Cliven Bundy: Occupy DuPont – Please!

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On January 6, the New York Times published a survey of the work of lawyer Rob Billott in uncovering the unrestricted spread of PFOA throughout the global environment. The breaking event in the investigation was a West Virginia cattle rancher who reported that DuPont was dumping a soapy substance into the river upstream of his ranch, and that since the dumping began, the cattle had manifested violent behavior, gross physical ailments and birth defects.

Filing a subpoena to obtain DuPont’s toxicological studies of the substance, Billott discovered that they had knowledge of its side effects for decades, but hid the information because it was “too risky” to replace the substance, which is used in the manufacturer of Teflon. Unfortunately, everyone who has ever used Teflon now has PFOA in their blood stream – as do fish, birds and animals throughout the world.

During the course of the litigation, state regulators refused to intervene to prevent open disposal of PFOA, to order DuPont to provide treatment for the water used by tens of thousands of people, or to order health studies of those exposed. The lawyers representing DuPont eventually rose to high office in the state even as the case evolved, and those agencies arbitrarily raised the safe drinking water level for PFOA in order to protect DuPont from regulation. When the EPA finally completed its analysis, the final drinking water limits were nearly 200 times lower than those adopted by the state.

The frightening thing about this case is that the EPA is only allowed to regulate chemicals for which it has evidence of toxicity. It has only ever banned the use of four chemicals, of more than 60,000 produced by the industry. Now it appears that the industry intentionally hides evidence of toxicity from regulators. We have absolutely no idea what we are being exposed to.

Note that not all companies are bad actors. When Monsanto first began selling PFOA to DuPont, it advised that the material should be incinerated. That DuPont chose to release it to the environment was their choice. That the substance is unusually resistance to degradation was not unknown to them.

DuPont’s response to these revelations is damning: DuPont has also chosen to litigate each personal damage case individually, rather than as a class. At the rate of litigation, almost all of the claimants will be dead when a trial date is set. DuPont is also planning a merger with Dow Chemical, and has taken the unusual step of spinning off their chemistry business as Chemours. This appears suspicious. Given the culture revealed by Billott’s litigation, I wouldn’t be surprised if PFOA was only the tip of the iceberg.

Yoga Limits

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The constraints of my professional life have driven me to yoga twice. Both times, I was suffering from back pain that constrained my ability to sustain my focus while sitting at my desk. I recognized that the problem was tight hamstrings and a weak core, but I channeled my need for exercise into jogging, which didn’t address either condition.

The first practice was held in the meeting room of a spirituality bookstore. The instructor was an Indian lady, and I was the only man that showed up consistently. As I got stronger in the practice, I eventually found myself with thirteen women hitched to my wagon. At the time, I didn’t have the energy to manage the load, so I quit.

I was able to stay away for a few years, and then I discovered the Bikram yoga studio in Agoura Hills. I have to admit that it’s been a struggle for the owners as much as it has been for me. I am a tall string bean with a large chest.

The relative narrowness of my frame results in transmission of stress into the stabilizing muscles in the hips and lower back that are supported by bones that provide limited leverage. This means that muscle balance is absolutely essential not only to achieve postures, but to avoid overuse injuries. As I strive for that balance, I’ve been developing muscle groups that had always taken a free ride in the past, which means that I become exhausted doing postures that are often placed in the “warm up” or “recovery” category.

After four years I’m finally able reliably to stay in the 105 degree room for the full ninety minutes. While the owners were often frustrated by my bailing out in the middle of class, some of the instructors are impressed by my persistence. Several have observed that the practice is not designed for my body type.

The attraction to me is a feature that many find intolerable – the dreary repetition of the practice. The Bikram formula is a series of twenty-six postures that the instructors describe with a rote dialog. Fortunately, the more difficult postures are progressive. This means that we aren’t expected to achieve full expression, and so I have the latitude to focus on trying to figure out how to get my muscles to work together. It’s a process that has caused my to look in the mirror on occasion and burst out in laughter in the middle of class.

This opportunity to focus on my physical self has been critical to my peace of mind over the last four years. While not typical, I have dreams in which people show up seeking help to keep societies and ecosystems glued together. There’s not much I can do except to offer them the sanctuary of my heart as a place of restoration. It’s frustrating and grievous to me.

So I should have intervened early today when the instructor continued reading his story during the srivasanas that punctuate the exercises of the floor series. Although I realized that it was interfering with my ability to focus on aerobic recovery, I was fascinated by the enthusiasm that filled the room, . The diversion provided some relief from the normal thoughts – people struggling with the urge to escape the room.

