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25 July 2008

 

A line from Obama's Berlin speech:

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
-- Aldous Huxley

posted by Lorenzo 9:10 PM

23 July 2008

 

People like Richie Jackson amaze me ... BRAVO!!!

posted by Lorenzo 12:00 PM

16 July 2008

 

Get Ready for the Next BIG SHOCK

Between now and the elections this coming November, I think we can expect some sort of crisis to engulf us on a national level. So just get used to the idea. That way you won't be knocked off your pins when the goons in Washington provoke their next big shock. IMHO, no one has a better handle on this than does Naomi Klein.

posted by Lorenzo 10:44 AM

07 July 2008

 

Doug Stanhope - This Generation Sucks
Now that I've become disenchanted with Obama because I think he's too conservative (i.e., old fashioned), I've been avoiding politics and looking for laughs instead. So I did a Google search for "comedian drug marijuana" and found Doug Stanhope, who has now added years back to my life by making me laugh. In this bit he echos my sentiments about young yuppies even though he must be half my age. So imagine how painfully true this bit is for a dusty old fart like me. (Full Disclosure: I retired from Verizon ... just listen the end :-) .)

posted by Lorenzo 8:12 PM

03 July 2008

 

Deception in Obama's new statement on FISA
(Glenn Greenwald, July 3, 2008)
Barack Obama has issued a new statement on FISA in response to the growing number of his supporters objecting to his position. . . . the statement contains many dubious claims and, in a couple cases, outright misleading statements. Worse, Obama's statement only addressed the objections to the telecom immunity provisions of the bill, while ignoring the objections to the (at least) equally pernicious new warrantless eavesdropping powers the bill authorizes. . . . Obama says he will vote to remove immunity from the bill but knows full well that this effort will fail, and that the final bill will have telecom immunity in it. The bottom line is that he will nonetheless end up voting for this bill with immunity in it even though he previously vowed to support a filibuster of "any bill" that contains retroactive immunity. Put another way, Obama claims he opposes telecom immunity but will vote for a bill that grants it. . . . Whether it's better than the Protect America Act (PAA) is irrelevant. The PAA already expired last February. If the new FISA bill is rejected, we don't revert back to the Protect America Act. We just continue to live under the same FISA law that we've lived under for 30 years (with numerous post-9/11 modernizing amendments). So whether this bill is a mild improvement over the atrocious, expired PAA is not even a coherent reason to support it, let alone a persuasive one. . . . The government already has "the authority to collect the intelligence it needs to protect the American people." That authority is called FISA, which already allows the Government extremely broad authority to spy on any suspected terrorists. The current law results in virtually no denials of any spying requests. So how can Obama -- echoing the Bush administration -- claim a new law is needed to provide "the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people" when the current FISA law already provides that? . . . The new FISA bill that Obama supports vests new categories of warrantless eavesdropping powers in the President, and allows the Government, for the first time, to tap physically into U.S. telecommunications networks inside our country with no individual warrant requirement. To claim that this new bill creates "an independent monitor [to] watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people" is truly misleading, since the new FISA bill actually does the opposite -- it frees the Government from exactly that monitoring in all sorts of broad categories. . . . Why else would Bush and Cheney be so eager to have this bill if it didn't substantially expand the Government's ability to eavesdrop without warrants?

posted by Lorenzo 9:07 PM

28 June 2008

 

Obama: Just another politician
(Michael Crowley, The Observer, June 29, 2008)

[COMMENT by Lorenzo: OK. You were right. It turns out that Obama IS just another politician. I guess that old age really does bring on the senility of hope. How could I have been so stupid as to actually believe that someone could get to where he is in our political system without being "just another politician" who will do anything, say anything, promise anything, and imply anything just to get more power.]

Few things crippled Hillary's campaign like the belief that she would say or do anything to get elected, from supporting the Iraq War to claiming she'd dodged sniper fire at Tuzla. In Obama, Democrats seemed to have found something refreshing: a brave truth-teller unmoored to pollsters such as Mark Penn, someone who had spoken out against Iraq the war and could at last restore integrity and honesty to Washington politics. . . . But since Obama dispatched Clinton, he has seemed rather more attuned to what the people want to hear or perhaps he has simply traded the wants of a liberal audience for those of a more moderate one. Either way, he is treading that reliably time-worn path every nominee follows to the political centre. And the question for Democrats is whether to applaud Obama as a cunning politician who knows how to win or fret that he's given undecided voters reason to think his 'politics of hope' are just politics as usual. . . . First, let us count the repositionings. This past week, Obama expressed surprising disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the death penalty for child rapists (he had previously questioned the rationale of capital punishment). He resisted criticising another high court ruling that affirmed gun owners' rights, even though he had previously seemed to support the gun-control measure at issue. . . . Obama also dropped his once-stern opposition to a Congressional measure, despised on the left, that would legally shield telecommunications companies [ AND the Bush Administration AND Congressional Leaders] that co-operated with extra-legal US government eavesdropping. To some, even the contents of Obama's iPod, recently revealed to Rolling Stone, smacked of political calculation, combining as it did Baby Boomer classics (Stones, Springsteen, Dylan) with highbrow jazz (Coltrane, Miles Davis) mindless top 40 pop (Sheryl Crow) and edgy-but-not-too-edgy hip hop (Jay-Z, Ludacris). Perhaps this playlist should be titled 'Majority Coalition'. . . . It's an unfortunate reality of politics that voters don't want to hear what they need to hear. We want to hear what we want to hear. Obama's recognition of that is a testament that he is, for better or worse, a shrewd, if far from pure, politician. Somewhere Hillary Clinton must be chuckling ruefully.

