My mother’s dog, Sister, died this morning. Sister had had a crippling knee condition that had gotten steadily worse. This morning, after repeated trips to the veterinarian, she was unable to take more than four or five steps before falling.

My mother d…

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I was in Sonoma—a town east of Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, California—yesterday afternoon and evening for a talk by Sam Keen put on by the Praxis Peace Institute. The talk itself was a disappointment; while Keen offers the insight that we are very imaginative in love and not very imagin… Read full post »

So it’s my V-day. Four years ago today, I turned vegan. In retrospect, it seems odd that I did not attach any significance to the fact this happens to be Cinco De Mayo or that it, like this year, was a presidential election year. In truth, I did not attach any… Read full post »

It was at a very low point in my life—I’ve had a few of them now—that I caught Bolinas, affectionately known to locals as Bo-Bo, at the end of the time when it was nice. On sunny weekends, college kids would flood Brighton Beach for an all-over tan. I developed a… Read full post »

I went by the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair this afternoon, bought a few books, and stayed for a talk. I was hungry, and I’d bought enough books that they were a drag to lug around, so I didn’t stay long, but I thought I’d pass along some impressions.

First, there… Read full post »

Thinking further about my situation, I’m thinking about a chapter I recently read by Robert Merton.^[1] He highlights a discrepancy between socially approved goals and the available means for achieving those goals. And I’m remembering that as my life fell apart—which might be said to… Read full post »

I’ve been reflecting on a story I told in my blog entry earlier today:

I was on site at Bally’s Park Place on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City (just in case you’re trying to place those names, the Monopoly board game took its place names from Atlantic City) when I heard

… Read full post »

I tried. I really did.

I remember graduating with an Associates degree in Business Data Processing in 1979. I’d been told this would make me employable. And, for a time, it seemed it did.

My first job was for Bally Systems Division, a part of Bally Manufacturing. Bally Manufacturing was best… Read full post »

I’ve had problems finding work for a long time—my problems marketing myself really cannot be reduced to the current financial crisis, though a pattern of increasingly severe recessions certainly has not helped.

Today I’m remembering how I responded to an ad for a warehouse job, only… Read full post »

It’s an issue that won’t go away. Barack Obama, the United States’ first black president, has refused to unequivocally acknowledge the racism that has afflicted his presidency since before he was even elected.

It’s possible to argue that naming racism would not help, that it w… Read full post »

There was something very striking about the vehemence of Alternet senior writer Joshua Holland’s repeated insistence that there was no proof of federal involvement in crackdowns on the Occupy Wall Street movement and the urgency with which he sought to silence Naomi Wolf.^[1]

Wolf had published… Read full post »

Note: This posting originally appeared in my research journal. Technical issues prevented its publication here at that time.

“Those of us who are not part of the ruling class, race, or gender, not a part of the minority which controls our world,†writes Nancy Hartsock (1987/2010) in response to a… Read full post »

Please don’t tell me to call suicide prevention. That is not a tangible solution to my problems.

Please don’t tell me to send out yet thousands more copies of my resume. I’ve done that. Over and over and over again.

Please don’t tell me to post my resume on jobhunting sites.… Read full post »

I haven’t had much to say here recently, mostly because my sense has been that I’ve pretty much already said everything I have to say on current events, in one form or another. It’s possible something will crop up in my research that will fertilize some comment here, but for now,… Read full post »

I’ve been reading Dennis Loo’s Globalization and the Demolition of Society.^[1] It’s a highly worthwhile book, recapping much of the criminality of the Bush and Obama administrations, but explaining why much more than a change of personnel is needed: it is a dysfunctional political a… Read full post »

This essay attempts to offer a path for human survival in a pessimistic scenario, a scenario which there are grounds to believe may come to pass, but which fails to account for as yet unseen emergent properties in a highly complex situation. This essay upholds and seeks to institute values of… Read full post »

So I was driving home, along one of my usual routes late at night. I was just west of Santa Rosa on Hall Road, just barely in the country, when I hit something and heard what turned out to be the sound of air gushing out of my right rear… Read full post »

In decrying the treatment of indigenous people by Western colonizers, John Bodley (2008) draws a distinction between indigenous society, which he writes has existed for 500,000 years in stable, sustainable societies with low population density, and commercial society, which has existed for about 6,00… Read full post »

I guess I am still recovering from the Saybrook Residential Orientation and Conference, for which I got up at 5:00 am every morning, for a week, to drive down to the Westin Hotel by the San Francisco Airport. As I was/… Read full post »

This (figure 1) is Admiral Janeway. And if you don’t like reading sappy posts about cute animals whose humans think they’re really remarkable, now’s the time to close this browser window.

Admiral Janeway really is a very special cat.… Read full post »

I’m going to leave alone the political implications of trashing the “professional left” as needing to be “drug-tested,”^[1] a political strategy which then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs later apologized for,^[2] but has reappeared in Obama for America (OFA) New… Read full post »

About a month ago, Joan Walsh penned a couple of articles for Salon.com, where she is editor-at-large, in which she tackled President Barack Obama’s relationship with compromise. These articles are worth reading if for no other reason than her examination of the analogy between Obama’s a… Read full post »

It almost went unnoticed in the mainstream media. After all, it was just a homeless African-American at the Civic Center Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Station, shot to death by a BART police officer less than a minute after he stepped off a train.^[1] The New York Times carried… Read full post »

Fallout from the debt ceiling agreement continued as a mainstream consensus emerges that President Barack Obama got rolled by the rabid right wing,^[1] the Dow Jones Industrial Averages fell by 512.76 points Thursday,^[2] and Standard and Poors lowered the U.S. government’s credit rating from AAA… Read full post »

I drive past an old red VW bus parked on the edge of a shopping center parking lot. The side door, facing towards the street is open and a mother watches over her children, across the street from a local market. I pull into the market’s parking lot and as… Read full post »