The story contrasted the experience of two caterpillars. The humble yellow caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘she’) encounters a grey caterpillar spinning a cocoon. While uncertain about the possibility of becoming a butterfly, the yellow caterpillar finally chooses to try, and discovers comfort in the realization that spinning a cocoon is a natural skill.

The second, striped caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘he’) has chosen to climb a pillar of caterpillars, symbolizing the struggle for social success. As he nears the top, stepping on those below, he is finally unable to penetrate the clinging mass, and becomes trapped. He looks out and sees a field littered with caterpillar pillars, and realizes that his struggle is meaningless – with so many pillars, attaining the pinnacle of one signifies nothing.

As he weighs his options, the yellow butterfly arrives to rescue him. She attempts to pull him out of the pillar, but he draws back, and sees this terrible sorrow in her eyes.

It was at that point that I walked out, the class laughing at my explanation. I laid down on the couch in the lobby, crying “Oh, God!”

I live this every day, and it’s not that simple. They don’t just refuse assistance.

They pull off your wings and drive nails through your hands and feet.

One of the students told me, as I was passing him after class on the way out the door, that “I had missed a good story.” Really? I don’t come to yoga for a spiritual fill-up, or for entertainment. That’s supposed to happen at church or the movies. I come to focus on keeping my body strong enough to bear the burdens that I carry. If I can’t focus on that, then I’m going to have to quit again.

Being Atypical

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I met a new friend today who blogs as Anonymously Autistic. She writes honestly and openly about the challenges of adapting to the world of conventional interaction. I have had my own struggles in this regard. After listening to Amythest Schaber’s testimony of a life spent learning to love herself, the following experiences came to mind. I don’t know if they will resonate with those that are autistic, but I offer them in that hope.

When I went through the darkest part of my life, I went through six jobs in eight years. Job six was a bail-out from my scientific peers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It required me to move away from my sons, which was difficult for me.

The interview was not attended by one of the program principals, who was away on travel. He actually drove down Interstate Five to my house (rather than flying) to converse with me. He said something unusual at the time – he said that I have “presence,” comparing me to the great singers that he had worked with as a member of the San Francisco choir. It was the first time anyone had been that direct with me.

The team I had joined worked with a community of information security specialists in the federal government. When the director brought her team out for a program review, we gathered at a winery so that they could meet me (I had not completed my security clearance, and so was not part of the review). When we had been introduced, we collected around the table and my friend, noticing the reactions of the team, suggested “One of the characteristics of autistic people is that they have trouble with personal boundaries.”

Both characterizations surprised the hell out of me. I have since recalled the young lady in college that, after our introduction, held on to my hand and laughed, “You are incredibly dense.” When I protested, she clarified, “No, not stupid, just – DENSE.” In fact, I didn’t encounter somebody that could roil my waters until after I was forty.

Amythest talks about dancing with her hands, and I think that I know what she is talking about. When I was in junior high school, at the dances I would enter into a trance-like state, dancing with an energy that the other students found hilarious if not disturbing. I have since learned to manage that focus. The way that I characterize it, to those that ask me how I dance as well as I do, is that my Higher Self is looking down on me. I actually don’t know what the heck I am doing, and could not possibly reproduce it later. But afterwards people go out of their way to tell me that I am a great dancer.

The point that I am working towards is that when I became aware of how much spiritual energy I was managing (that “density” mentioned by the coed), I spent a couple of years trying to organize it. I began to have burning pains in my sides (often reported by those with shingles) and burning at the base of my skull. When I focused on those side-effects, I realized that I was trying to channel spiritual energy through physical constructs that were simply incapable of handling the load. It was like trying to run 30 Amps of current through a wire rated for 20 Amps. In that instant, I simply shifted the flow out of my brain, and began to work directly with the spiritual structures that generated it.

Amethyst talks about the enormous depth of the love that she feels. My experience causes me to wonder if she isn’t an angel trying to squeeze herself into a representation that people can relate to. Part of that includes forcing her to engage them in the normal way. If she’s in any way like me, however, that’s just not going to work. There’s too much energy in her soul, and it overwhelms her physical apparatus. She needs to find things like ecosystems and cultural moires to channel it into.

The Brain is God

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Human beings can do really amazing things with their minds. For example, play short stop, which means fielding a ball reliably even when it’s never hit the same way twice. The complexity of that skill defies our understanding, so we just sit back and enjoy.

