sparrow chat

If there’s one thing you cannot say about Republican presidential nominee John McCain, it’s that he’s a bundle of laughs. Let’s be honest, if this guy ever gave up politics he could don a black suit and make a fortune working at Forest Lawns.

Yet the joke he came out with today was the funniest I’ve heard in a long while.

According to McCain, he was “amazed to learn” that the Iraqi army had attacked the Shia militias in Basra. Prime minister Maliki (says J McC) took the decision and went ahead without informing the Americans!

Now that’s one hell of a punchline, Senator. Or, was it that the Americans just forgot to inform you? Presumably, all those US A10 bombers pounding the militia positions while the Iraqis engaged them, were purely coincidental?

Nice one, Johnny, but next time stick to eulogies. You were never cut out for show business.

More hilarity, this time from South Carolina, where local government officials are introducing $500 fines for beach picnickers who fail to demolish sandcastles before leaving the beach. Apparently, drunken revelers and blind beachcombers are falling over them in the dead of night and injuring themselves. A similar rule will apply to holes dug in the sand.

So once Mom and Pop have sunned themselves in beach chairs for the afternoon, and little Willy and Sarah have designed and constructed their ten room, four-turret, moat-surrounded, super-deluxe penthouse sandcastle, Pop leaps up, shouts, “Time to go home”, and jumps all over it with his size fifteen flip-flops.

Willy and Sarah, mortified, scream their heads off and hate their father for the rest of their lives.

Yep, that’ll work.

Filed under: American humor

Posted under Sparrow Chat

Historians reckon it’s around 2,600 years since the guy we now refer to simply as “the Buddha” sat under his Bodhi tree and refused to budge until he attained Enlightenment. According to legend, it only took him forty-nine days.

The ancient practice of meditation pre-dates the Buddha by at least a couple of thousand years and yet, in the West, its following has been patchy at best, restricted to a minority of individual practitioners. Christian religions recognize the practice, but limit it to a process for gaining personal contact with their exterior god, rather than the inner self.

They’ve yet to realize the inner self and God are one and the same. But, give them time; they’ve only been at it 2008 years. Presumably, the Buddha’s ‘forty-nine days’ was something of a fluke.

Meditation is generally utilized as a means to quiet the thought processes, by focusing on something that requires no thought, such as the breath. It’s long been realized by Buddhists that our thoughts, in particular the continuous process of ‘mind-talk’ that exists in our heads, is nothing more than a load of irrelevant garbage distracting us from the truly important matters of life; the feel of a raindrop landing on one’s cheek; the colors in a butterfly’s wing; the glory of wind sighing through the trees.

Rather than sensing these joys of nature, we concentrate instead on matters such as: “when can I get a burger?”; “is the boss looking at me funny?”; “have I got cancer?”

What thought is passing through your mind right now? Focus on it. Is it positive, or negative? The chances are it’s negative, dragging you down into gloom and despondency. Instead of reaching for the joy so abundant in your life, if you bother to look for it, your thoughts keep you mildly worried, depressed, or just plain bored.

Here’s a little experiment. Take ten seconds out of your day to switch off your thoughts. Close your eyes, visualize a “Pause” button on that tape recorder running in your head, and press it firmly to the “Off” position. For about ten seconds, do nothing but experience your being – your body, your senses; those moments in your life as they pass by, each one the only moment that you are alive. The one before it has gone; it’s dead. The one ahead has not yet happened.

Chances are, in the process you took your finger off the “Pause” button and allowed those random, negative thoughts to take you over once more, but just for a few moments, did you not feel better?

For most people, the answer would be, “Yes.”

With practice, it becomes much easier to turn off those negative thought processes, and for longer periods. All that’s required is time; time to be contemplative – to meditate.

“Ah, but that’s all bullshit!” I hear some of you cry.

No it isn’t, says Professor Mark Williams, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, a pioneer of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) – which primarily consists of meditation.

Professor Williams states, in a BBC report out today:^[1]

“”It teaches a way of looking at problems, observing them clearly but not necessarily trying to fix them or solve them.

