Clinton and Cain, both may well be serial womanizers.

Is it hypocritacal to hate one absolutely and love the other unconditionally?

I've seen too much bad behavior from both sexes in the office the last ten years to loathe or love either. Title VII has turned into bad law and a nightmare for administrators. We may want to think a little harder about human rights and the limits of power when enforcing a narrow spectrum of human behaviors. Zero tolerance is usually bad policy.

I really like the topic title, Doug.

It does logically sound hypocritical. I think Len has a point. I think the media puts too much focus on the sensational and completely ignores the essential. Our politicians are human. (It does seem like we've got an overabundance of fucking idiots right now, though.)

If you don't mind Gus, can I use this as my nomination for the Understatement of the Year Award?

We don't have a lot of facts. We have stories about allegations. We are told there were payoffs (settlements). What we don't know is what the actual allegations are. Apparently the system worked to some measure of working and claims were settled. This is a political bag job. I don't condone harassment and I've had to manage it, be subject to it, been accused all of the above so as a result, I became very familiar with Title VII. It is very tough to adjudicate and that makes zero tolerance bad policy because it too often comes down to 'allegations' and no proof. Quid pro quo? Absolutely harassment. Complimenting someone's hair color? What about the cases where someone uses it for political career advantage or extorts a company or defends their own bad behavior when confronted by accusing the accuser? ALL of that really does happen. Zero tolerance makes it possible because it means the Human Resources people have to act as judges in a legal system for which they are not adequately trained or experienced.

We're losing the ability to function as adults and by that I don't mean harassing but as competent functional judges of what is human behavior. We're turning ourselves into our puritan founders and that is war on our nature. Political correctness combined with zero tolerance ain't healthy.

"Billy Jean ain't my lover, she's just a girl who said that I was the one..."

the villain twirling his mustache is easy to spot, the one who is cloaked in good deeds in well camouflaged...jean luc picard

i love that quote (it may not be exact, but...)

having said that...i wrote this last night thinking about a different subject on here, but didn't post it...but having read that opening post, i will go ahead here. it is barely relevant, but a tiny bit of it may fit in somehow

you know when i hear the thing "dirty hippies" i am like, whatever...when i was growing up, my impression of hippies based on those who were around me, was that they were not dirty (no dirtier at times than anyone else might possibly get at times) many were in fact a breath of fresh air as far as i could tell! but anyway, i saw many as creative, interested in the workings of the natural world (and trying to work in harmony with it), and willing to look outside the box, even with a kid like me! :) i only say that because i could be pretty quiet, yet at times quite opinionated! (so i have heard, i never would have guessed!) but they seemed interested (or at least curious) as to where i was coming from...i remember one hippie "chic" saying i was very philosophical for my age, and i am thinking, "note to self, look up philosophical in the dictionary" ...but then i remember a fella from guatemala who worked at the gas station on the corner (and after his first asking me if i knew her, and i say, no) hollering at me for having gone into her house with her because i just shouldn't go into peoples houses i don't know! i remember that! it sort of startled me to see such seriousness in his eyes, but anyway...one time i really did cross the line, assuming that no one who identified themself as a hippie could ever be racist, but i found out i was wrong to make such an assumption...still, so many i really did look up to, which may be why i felt it presumptuous to call myself a hippie...that along with certain mental shackles...dare i say it, due a lot to the confusion from religion. philosophy is one thing, which is-what it is, but religious dogma another...okay enough about that for now, lest i get carried away. yet again, there have been some pretty colourful characters...wow! i may have been about 15 by this time...this fella was like a living breathing rainbow! wanted me to run off with him right then and there take acid and make love on the beach! well i was nowhere near that league of notions! and i replied rather cheekily that i think my mom would be expecting me home for dinner and that it probably wouldn't give us enough time...

but i really liked him and it was always really fun whenever he would see me. but anyway, i always appreciated my fellow human hippies! in general! a lot of the time anyway!
and my fellow human guatemalans :)

and then i wanted to play this song...so here it is
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNCFcDy94xc

it probably would fit better on another thread, sorry if it was way all over the place...carry on!

Appearances, samsara, the delusions of belief grounded in the symbols of appeal and enchantment.

The usual responses to abuse are policy and observation. Zero tolerance and political correctness are a bad brew because some people have handle bar mustaches and twirl them for style and a good deed is still a good deed. In other words, shallow thinking and rapid response are often just as inimical to justice as tolerating abuse. The experienced HR person takes accusations of harassment seriously but uses multiple inteviews to collect data then observations of behavior to determine if in fact abuse is continuous. OTW, a case has to be obvious by nature, eg, the quid pro quo and in that case, response must be immediate and without.... mercy? Sounds a bit like the bad guy in V for Vendetta?

