RARWRITER.COM™ Presents the...

Dedicated to Intellectual Disobedience and the Pursuit of Understanding, the Last Bastions of Hope

   

        

Volume 1-2012                                                           

 

Lunar Eclipse 2010

 

 

Solar Flare (NASA)

2013: NASA anticipates large solar flares, possibly as large as the 1859 flares that fried telegraph lines throughout the U.S. and Europe

 

HOT THIS WEEK

FEATURES CURRENTLY AT RCJ

Are You A Slave? A Brief History of the Subject Suggests "Probably"

Moses, Wall Street, Human Nature and Grover Norquist

Concepts of Resistance - The RCJ Provides a Road Map for the OWS Movement

Lance Henriksen - World's Greatest Actor in Reflective Mode

Conspiracy - A Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the New World Order

Elections 2012

What Does it Take to be President?

Rating the U.S. News Readers

The Antidote to Michelle Bachman

Ship of Fools - Why Won't We Save Ourselves?

White House Solar Bomb

What Is Happening to Us?

The Cloud - What It Is

Background on Afghanistan

Economics 101

Global Economic Risks

Islamic Definition

Middle East

Second Amendment Remedies

Sam Broussard - Republicans

Treason

Why All the Zombies?

Gun Rights

Leadership Chronicles

 

FEATURED BLOGGERS

Is Belief In God a Sign of Weakness?

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.

No, but it may be a signal for help, and not necessarily in a bad way.

God is a construction of peoples’ need to have an organizing influence in their lives, standards to live by, and some reason to carry on. In all of those ways, God and everything that comes with it – the afterlife, sense of well being and spiritual comfort, and purpose in all things – is truly helpful to people, as various studies have seemed to indicate. Belief is powerful, almost regardless of its details.

That God, and the belief therein, is a signal for help is endemic to the genesis of the subject, if you will pardon the pun.
Read Post - Comment

 

Letter to Conservatives: The Party of Wealth – Theirs
 

Sam Broussard - Writer, Songwriter, Musician, member of Steve Reilly and the Mamou Playboys

 www.sambroussard.com

Three of the front runners for the Republican nomination are now just memories, pundit fodder: Huckabee and Trump, and Palin recedes into political tinnitus. But the retiring of all three has one thing in common, and it’s money. Huckabee just bought a huge house in Florida and is enjoying his status and salary at Fox News. Trump is more at home on his reality show. And Palin is enjoying both Fox money and reality TV and will probably be the next Oprah Winfrey, although she’ll never get more than twenty percent of the viewers because only that percentage of Americans can identify with her spunky pride in her ignorance. And yes, she’s pretty.

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We Need A New Party!

Kenny Lee Lewis - Member of The Steve Miller Band, Guitarist/singer/songwriter, Novelist/screenwriter' www.kennyleelewis.com, www.stevemillerband.com

I am a rock star. Ok, ok, I am in a band with a rock star.  I am also a husband, father of three daughters, and a small business owner who pays his taxes like anyone else. I never got into politics until the last election and wrote and produced a non-partisan PSA video for Comcast called “Get Out and Vote” to help assuage voter apathy throughout this ailing nation. I didn’t vote for either one of the major candidates in 2008. I am all about trying to rally everyone to start voting again so we can possibly support a third political party that makes sense. If we can educate and get people out to the polls again, I believe that there could be a groundswell of voters who could turn the tides in future elections.
We need a party “by the people and for the people”. As corny as that sounds, it is a precept that our nation was founded upon and if we are to lift up and resuscitate this
suffocating political system, we are going to need a leader who actually leads rather than folds like a cheap stroller just to please his parties’ special interests.

(Use the link below to read Kenny's entire post (© Kenny Lee Lewis, 2011 - All Rights Reserved).

Read Post - Comment

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The RCJ Posts Issues Questionnaire on Obama - Obama 2012 – Where Do You Stand?

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting firm Rick A Rice Consulting.

The Revolution Culture Journal (RCJ) invites you to participate in a little experiment to help us understand public perception of President Barack Obama, particularly as it relates to enthusiasm for his re-election in 2012.

We have identified 34 issues in U.S. foreign and domestic policy and devised a scale to determine how well respondents feel President Obama is doing with each. Use this link to go to the questionnaire.

Read Post - Comment

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Bechtel’s Long-Term Commitment to Nuclear Disaster

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting firm Rick A Rice Consulting.

Somehow the idea of using nuclear fission, and eventually nuclear fusion, to boil water, produce steam, drive turbines and produce direct current electricity has found its way back into the list of acceptable alternatives as an environmentally friendly solution. This bit of Houdini depends entirely on comparison to power generation through the burning of coal, which produces carbon emissions and is a primary contributor to rising levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) in our choking environment.