Less complex manifestations of the mind’s magic are treated as curiosities by the neuroscientists. There is, for example, the lady that dialed the time recording one day and was able to tell perfect time forever after. Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat describes twins that could do prime factorization up to eight digit numbers, apparently by “seeing” the collection of numbers. This was a skill that vanished when they were separated. And we have stories of people that could hear radio broadcasts, purportedly through the antenna of their dental fillings.

In attempting to explain these phenomena, the neurophysiologist evokes the breathless complexity of the brain. For example, it has been said that the information encoding of our brains exceeds the number of particles in the universe. Of course, that’s not really terribly impressive, because those particles also have states, so the brain could never capture the state of the universe. But it’s a nice number, very large, which creates a fuzzy assurance that there’s so much to be learned about the brain that we’ll eventually be able to settle all its unexplained manifestations.

Well, we’ve hit a roadblock. Recent analysis indicates strongly that we’ll never be able to simulate the brain. This is really terribly frustrating. Now those of us carrying the labels “schizophrenic” and “delusional” will never be able to pin the scientific materialists to the mat, forcing them to recognize the existence of the soul.

Shot-Sighted

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As a boy that grew up scampering through the sage brush on the hills above the school, when we stopped for a bathroom break on one of our early camping trips, my first thought was to duck under the barbed-wire fence and wander in the woods it protected. I was tame enough to check first with my mother, who drew my attention to the sign:

NO TRESPASSING

Violators will be shot on sight

 “Don’t they have to give you a warning first?”

“That is the warning,” my father observed.

Looking up and down the lonely road, I thought, “But what if their car broke down and they need help?”

It was my first collision with the thought that property ownership trumped human life, and I was a little shaken by the experience.

I don’t see the signs much in my area any more – perhaps because most of the agriculture and ranching has disappeared. But technology may also have something to do with it: with helicopters and radio trackers, it’s probably pretty hard for cattle rustlers to disappear into the wilderness, and aerial crop dusting probably dissuades most casual fruit pickers. The spread of drone aircraft will also make easier to bring thieves to justice without risk of a confrontation.

It was only later that I learned that these signs were also posted frequently by those engaged in illegal activity. The classic image is the moonshine distiller or hillbilly sending off the “revenooer.” But I was confronted by another case when working on a friend’s deck up in Redding one summer. A piercing scream of terror came from the house across the fence – but there was the sign. None of the locals so much as turned a head in concern. I guess it wasn’t the first time.

The Bundy Family now camped out at the Wildlife Refuge in Oregon says that they are “defending their way of life.” One of their number, finding himself in the minority in a discussion of violent confrontation, went out to make a stand in the cold, observing that he had grown up with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face, and he would rather die than spend a single day in jail. On hearing this, I thought of Michael Douglas in Falling Down. A defense industry engineer, laid off and denied visitation rights to his child, trades in weapons in an escalating rampage, finally being gunned down before his daughter.

The Sheriff in Oregon has asked the invaders to leave, observing that they don’t have the right to come in with their guns and tell them how to live. But I wonder if anybody has asked the Bundy’s to consider what would happen if we all chose to act as they did. Will they take cause with the older software developer, defaulting on his mortgage because ageism makes it difficult to find employment?

The scariest exhibition, however, was the Alabama legislator who avowed on national television last night that the reason we have remained a democracy is because our government is afraid to confront its armed citizens. Comparing the M-1 Abrams tank and fighter jets to the hand-held weaponry in the homes of our citizen militias, we might draw a comparison with the armed knights of the middle age and every farmer with a pitchfork. Comparable parity of weaponry in the Middle Ages did not deter tyranny, nor does it do so today.

The Founders designed an institutional system that pitted the three branches of government against each other in a federation of states with their own security services. This institutional competition was designed to prevent any one branch or level of government from being able to impose its will on citizens. That the legislator suffers from a such a deep misunderstanding of how our constitutional system safeguards our liberties is perhaps the most frightening aspect of this situation, particularly because it has often been the Federal Government that has stepped in to ensure the rights of those intimidated by state and local authorities.

Devolving coercive power down to the citizens seems to promise only that those that relish and glorify violence will be able to terrorize those that don’t. We’ve worked long and hard to escape that condition. Why give in to it now?

How Not to Have a Popular Blog

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A new study of Facebook usage confirms that people tend to interact with those that confirm their view of the world.

