the low gravity of the 16-mile-wide (27 kilometers) Phobos, a force 1,000 times weaker than the gravity on Mars itself, where NASA’s Curiosity and Opportunity rovers currently explore, said researcher Marco Pavone of Stanford University. Gravity on Mars is about one-third that of the Earth.

Okay, fine.  But the fact is, I’d like to see some questions answered about this thing before I get dead, or much more senile than I am already.  I want to know whether that thing is hollow.  And going about it in slow steps, using things that haven’t even been invented yet is going to take a long time. 

We spent all that money during the 1950s and 1960s inventing hydrogen bombs we never got any use out of.  Maybe it’s time to put them to some useful work.  We probably have the technology today to get a hydrogen bomb delivered right there dead center of Phobos within the next couple of years.

Time someone, hopefully the Chinese or the Japanese, launched a hydrogen bomb at phobos to see what happens when it hits.  And whether it shoots back.  Time for some serious disambiguation.

Just saying.

Jules

Edit:  The thing’s obviously not able to defend itself anyway and the chances of it shooting back are almost certainly not all that likely.  Whatever made all those dents in it, the impacts are bound to have generated a lot of heat inside and rattled the eye teeth of the might-have-been computers and defunct Buffalo Bills aiming rockets and pushing buttons of weapons systems.  Knocking a nice hole right in the middle a person could focus a telescope on for a looksee would improve things enough to make it worth the risk and the cost.    Easily enough to make it worth the miniscule risk of it raining down nukes on the Japanese or Chinese launch sites.

6 Comments

Posted in 2013, Adventure, Astronomy, Education, Government, Grants, Human Behavior, Los Alamos, Nature, Science, Senior Citizens

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