Read Post - Comment

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Applying Grover Norquist to Corporation Intellectual Starvation

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting firm Rick A Rice Consulting.

In my career as a consultant, I have all kinds of opportunities to interact with different personality types at different levels of organizations. Some of these are of the kind that might make others feel that life is not worth living, but the advantage of consultancy is that my involvements are focused, short, and generally sweet, and then I leave the office dramas behind for a quick dip into the next kiln of opportunity. I am like a merry mercenary in that way, unexposed to the daily grind of the organizations with which I work.

Staff people, on the other hand, are subject to hierarchical structures and personality profiles, and their critical path issue is: a) whether or not to stay in the roles they are in, given the odds of rising up to a more satisfying position within the organization; or b) to cast their fates to wind, which is the job market.

So much of life happens at the initial sell-in.

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Appointment with Disaster - Republican Domestic Policy

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.

While the rich are enjoying tax breaks they have no need for and U.S. corporations are holding on to record profits, padding their accounts to ensure that this is not their rainy day, but doing little to further the employment and domestic security needs of United States citizens, word comes that we are running out of money to provide help for a growing population of homeless (see the Huffington Post on this date).
Read Post - Comment

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Welcoming the Arab Street to U.S. Foreign Policy

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.

I was all set to thank the progressive Arab world, or at least the 25 percent of it that is situated in Egypt, for taking charge of U.S. foreign policy and forcing it to make sense. Then those pro-Mubarak thugs showed up and shocked the global community back to reality.
Read Post - Comment

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Why Your College Student Can't Read, Write or Even Think

Rick Alan Rice - Publisher, Writer, A&E / IT Consultant

Back a hundred years ago, when I was in college, all the guys who were doing the best in the classes I took all seemed to be Viet Nam veterans going to school on government grants. They tended to stand out because they were older and far more experienced than their classmates. It seems unlikely that they were brighter, but they were fundamentally different in terms of focus and perspective in ways that seemed obviously helpful to them.
Read Post - Comment

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GOOD VISITS: Sites
Cracked.com
 

 

 

 

 

PENN STATE:

 

Lessons in Everyday Heroism

 

Left: Penn State Mascot - a furry

 

 

By RAR

 

Who knew that we have so many heroes in our great nation?

This week they flocked forth in huge numbers - almost unanimous numbers, it seemed - to tell the amateur human beings at Pennsylvania State University, including legendary football coach Joe Paterno, Penn State President Graham Spanier, and the now-infamous assistant coach Mike McQueary, how they should have behaved when confronted with the sex assaults being committed by former Assistant Coach Jerry Sandusky. Sandusky is now charged with 40 counts of criminal abuse of eight minors over a 15-year period, with additional charges likely to develop from ongoing investigations.

The initial impulse on the part of the Penn State student community was to rally behind their beloved, bespectacled Coach Paterno, who has guided the football program at Penn State for 46 years. But as the story continued to unfold, the focus turned more to McQueary, the assistant who reportedly showed up at the Penn State athletic facility one night nine years ago to pick up some scouting video and witnessed Sandusky sexually abusing a 10-year old boy.

McQueary, the story goes, reported the incident to his father - this was in 2002, and McQueary was only a graduate assistant at the time, though he was 26 years old. His father began contacting Penn State officials the next morning, including Joe Paterno, who very soon thereafter told Sandusky, his heir apparent, that he would never become head coach at Penn State. The apparently shocked Sandusky resigned his position at Penn State soon thereafter, supposedly to devote himself full time to the boy's club he had founded, Second Mile, the aim of which was to help "needy" children.

McQueary, who is the last man standing on the Penn State football staff among those associated with this lurid tale, has gone into protective custody and was to miss today's game with the Nebraska Cornhuskers. There have been threats against his life.

McQueary's crime, according to the popular outrage, is that he did nothing in the moment of his discovery of Sandusky's assault on the boy to stop it then and there. As one commentator put it, "McQueary is six-four and 220 pounds. The guy was quarterback of the Penn State football team, he's a stud! And he did nothing?"

The national reaction to this storyline has been not only revulsion, but condemnation not just of Sandusky but of everyone else mentioned above, and most especially the former BMOC McQueary. Everyone seems to know exactly how they would have handled that moment, it seems, though the best I have heard in terms of describing actual steps that should have been taken come from comedian John Stewart, who suggests that you step in to break up the assault and call the police in one order or the other.

That is the checklist, but how easy is it really?