To purify ourselves we've become a surveillance nation, cameras everywhere, billions spent to ensure not a single commission is omitted from the record. Supplying these systems, providing the latest AI to flag behaviors is quite... profitable. Sounds a lot like those judges sending kids to private prisons while accepting contributions from the corporations that operate them.

Asked Arlo what he said on CNN. His response was:

Ok, minus the typo, typical Arlo. Is it informative or just a blow off. Tough to say. My response: "And the choir says Amen." So the moment passes because I can a) ask more questions and irritate him or b) assess it as his usual whimsy when he doesn't want to go into detail and let it go because nothing good comes of pressing the point and eventually the video will show up. It did from Jackie the next day. IOW, don't create more bad emotions because I couldn't decipher a gesture, a symbol, a response. It is what it is. Let it go.

Zero tolerance and political correctness are a bad brew. If the only means to enforce such policies is to be instantly reactive and suspicious to the point of enduring 24 x 7 x 365 surveillance, then maybe we should ask ourselves if living among the fluffy clouds on Sugar Mountain, so sensitive we may as well be the boy in the bubble is preferred to simply growing up and accepting a bit of bad behavior as long as it isn't real abuse.

I watched the video. Arlo did say in the interview that movements like OWS are "something just coming out of the earth". I have a quibble with that: what we learned from studying movements such as the Cinncinatti insurrection in 2001 is that they don't just happen. It takes decades of frequent and high amplitude abuse, force of injustice by authorities over a population to produce a 'sudden behavior'. It isn't a mystical event. It is a predictable cultural and human response to sustained abuse. The trigger can be trivial because like a pachinko machine, once the ball hits the right weight, the interconnected levers let go all at once. He is right about divergent viewpoints coming together. He is right about core groups forming. He is right that this will go forward that 'most of the people are the same". And the scary thing is that is observable, recordable, recorded. It takes cahones to keep on keeping on because it won't just be about 'feeling good'. It will have consequences for people individually and that is the price of doing the right thing.

Beware the easy answer, the zero tolerance policy with the politically correct triggers. A landslide is triggered by a single rock shifting position but it requires the force of millions of tons of misaligned rubble over a long time. While we can't ignore the abuse, we have to be wary of simply moving the rock to another place on the same bluff. To paraphrase Einstein, "we can't use the same thinking to solve the problem that caused the problem."

I like the Guthrie Center because it is a right anwser to a lot of things gone wrong and it operates where things can be made better: on individuals. It is the same people saying the same things to people who are there to hear them. I was happy to be one. Made me feel better and ... thanks.

quick interjection (for clarity in case needed)

i don't think handle bar mustache (along with twirling it for style) equals villain, nor do i think that was the overall point of the statement.

Fair enough. Still, as a quote it reveals a certain binary mode of thinking or a polarized classification. Polarities are not resolved; they are managed. So one can fairly ask if the polarity is organic or imposed.

Somone just posted a video on FB of an Occupy Atlanta protestor speaking in somewhat jumbled sentences. The post was labeled "WTF! Does anybody understand what this is about?" In short, someone cherry picked a person without the usual white english speech patterns and used it to label. It was jumbled but it wasn't hard to understand. Nevertheless, people who have been piling on to object to OWS did not because they actually can't understand what the black lady said, but because they didn't want to. The post was made by a white male and the person who piled on hardest is a local Hispanic female business owner. They are still doing it as I write.

Class and race can be very polarizing. And then there are simply people who don't like other people. Que lastima.

Context, familiarity with content and a willingness to listen without prejudice are critical to understanding particularly when the message crosses cultures, but of these, willingness.

Sensationalism and fear mongering sell well. We do not watch tv news in our home. The rare exception is PBS for BBC and Leher. The others seem to focus on all the bad things. And sell it in teasers, sound bites, and video clips that never tell the whole story. I try to read as much, from as many sources as I can to try to see many pov's of each issue. But I'm also well aware of the fact that I also seek info aligned with my own liberal views.

Slightly off topic...
I think all humans share at some deep and very basic level, a universal oneness. On this level we all all the same. We are connected by more than the fact we are human.