“It suggests to people that they begin to see all their thoughts as just thoughts, whether they are positive, negative or neutral.”

The report goes on:

“MBCT is recommended for people who are not currently depressed, but who have had three or more bouts of depression in their lives.

Trials suggest that the course reduces the likelihood of another attack of depression by over 50%.

Professor Williams believes that more research is still needed.

He said: “It is becoming enormously popular quite quickly and in many ways we now need to collect the evidence to check that it really is being effective.”

However, in the meantime, meditation is being taken seriously as a means of tackling difficult and very modern challenges.

Scientists are beginning to investigate how else meditation could be used, particularly for those at risk of suicide and people struggling with the effects of substance abuse”

In America:

“Dr Richard Davidson has been carrying out studies on Buddhist monks for several years.

His personal belief is that “by meditating, you can become happier, you can concentrate more effectively and you can change your brain in ways that support that.”

In one study he observed the brains of a group of office workers before and after they undertook a course of meditation combined with stress reduction techniques.

At the end of the course the participants’ brains seemed to have altered in the way they functioned.

They showed greater activity in the left-hand side – a characteristic which Davidson has previously linked to happiness and enthusiasm.

This idea that meditation could improve the wellbeing of everyone, even those not struggling with mental illness, is something that is exciting researchers.

Professor Williams believes it has huge potential.”

Science, it seems is finally beginning to wake up to the reality that meditation really can make us healthier, happier, and probably wiser.

Not that we all need to take a course in ‘Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy’.

You could just go sit under a Bodhi tree for forty-nine days.

^{[1] ” Scientists probe meditation secrets”, BBC News, March 31st, 2008}

Filed under: Thought less

Posted under Sparrow Chat

Iraq descends further into chaos today as a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad, due to end at sunrise Sunday, is extended indefinitely.

The flaunted assault by the Iraqi military on Sections of al Sadr’s Mahdi army in Basra has reached a stalemate. Despite the US media’s broadcasting of erroneous statements to its citizens, suggesting the Iraqis were engaging the Basra militias without assistance from the US military, American warplanes have been bombing and strafing the city, and the BBC reports tonight that British troops have now entered the battle.

Once again, this abominable occupation creates havoc for innocent Iraqi civilians desperately attempting to reconstruct their lives in the face of never-ending terror, suffering, and death; an innocent nation torn asunder by the ravages of an illegal invasion and occupation that has lasted five, desperate, years and holds no hope of returning to normality for decades to come.

America is determined to remain in Iraq. Of that, there can be no doubt. So long as the country is occupied, insurgents will retaliate against the oppressors.

The plan designed by those who laid their signatures to the US Project for the New American Century, a plan to take control in the Middle East, secure oil pipelines, and become the dominant force in the area, has proved a dismal failure, resulting in the loss, so far, of 4,000 Americans and an undefined, but enormously high, number of deaths among Iraqi civilians. That figure may be vague at best, but it has produced one statistic that has been accurately calculated: the number of orphans in Iraq now tops five million.

America, under George W Bush, has likely underscored its place in history alongside the atrocities of Nazi Germany and those of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, by its illegal occupation of a sovereign nation innocent of any act of aggression.

The damage is done, yet continues to be done. Removal of US troops from Iraq would not mark the end of violence in that country. It would merely mark the beginning of the end. Some degree of civil war is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. So long as a US presence is allowed to remain, the resulting suppression will lead to continuing low level violence ad infinitum.

Get out, America! As in Vietnam, where you interfered and got burned, so Iraqis are proving that, despite culture differences, humans beings everywhere have one thing in common: an aversion to foreigners marching in and taking over their lands.

NOTE: this, posted yesterday on an Iraqi website:^[1]

“The main Sadrist spokesman al-Obeidi has said that the GZG government “have closed the doors to dialogue for a peaceful resolution of the crisis in Basrah.” He said that al Sadr has issued a statement saying that Bush’s statements on the crisis provide legitimate legal grounds for the Mahdi army and the Sadrist current to transform their role from calling for peaceful mediation of the crisis to the defender of the rights of the people and to protect innocent civilians.
Sadrists also confirmed a delegation of the Central Bureau of the Sadrist office in Najaf visited Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani and discussed with him developments in the security situation in Basra. Sistani expressed displeasure of the deteriorating performance of the government in the areas of security and economy.”