In my own family, we had an incident once that became family legend over time, and it had to do with actions taken by a favorite uncle when he was confronted with a similar situation. The story goes that he was driving through his home town one day - a place he had lived in his whole life, a small town - and a flash of disturbance through the picture window of a house he happened to be passing by caught his attention. He looked to see a man beating his daughter; a man my uncle knew to be a violent drunk, and a daughter he knew to be petite and defenseless against her father's rage.

Without hesitation, my uncle pulled his work truck over to the curb, entered through the back of the house, and committed physical violence of his own against the drunken abuser. He threw the guy up against a wall and warned him that if he ever laid his hands on that girl again that he would beat him senseless.

That story was unverifiable. It was, in fact, told by that same favorite uncle, along with a long collection he had of stories he would tell about times in which he had taken down some threat against whom others were hopeless. In fact, I had two other tough guy uncles who had similar legacies of heroic violence, and some cousins, too.

I never saw any of these heroics, in truth, but have sort of incorporated them into whatever mythologies could be molded around my larger clan associations, because I suppose I need these stories. They seem to hint at something greater within us all, that we should feel guilt about not being capable of summoning at will as situations arise.

Where one may be hesitant to confront a belligerent drunk for fear of what irrational violence may ensue, asserting one's self into the affairs of a sexual predator is another thing entirely, or so one could logically assume. Sexual predators are fueled by damaged psyches and prying open that Pandora's Box could expose a person to almost anything.

Is that what is happening with the Ray Gricar story? Gricar is a former district attorney who chose not to prosecute Sandusky in 1998, after investigators recorded a conversation between Sandusky and the mother of a boy who had reported Sandusky's abuse. When Sandusky apologized, D.A. Gricar dropped the case, but then in 2005 Gricar simply disappeared, though not without a trace. The New York Times has reported that Gricar's car was found abandoned, his laptop recovered months later in a river without a hard drive, but that Gricar's body has never been found.

Sandusky, who is currently free on $100,000 bail -- also a hot debate topic this week -- is certainly "twisted" and very possibly psychotic, whether or not he had anything to do with the disappearance of D.A. Gricar.

If that is true, it is staggering to imagine that Joe Paterno could have worked with this guy all these years -- Sandusky is 67 years old -- and somehow not have noticed what an odd duck he must have seemed. The kids he molested called him a "weirdo". Wouldn't weirdness have manifested itself in day-to-day interactions with others?

Have you ever been around a university athletic facility? Or possibly a military camp? Or have you ever read anything about the Roman games?

There is something inherently sexual, and violently so, about male institutions. And there are reasons that as males mature into puberty that you get this schism that in high school typically plays out as the "jocks versus the geeks" and why opinions on either side are strongly polarized.

For the single mothers of boys in need of fatherly direction, Sandusky's "Second Mile" foundation must have seemed like a stellar opportunity, combining associations with a high profile athlete and America's reverence of big-time college sports with perquisites and benefits otherwise impossible for a kid from those backgrounds to imagine.

We send such mixed messages to kids, vulnerable and not anywhere near fully developed enough physically and intellectually to protect themselves in a world that grownups often misapprehend.

And as for heroism?

We live in a constellation of pain of suffering, of opportunities to do heroic things and help our fellow man, but by and large we look the other way.

At least 40 percent of American voters will vote for anti-government Republican and Tea Party policies out of pure unwillingness to accept that their fellow citizens could handle the responsibility of efficiently managing benefit payments. And that gives that 40 percent the benefit of the doubt, because some percentage of that number harbor resentment against anyone who would even claim to need help and assistance (read Herman Cane and the notion that people "should blame themselves for not having jobs...").

Of that group, some small percentage might pull Jerry Sandusky off that kid, were they to encounter him in that shower at the Penn State athletic facility in 2002, and...do what? Assault him? And then call the police?

And then spend the rest of their lives embroiled in the twisted wreckage of Jerry Sandusky's psyche within the nightmare corridors of the American judicial system?

Heroism, it turns out, is a complicated decision to make when it may only be the beginning of something long and awful, not the end.

So what do you do in that situation? You probably do what Mike McQueary did, which was to escalate the issue up the ladder of authority, or otherwise to act as instructed and report the incident to a supervisor. That includes the police, who are better resourced to handle psychopaths than was graduate assistant Mike McQueary, and there is where the chain of responsibility fell apart. McQueary, Paterno...they should have all called the police.

As for the public machismo, save it for the polling place if you still believe it counts. There are a nation of people being abused by life every day. And you can help, Hercules, but will you?


 

©Rick Alan Rice (RAR), November, 2011

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