To explain, let me share a dream from last night. I got to sleep in, and in that ten hours I had time to dream. At some dreamy point I found myself at work, with my wife and a co-worker and his wife getting onto some futuristic transporter. It was just a space-age golf cart, with me at the controls. As I rolled up toward an automatic door, the door opened and before I could proceed thru, I noticed a group of people on the other side, and waited for them to come thru. The first one thru, another co-worker, being quite the joker (in real life as well as dreams), bumped into the front of the transporter, and laughingly acted like I had run into him.

We may have been in a foreign land because we were face to face, on the right front side of this transport thing. I was so close to his face and could see him so clearly, focused in full living color. At that point the "regular awake part" of my brain told the dream part of my brain, this is a dream but Rene looked just like "real life", or whatever you call the awake part of life.

That woke me up. I went the bathroom and was thinking about what just happened. I started thinking how I know we all dream, and if we look close enough we can see the reflections of our awake time very clearly. Perfectly clear. In our dreams we all have this built in connection. Hard-wired.

In this way we are all the same. However it is, whatever it is, it means to me we all have inside us the same potential.

Wow! That was pretty profound.

No truer words have been spoken when you said this:

In this way we are all the same. However it is, whatever it is, it means to me we all have inside us the same potential.


Thanks Doug!

Agnes,

I want my working class hero. I have wanted to know, for some time now, will anyone ever step up to clearly explain how we got here and the way forward? That Kevin Drum article from MJ about the loss of counterveiling force, was as close as it gets for me in how we got here. Now I'm still waiting for a glimpse of the way out of this mess.

He showed how unions supported the dems and got much needed laws passed to support all working people, from the '20 to the '70's. As the need for unions faded so did their power (money) and the dems began to look to business for a new money stream. With both parties supported by business, the balance was lost and the laws passed since that time almost always were in favor of business.

What if Father really knew best? Maybe it would be a sweeter world. The Buddha saw it: we all suffer and maybe that unites us. Maybe the way we relate to the sufferings of others by how we relate to our own is how we differ. There is a show on PBS tonight about that question as realized in TV shows.

As long as we get together and explore those differences, we suffer less. It seems to me that is one way of saying what Arlo was saying. In the Big Kahuna, I described a party where people get together and party in front of a picture of a surfer. It looks crazy to the non-partier who walks up on that but as the girl says who asks him to join them, "it doesn't really matter what you're wanting at the party, it's the wanting makes the party go on."

Party on!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDg7IFRyFYI&feature=channel_video_title

Surf on, indeed Len.

Surfers make it look so easy. Surfing is a good analogy for life. Both take practice and balance, the right tools and skill sets for sucess. And a great teacher can make things much easier.

Feeling that connection with the wave, pushing you along. It helps bring you back to a grounded peaceful place. The wave has power, and shares that power with you.

For me, at some point, that place became easy to get to on my bicycle. I love bike riding. Pedaling along can be so relaxing. Tecnical trails that require all your attention (or die) are a very good way to forget about everything else.

I can still remember my very first ride. To say it was memorable is an understatement.
We lived in a house on a hill Pacifica, Ca. There, even the punishment we now call time-out was not so bad. We'd be sent to the corner of the living room where two bay windows offered a view of the Pacific ocean. I can still remember looking out those windows at the blue sky and white capped ocean on sunny, windy days. In case you are wondering, yes, I needed lots of time outs.

Being way up a hill at 490 Brighton road* (google map street view anyone?) brought a new kind of power to my world. My brother and I were very young (4 & 6) when we moved there, we knew enough to want to tap into it in any way we could.

*Crazy side note: recently our youngest daughter told us that her boyfriend's brother, a desinger for Nike in Oregon, was taking a job with Levi in SF. They bought a house in Pacifica. We both said what a small world, what if they bought my childhood home. Well no, but just up the street, right next door to the house of my best friends Sunny and Bertha (my first love).

We did what was natural. We used the power of that hill, like a surfer uses a wave. Waves have great power, hills do to, at only four years old I clearly understood that. As I pushed my sisters (way too big for me) blue Schwinn (girls) bike up to the very top of Brighton road with my brother leading the way, I was full of fear. Fear that was tempered only by the desire to know that power. Well mostly I wanted to learn to ride a bike.

I had grown tired of my little red trike. It was useless anywhere except the flat driveway. I wanted to feel the power that hill held. Today we protect our kids from dangerous things like this with a constant watchful eye and so much safety gear - like helmets, protective pads, gloves, etc. In 1962 parents did not yet seem to see the need for any of this. We were somewhat free to do whatever we wanted, without much oversight after we were out of sight. We had so much freedom then. It was a joyful time and place to be growing up.