So, if you try to reconcile their views, are you agreeing with all of them, or disagreeing with all of them? Comparing my success as a blogger as compared to those with “conventional” views, it appears that the tendency is to respond as though I am disagreeing, and perhaps disagreeable as well!

 

Solstice

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In December of 2001, I woke every morning to the pulse of a heart against my mind. After a week, a woman’s voice came gently, “Let me in. Let me in.” More and more persistent each morning, it finally insisted “LET ME IN!”

I surrendered my barriers, feeling as though a wall was falling around me, and had a vision of a woman looking at me over her left shoulder, offering the affirmation:

You are a beautiful man. Do not allow yourself to be destroyed.

In December of 2010, a solstice meditation placed me before a tree in a forest. Its roots spread and I stepped into the earth’s womb. Tokens were promised: something for the mouth, something for the pocket, and something to cradle in the hands. Taking up my gifts, I left, to be told that the fruit in my pocket was a gift from the past and the key in my mouth was strength for the future. But held in the hands was the thing I had to surrender: the woman that I could love.

I turned to the sacred tree, and offered her spirit to it, pleading “Find yourself, and return to me.”

Are you here yet?

Package Deal

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This blogger, noticing the feedthrough in ISIS recruiting videos and Republican campaign advertising, would like to extend an offer to execute a joint marketing campaign for the two parties. The collaboration would ensure maximum impact by coordinating terminology and stock imagery to ensure confirmatory fear-mongering on both sides.

Proceeds will be used to purchase roach hotels for the ultimate survivors of the devastation in Syria.

In related news, elevated blood pressure readings in retirement complexes around the nation suggest that the Party’s rhetoric is a significant threat to the Republican base.

Looking Ahead

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It’s such a beautiful experience, moving through a crowd of gentle people, and then getting hooked on life, stretching out a hand and feeling the pulse of the Amazon, caressing the Andes and then making the leap from Tierra del Fuego to Cape Hope, gently cupping the Congo and pausing before merging into the thrum of Ethiopia. Stuck there, I reached across with the other hand and felt the rainforests of Southeast Asia, roamed over the Russian tundra, and then slowly squeezing inward around the pustule that is the Middle East, soaking it with the healing energy of life and love.

And later she said, hesitantly “It seems that it’s going to get worse.”

“I’m afraid that is what I see, too.”

With the air of one surrendering innocence, she hazarded “But it’s not going to affect people like us.”

I had to look away, trying to find a formulation that did not take air out of the joy she was sharing with me. “Well, in order to bring healing, we have to make a diagnosis. That means getting close enough to feel their pain.”

It’s the last hurrah of selfishness. It knows it, and so figures there’s nothing to lose.

As Matt Maher promises in “Hold Us Together”:

It’s waiting for you knocking at your door
In the moment of truth when your heart hits the floor

And you’re on your knees

And love will hold us together
Make us a shelter to weather the storm
And I’ll be my brother’s keeper
So the whole world will know that we’re not alone

Abuse and Authority

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IB writes really beautifully regarding the heartbreak that comes from the power struggle raging in our families today. When I struggled with this, I ended up with the following definitions:

Power is the ability to make reality conform to our will.

Love is a desire to see its object grow in power. The priorities are health, ability and only then happiness.

Authority is granted by a subject when the ruler’s power is validated by manifestations of love. Jesus ultimately reigns not because he destroys other claimants to power, but because those he loves learn to ignore false claims of authority.

Strength is power over the self. To offer power to someone trapped in anger or fear is self-defeating – they are not in control of themselves, and so we have no idea what the ultimate manifestation of our power will be.

This worked pretty well for my children. At one point, my elder son began to lecture me on these points, as he had forgotten that I had introduced them when he was in elementary school.

insanitybytes22's avatarSee, there's this thing called biology...

I hesitate to write this post simply because the world we live in today has a tendency to define everything as abuse, and when everything is abuse, nothing is anymore.

I spent many years working for our domestic violence sexual assault program so I know what abuse is, but at the same time I was also observing our culture’s plunge into insanity, to where the system began to see abuse everywhere, in everything. I remember someone threw a piece of banana at a spouse and it was deemed 4th degree assault. Kids started threatening to call the cops on their parents, take away my toys, that’s destruction of personal property, ground me, that’s unlawful imprisonment. What started shifting was power and who held it, and authority and who had it.

Our own kids reflected these cultural shifts too, and often hubby and I were left either outright laughing or scratching…

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