It seems al Sadr’s six month ceasefire may be over.

^{[1] Gorilla’s Guides, March 29th, 2008}

Filed under: Bush’s war

Posted under Sparrow Chat

It’s good to be back online. My thanks to those of you who emailed your sympathy at this time of blog “cold turkey”. Unfortunately, as both emails and blog are routed through the same server, they were only received this morning, just as Sparrow Chat came back online. Consequently, there hasn’t yet been time to answer them all.

It really is good to be back.

Posted under Sparrow Chat

What exactly were the ancient Egyptians envisaging when they constructed the Great Pyramids of Giza and Khufu? Historians and archaeologists have pondered that question for centuries. Undoubtedly, they were burial chambers of the kings, but why a pyramid, rather than a rectangle or square?

In modern society, the pyramid-shape turns up all over the place. In essence, it represents a structure designed to funnel matter, in one form or another, from the bottom to the top. Take pyramid selling as an example: this idea (illegal in most western nations, but still prevalent under various guises) relies on the toil of numerous workers (the pyramid base) each selling relatively small amounts of a product, but in such vast numbers that overall profits make the few (at the pyramid’s peak) very wealthy indeed.

Their are a number of super-large companies operating worldwide still employing the pyramid sales technique, but managing to circumvent national laws by various, corrupt, means.

It’s hardly surprising this is the case, when one considers that most societies on the planet operate through a pyramid-style process.

Is it possible the pyramids of ancient Egypt were effigies to the success, at least so far as wealthy Egyptians were concerned, of the society they created?

The pyramids were built by vast numbers of poor, non-union, laborers, all working for a pittance to the greater glory of their Pharaoh – at least, so we are told.

No doubt as they toiled, more than one was heard to mutter, “Why can’t ‘e just ‘ave a bleedin’ normal ‘eadstone like everyone else?”

Since the days of the Egyptian empire, societies have emulated the Egyptian model. Take modern day America, for instance. Here we have a perfect example of the pyramid-sales technique utilized on a national scale to create a capitalist society with a relatively small, wealthy elite at its peak, sucking up wealth and power from the ever-expanding base beneath.

In fairness, there was a time when the very bottom of the US pyramid contracted considerably, as the numbers of poor diminished due to a strong economic base. The model fails to allow for a continuing contraction, however, due to the ever-increasing demand for greater wealth from those at the very top.

Imagine for a moment, America as an economic pyramid. At its peak are the wealthiest of society. As we progress downwards the sides expand out. It is here we find the CEO’s, senior managers, and others of their ilk. Nearer to the bottom are the American workers, bustling away to make profits that are immediately sucked away, up into those esoteric regions at the very peak.

At the base of the pyramid are the dispossessed, the poverty-stricken, the down-and-outs of society. These unfortunates make no contribution to the wealth at the pinnacle.

The benefit of the pyramid system, the flow of profit and wealth, is mainly upward. More and more is squeezed into an ever decreasing space at the top. In times of plenty that space expands downwards, bestowing further benefits on those levels close beneath. During periods of recession it contracts, leaving many in the lower eschalons worse off.

There is also a downwards flow of wealth, though much more of a trickle than the torrent raging ever upwards. It seeps down to the lower levels, siphoned off on its way as salaries, perks, and tax avoidances, until it finally becomes a stagnant puddle of so-called ‘benefits’ for those few at the very bottom eligible to receive them.

This, then, is the model for societies throughout the world. It is the “freedom and democracy” much expounded by George W Bush and his cohorts as they slaughter their way across the Middle East.

When viewed from the pyramid perspective, the concept of taming other nations, commandeering their valuable commodities, and sucking more workers into a system designed solely to create wealth for a minute few, suddenly becomes highly visible.

Is it perhaps time we moved on from the pyramid-system of society, and allowed those ancient Egyptian Pharaohs to rest in peace?