Back then, in the Summer of 1962, (before they elevated it) near the bottom of that hill, was highway 1. There was a stop sign at the bottom of the hill at the busy two-lane highway. We knew the route well, as we walked to check out our new school, Sharp Park elementry, that way. (across the street from a beach, long gone since declared an unsafe location)

Brighton rd was a straight shot down that hill to the highway. My brother got a job (or what ever you want to call it) cleaning the gas pumps at the Shell station on the corner of Brighton and highway 1 on Saturdays. Sometimes I would go too, and get a nickle for my help. I gave my brother the nick-name Gassy.

So back at the highest point of Brighton rd, stood a tiny 4 yr old kid, straddling this huge girls Schwinn bike, trying to decide if I would risk death and tap into this power. In hindsight I realize how much smarter it would have been to learn on level ground, but that argument either never occured to me at the time, or was shot down by my big brother. It could be said that smartness has never really played a primary role in my life. I don't remember how I overcame my fear, but I did. Hands on the bars, my feet went up on both pedals and then down the hill I went. So far, so good I'm riding a bike down this hill, loving the feeling. I feel this power now. I'm part of it, it part of me. Ahh yeah.

My brother told me to keep my feet on the pedals so I would not lose control of the bike, which, while being true, was good in theory. But since I was too small for the bike, this became impractical after a very short time. The front of the seat was hitting my back, and making me lean forward. I sensed this caused problems steering as this position put more weight on the front wheel than the back, causing balance/steering issues. True, it was only my first ride. But I felt this imbalance and knew I needed to correct it somehow. I climbed onto the seat, causing my feet to come off the pedals. My back felt better. Smart move my tiny brain told me. Uhh no.

Quickly gaining speed while also losing control of this increasing speed, I knew I needed to get back on the pedals. And my brother was yelling these very instructions to me as we sped faster down the hill. Of course that was not possible, and I was speeding ever faster toward highway 1 without many options to prevent crossing busy highway 1, and the certain death that I was sure would come with it.

Well, seeing your impending death must have some way of prompting the use of previously untapped parts of your brain. I heard my brother instructions that I needed to get my feet back on the pedals to stop, but the pedals were spinning way too fast for me to find a way to re-connect with them at my beginners level of bike riding skills. Nearing the bottom of the hill and highway one, I found crashing against a hedge and picket fence to be a preferable option to crossing the highway and being run over. Thus ended this nightmareish first bicycle ride.

I don't remember how bad I was hurt. I do remember the wonderful feeling of dodging death while learning to ride a bike. And the joy I felt tapping the power of that hill. If only for a moment, before being overcome by the terror of speeding out of control. Over time I became a highly skilled rider. I've crashed hard many times. I'm more careful now that I'm older and a little slower. But it's still a very wonderful feeling being so closely connected to the outside world and all its beauty. To be able to be live so fully, only in that moment.

When we taught our oldest daughter to ride, as she started off on her very first un-aided ride she yelled, "my legs feel like rockets." Now the grandkids are riding too. We are so lucky to live near the American river parkway, with its 30+ mile trail from the confluence with the Sacramento river, to above the dam at Folsom lake. This nature area provides so many people the chance to connect to that power that rises up from the earth.

As the revenue stream that helped support this parkway is slowly drying up the county is saying they may need to close it. I'm sure we will find a way to avoid that.

I hope that same power Arlo spoke about will rise up from the ground around this issue too. There are so many people tuned into it. Its easy to feel it.

As far as the occupy movement it is not as easy for everyone to feel that upswell. But if you do feel it, I hope you find a way to support it.

i don't know if there is any one person who would be able to do that? but i think a lot of people have a pretty good feel and a collection of these discussions with such contributions could be perhaps pushing the process along. (i have actually managed to learn a thing or two!)
that article is a lot for me to digest and i really don't think i know enough about unions to say a whole lot about what you say, but i still think the article was useful,,,but evidently there needs to be some push (as you say) saying ("reminding") stuff like, hey this bank dereg thing seems to be messing a lot of us up! and the stuff about corporation and personhood and the super for profit health care thing...and don't forget about the warren buffet thing! remember him? and whatevr else i might have missed on that list i mentioned earlier on another thread after fumbling and bumbling into such realizations on yet another thread.

that bike riding stuff reminds me a little of some of my own bike riding experiences (sort of?) i really cannot remember my very first bicycle ride...but i don't know...maybe i will get back to that later!