posted by Lorenzo 7:32 PM

02 April 2008

 

Matt Pallamary as seen on YouTube!
Here is a brief interview with my friend Matt Pallamary whose recent memoir, "Spirit Matters", has just been published.

posted by Lorenzo 9:24 PM

19 March 2008

 

Barack Obama Speech on Race
I've heard some good speeches in my life, Kennedy's innagural, MLK's "I Have a Dream" among them, and I'm adding to that list Barack Obama's direct and honest speech about the racism that still persists in this country. IMHO, if this speech doesn't move you then you still don't quite get what his campaign is all about.

posted by Lorenzo 4:44 PM

14 February 2008

 

Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video

posted by Lorenzo 4:03 PM

28 January 2008

 

Kennedy Family Endorsements of Barack Obama
I have to admit, this Obama rally took me back to my college days when I watched John Kennedy's run for the presidency on a little black and white television in my college dorm's basement. While I don't agree with Obama on all the issues, there is no question but what he brings with him a sense of hope that is long overdue. It has been so long since we have seen a true LEADER in this country that we have almost forgotten what they look like, and to me, Barack Obama is the kind of leader this country so desperately needs at this critical moment in history.

posted by Lorenzo 6:20 PM

19 January 2008

 

Video: Angry About Environmental Destrucion
Everyone over 30 should who sees this video should give some serious thought to what this young man has to say about the current state of our Earthly environment and our responsibility to do something about the mess we humans have made of this planet.

posted by Lorenzo 11:25 AM

10 December 2007

 

What is Myspace, really?
[CLICK the above link to read this entire essay.]

This is the scariest question of all. Myspace is the largest private opt-in database on the planet. We willingly register ourselves, our thoughts, ideas and interests. We upload photos of ourselves, our children and families. We link ourselves to our friends, family, organizations, telling where we live, our relationship status, religion, age, sexual preference, employment, which schools we attended, etc. We feed all of this into the biggest computer networked propaganda machine ever developed all in the name of social networking. A machine owned and operated by friend and supporter of G.W. Bush and his "war on terror" All ready there are numerous reports extreme as people going to jail, because of the contents of their Myspace page? What will be next?

A few good sites dedicated to the Myspace censorship problem.
freemyspace.com

www.civic.moveon.org/pdf/myspace/

Myspace censors Presidential candidate Ron Paul - see informeddissent.com

posted by Lorenzo 4:08 PM

05 December 2007

 

The True Story of Christmas

Modern Christmas traditions are based on ancient mushroom-using shamans. Although most people see Christmas as a Christian holiday, most of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are actually derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of pre-Christian Northern Europe. The sacred mushroom of these people was the red and white amanita muscaria mushroom, also known as "fly agaric." These mushrooms are now commonly seen in books of fairy tales, and are usually associated with magic and fairies. This is because they contain potent hallucinogenic compounds, and were used by ancient peoples for insight and transcendental experiences. Most of the major elements of the modern Christmas celebration, such as Santa Claus, Christmas trees, magical reindeer and the giving of gifts, are originally based upon the traditions surrounding the harvest and consumption of these most sacred mushrooms.