Filed under: Pharaoh’s curse

Posted under Sparrow Chat

We’ve all heard on the news about the long wait for disability payments, as experienced by many claimants.

Hell, yes, it’s bad – but I’m not disabled, so I’m not bothered. It can’t happen to me.

But it can happen, even to the most selfish of individuals, like me. The plain fact is, anyone of us can become disabled at any time, through sickness or accident. Then we may suffer like Robert Veneziali of New York state.

From the Times Herald-Record, March 28th, 2008:

“With some high-profile intervention, electrician Robert Veneziali is about to get the disability benefits he deserves.

Veneziali hated going on disability. He’s worked all his life and he’s proud of it. But the type of multiple sclerosis he suffers from is unpredictable. One day he was fine, the next, he had hardly enough strength to call for help.

So when he called for help to the agency designed to provide working people with exactly that, he was devastated when that agency decided he wasn’t sick enough to qualify for benefits.

Try back in another 18 months, they said. But he had a wife and three kids to support.

Veneziali’s mother, Elaine, who had seen her son consumed by the disease, was having none of it. Last January, she called Rep. John Hall, D-Dover Plains, who had seen a report alleging that a bureaucratic “culture of denial” permeated some Social Security Administration offices.

Hall paid a well-publicized visit to Elaine Veniziali’s home in February. He called her son’s treatment “unconscionable.” He threatened a federal inquiry.

Wednesday, Veneziali learned his appeal had been approved for disability benefits by an SSA review board. The benefits are retroactive to August, when he first applied for them. He’ll get about $1,300 a month, plus about $1,200 for the kids.

The payment of roughly $25,000 will allow Veneziali to do what he couldn’t do in December: give his kids a Christmas.

“It’s going to be a belated Christmas, but it’s gonna be a good one,” he said.”

Veneziali eventually got his entitlement, but how many disabled people are able to contact their political representative and achieve that sort of result? How many congressmen would be prepared to take the trouble on behalf of just one individual?

Would yours?

Suppose you were too sick to make the effort and had no-one to fight on your behalf? You could end up like LeeAnn Janke from Minnesota who waited two years for a disability check from Social Security:

From KaalTV, March 27th, 2008:

“One woman, barely able to dress herself, had to wait two years for just one disability check. Social Security says the reason is because its offices are backed up.

Earlier this month, Senator Norm Coleman added his name to the list of U.S. Senators pushing for a 2009 appropriations bill with more necessary money going to Social Security disability offices.

Fifty-four-year-old LeeAnn Janke finds it difficult to do daily tasks anymore.

“I have fibromyalgia, I have osteoarthritis, I have problems with my neck,” she says.

While waiting two years for money from the government, she had to rely on her husband’s paycheck and insurance for living expenses and the numerous medical bills.

“Each bill is like $2,000 or $3,000 at a time.”

This year, there were about 4,000 new disability cases in Minnesota.

But the one office in Minneapolis that deals with these cases is so backed up, more than 10,000 cases, like Janke’s, are pending……..

“People are dying while waiting to get a decision on their disability benefits and it’s just a horrible situation,” says Dan Allsup of Allsup Social Security Disability Representation.”

Some would consider LeeAnn Janke to be fortunate. At least she had her husband’s pay check to fall back on. Rick Shaglia didn’t. His only income was his disability check:

From Melanie Payne, News-Press, March 27th, 2008 (reproduced almost in its entirety):

“Rick Shagla can’t walk. The stiff fingers of his hands are splayed at odd angles, making his handwriting illegible.

He’s lost sensation in his extremities. If he can’t see his hands and feet, he loses where they are. Unless he’s paying attention, he could place his hand on the burner of a hot stove and he wouldn’t know it.

Shagla was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome in 1987. He then had testicular cancer. He continued to develop neuro-muscular problems and needed a wheelchair.

In 2002, the Social Security Administration deemed Shagla permanently disabled, granting him full benefits and Medicare eligibility. By 2008, he was receiving $2,487 a month.

Then, in February, Shagla got a letter saying that his Social Security Disability payments had been miscalculated over the past six years. He’d been overpaid, on average, by $1,200 a month.

Not only would his payments be cut to $1,100 a month, he also owed the agency $83,252.

Sometimes when people call me, I can hear so much panic in their voices that it scares me. Shagla’s call was one of those.

This was a desperate man.

He’d been evicted. He couldn’t pay his Medicare supplemental health insurance.

“They just ripped my life apart,” the 47-year-old man said as he sat surrounded by moving boxes. “I’ll end up going to a nursing home.”

I called Social Security in Atlanta and spoke with Patti Patterson. After a week or so, she called me back.

“Good news,” Patterson said. “It was a mistake.”

Patterson said Shagla would get his money for March in a couple of weeks, and in April, he’d be reinstated to his previous level of benefits.

“This is rare,” Patterson said of the error made in Shagla’s benefit change. “We have told him we’re sorry.”

I got lost in Patterson’s explanation of how the mistake was made. But that’s OK. I don’t need to know how it happened.

I did wonder, however, how often it happens and how long it takes to fix if you don’t have The News-Press calling Social Security for a statement?

The answer: All the time and forever.”

Mistakes do occur all the time. Is it because the SSA staff are incompetent? Usually, no, but they are grossly overworked and stressed out. The reason is not complex, as some higher up the SSA management ladder would have us believe. It’s very, very, simple. In fact, there are two equally simple reasons that, in combination, explain why the system is broken. The first is a squeeze by Congress, over many years, on funding for the Administration.

“Get by on less”, has been the call from those who never, ever, have to get by on less, and willingly sanction billions for foreign wars, but never for the benefit of their own people.

The second reason stems from abominable leadership and management practices, from the top of the Social Security management ladder way down to the very bottom – those in charge of field offices.

While there are obviously some competent managers at field level, many are just sitting it out for their retirement (pensions are calculated on salary for the last three years of employment) with little regard for staff welfare, or the efficient running of their offices.

Further up the ladder, “statistics” is the name of the game. Never mind the humane aspect, all that matters is producing figures to make the next-level senior manager look good. Consequently, over-stretched field-office staff are forced to concentrate on meaningless paperwork while benefit claims sit idly by, untouched.

Rather than take on more staff, senior management now employ an ‘overtime regime’. Stressed out workers, dealing daily with angry members of the public who have no-one else on whom to vent their frustrations, once had the luxury of a weekend off to unwind. Now, they are expected to work ten hour days and turn in on Saturdays, not necessarily to catch up on benefit claims, but to bolster the statistics necessary to make senior management look good to those at the top, who determine SSA’s efficiency entirely by its statistics.

To add insult to injury, top grade workers with many years of vital experience in handling complex claims, are being forced to spend much of their valuable time on menial duties, once the job of minor clerks and receptionists no longer employed, and not being replaced, by SSA.

$50-an-hour experts doing the work of $12-an-hour employees!

Where, oh where, has the sanity gone?

Above, I published an excerpt from a Melanie Payne article in News-Press. I noted the article was “reproduced almost in its entirety”. I left out the ending. Here it is:

“According to Douglas Mohney, an attorney with the Avard Law Offices in Cape Coral, Social Security is, “an incredibly complex system and tens of thousands of people a year get hung up by not quite knowing the rules since no one gives a complete explanation.”

People receiving benefits can suddenly stop getting them…….and it takes years to have them reinstated.

Other people trying to qualify for benefits are repeatedly denied and have to wait for a hearing before an administrative law judge, Mohney said.

Getting a hearing can take years. One of Mohney’s clients applied for Social Security Disability in 2005. His hearing is scheduled for April 1.

“He’s on a cane, and he’s been homeless four or five times,” Mohney said.

Many of his clients die while waiting.

When I was talking to Mohney, he had on his desk the file of a woman who had been waiting three years for a hearing. She had a number of health problems, including depression.

Mohney had just received notice that her hearing had been scheduled for April.

But she won’t need it.

She committed suicide.”

This poor woman was anonymous. We’ll never know who it was. One day, it could be me, or maybe even, you.

Filed under: Social insecurity

Posted under Sparrow Chat