[Click the above link for the complete story.]

posted by Lorenzo 5:38 AM

02 November 2007

 

Towing a floating drydock through the Panama Canal
Below is a short YouTube video of the two transits we made through the Panama Canal in 1969 during the Phase II Scorpion Ops. I was the XO and navigator of the Apache at the time.

posted by Lorenzo 7:29 AM

19 October 2007

 

USS Scorpion (SSN 589) Search Operations - Phase II

The video below is a collection of pictures I took during June and July, 1969. They were taken at the location, in the mid-Atlantic, of the tragic Scorpion loss. I was the executive officer and navigator for the USS Apache (ATF-67), which is the ocean-going tug boat that towed the bathyscaphe USS Trieste (DSV-1), and her mother ship the USS Whitesands (ARD-20) from San Diego to the mid-Atlantic and back during what turned out to be a cruise that lasted over ten months.

posted by Lorenzo 9:57 PM

04 October 2007

 

The US Navy's Longest Ocean Tow
One of my assignments in the Navy included a little 10 month cruise from San Diego to the site of the USS Scorpion's sinking in the mid-Atlantic. I was the executive officer and navigator for the USS Apache, which is the ship that completed this 14,100 nautical mile tow. Here are a few pictures from our time at sea:



Still photos at: apache67.blogspot.com

posted by Lorenzo 2:13 PM

20 July 2007

 

I couldn't have said it better
Go to Iraq and Fight, Mr. President
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC Countdown

Thursday 19 July 2007

posted by Lorenzo 2:56 PM

10 July 2007

 

Michael Moore Tells CNN the Truth
If you haven't already heard about this confrontation you owe it to yourself to watch this video. . . . BTW, if you haven't seen Sicko, that's also something worth your time.

posted by Lorenzo 5:12 PM

02 June 2007

 

U.S. Homeland "Security" is a Farce
I guess with an insane person living in the White House we should expect nothing better than the Keystone Cops guarding our borders, and that is exactly what we've got.

Earlier this year, a low-level U.S. flunky denied a Canadian psychotherapist entry to the states because several decades earlier he had written a paper that stated there were some positive benefits to be gained from the proper use of psychedelic medicines, like LSD. There was no formal hearing on this matter, just a simple Google search and that was it . . . barred forever from entering the U.S. because of a college term paper.

But a person with a fatal, contagious disease whose name and passport number were in the border control computer system was allowed to merrily drive into New York. . . . But what do you expect when the Bush Crime Family is running the show.

posted by Lorenzo 5:41 AM

16 May 2007

 

THE WAR ON CONSCIOUSNESS
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a long essay by Paul Levy. Please click the link above to read the full text.]
We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself. . . . We have the most criminal regime in all of our history wreaking unspeakable horror on the entire planet, while simultaneously waging war on the consciousness of its own citizens - US. . . . The private interests that control our government have an incredible mind-control/propaganda machine at their disposal in the form of the mainstream media, which if not quite fully owned and controlled, is certainly under their “influence” enough to serve their underlying self-serving agenda. George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie – this perfectly describes the corporate owned media of today which is nothing other than the propaganda organ of the state. The corporate world and our government are becoming indistinguishable, which is one of the hallmarks of fascism, or more accurately – corporatism. . . . The corporate-mainstream media "captivates" our attention, capturing a part of our self-reflective, discriminative awareness, thereby restricting the range of our conscious awareness, which is what hypnotism is all about. Once the attention of the masses becomes entranced, the corporate/government media can then "play with" our mind. This unholy trinity of corporate/government/media can create an obsessive fixation on certain superficial events that "seize" the collective psyche. For example, it feeds the masses sensationalized stories such as Anna Nicole Smith ad nauseam so as to divert our attention from the evil that is being done behind the scenes in our name. . . . If only one person believed the propaganda-created consensus version of reality, they’d be thought of as crazy. If a small group of people believed it, they’d be thought of as a cult. When a certain critical mass of people irrationally believe this fictionalized version of reality (in our case, that Bush has been "elected" by the people) to be objectively true, however, they are considered normal. . . . Mass psychology then becomes the order of the day, as our species, animated and inspired by fear – which Bush and his regime are only too happy to cultivate - reverts to the primitive psychology of the herd. A collective amnesia ensues, continually fed by a self-generating web of endless denial, as the manufactured consent is recreated anew every moment. . . . The solution to winning the war on consciousness is for us to RECOGNIZE the nature of the war we are in, which can only happen through the agency of our consciousness. Realizing that the true war we are in is an assault on our own minds is the expansion of consciousness which is itself simultaneously the solution. From a deeper, more expansive perspective, the war on consciousness is itself the very catalyst and instrument for consciousness to awaken to itself. . . . It is our turn to come together so as to render powerless these sick criminals who have been terrorizing us. We can help each other to access our intrinsic heart-centered power and collectively turn the light of truth upon them so that they have no where to hide from their lies and corruption. For "truth", to quote the infamous Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph M. Goebbels, is "the greatest enemy of the state." Bush and the private interests who keep him in power and profit richly from his actions are absolutely terrified of one thing - the truth. As the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." Like pouring water on the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz", when the true light of awareness is shed on what Bush and the real powers behind him are doing, their illegitimate power over us is dis-spelled as the illusion it always was.

posted by Lorenzo 3:13 PM