You can tell it’s summer. I’ve neglected my posting; Congress is getting ready to take a month off after stripping us of some more freedoms because Papa George W. thinks we’ll be safer. They can wiretap at will now, folks.

Also, the new estimate of the cost of World War Iraq is now 1 trillion dollars. You know, Social Security and Medicare wouldn’t be in trouble if the government could throw money at it like they are doing to kill good men and women in foreign places.

Do you feel safer now? Why couldn’t that money rehabilitate bridges so we don’t have another debacle like Mississippi? Man, that shouldn’t have happened.

George W. ran almost every company he was in charge of into the ground, took his share and then ran. Now he’s in charge of our money. There is no such thing as Government money. It’s our money that they take from hard-working people.

Well, it’s August and Congress and George will take a vacation. I’ll bet our soldiers in Iraq aren’t on vacation. Neither is Iraq.

God help us all. What is the matter with the human species? Can you hear the fiddles?

In the CD called The Traveling Wilbury’s, there is a song called Tweeter and The Monkey Man, where they sing “In Jersey everything’s legal unless you get caught.” Mitt Romney is Massachusett’s Monkey Man.

Just recently his driver posed as a police officer both in New Hampshire and in Massachusetts. Jay Garrity, Mitt Romney’s man who identified himself as Trooper Garrity on at least two occasions, was even driving, according to the Boston Metro, on a suspended driver’s license.

According to the report, Mitt Romney was in the car on at least one of the occasions.

Jay Garrity has taken a leave of absence from Romney’s employ at this time and Mitt, always there when you need him, says “He’s a good guy and wish him the very best, but this is really now in his hands.”

When you’re super-rich like Mitt, “everything is legal, sometimes even when you get caught.” Romney may be the worst candidate running. He really only gives a damn about himself and his family and sees the Presidency as just one more “feather” to collect.

Romney has a net worth of $350 million and is feeding his campaign money hand over fist. Like George W. Bush, he inherited his giant stake of “start” money. He’s just smarter and more dangerous. He doesn’t give a damn about the working guy or gal.

W. Bush is the worst President we’ve ever had but, if Mitt cops the big “feather”, he might top Dubya at that position.

Romney is the rich, works and favors only the rich and is a pretty frightening spectre on the horizon. The United States has become a Plutocracy and Mitt Romney is the new MonkeyMan.

It was just a little over one hundred years ago when the automobile was invented. One only need to look at today’s traffic reports to see what has happened. We have built a civilization where the automobile holds us captive. Most of us need the car to get to work, or we think we do.

Picture the size of your gas tank, if you can. Then take all the gas tanks in the world, fit them together, and just try to imagine how big that tank would be. Don’t even think about the oil tanks that many people use to heat their houses. It’s going to take enough of a feat of the imagination just to visualize the size of all the gas tanks in the world put together. Imagine yourself walking through that tank. How far would you have to travel to get from one side of the tank to the other?

Just think, we fill that tank with gasoline, derived from oil, at least once a week, some of us more than that. Now think of the hole in the ground that is the same size as the tank you are walking through. Understand me, this hole is doubling in size, at a minimum, every week.

Now consider that we use oil to make plastic, we use oil to ship food to our major population centers, we use oil to run our giant farms that mono-crop, we use oil to grow the feed that the cows and pigs and chickens we eat need to survive, we use oil to build the asphalt roads we drive on, we use oil to get the energy to manufacture almost everything we use, we use massive amounts of oil to wage war.

Do you see where we are all going here? How big is that hole in the ground now? This all started only a little over one hundred years ago.

Oil is the weak link that holds our civilization together. Consider this: Is it possible that we have come close to using half the oil that exists in this world in a little over one hundred years and the use of oil increases constantly as our population explodes to over 6,000,000,000 people from a mere 2,000,000,000 just a little over two hundred years ago.

Oil has made this possible and, as we drain the Earth of its fossil fuel, we are going to watch the intricate threads that hold our civilization together unravel.

Now, maybe I’ve made a miscalculation. Maybe this isn’t happening as I’ve described it. But when I turn on my TV and watch the traffic reports and the war reports and all the little events that make up the Big Event, it hints that something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones.

I haven’t even factored in Global Warming or given you the picture of all the exhaust pipes in the world fastened together to make one giant pipe. Our collective noses are in that pipe.

Ethanol is nice but it’s only possible in a cheap oil economy because it is derived from mono-cropping oil. So we’re back to the drawing board. Or maybe scratching pictures on the walls of caves after civilization implodes.

Have a great day and go for a joy drive folks.

As bloody wars continue in Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur and other places around the world, basically because our species is sliding into insanity, suicide bombing is gaining in popularity.

I consider suicide a private event. Let’s say you are dying of cancer and suffering excruciating pain and have no hope of recovering life as you once knew it, then suicide becomes euthanasia. I believe this is valid and courageous, a leap into the unknown from the what we know.

But when one commits suicide with the intent of taking other people with them, this is the ultimate act of cowardice. If you think committing suicide is glorious because of a perversion of a religious belief, then, by all means, take yourself out. But be brave. Go by yourself.

Just recently, in Baghdad, one of many suicide events took place at the funeral of a slain Fallujah leader, killing 30 people in the process. Also, just recently, the “martyr influence” has spread to Somalia, where a suicide bomber reportedly filmed his “trip to glory.” More likely a trip to gory.

This is cowardice at its ultimate. Also, the leaders of the people who encourage these acts of cowardice never do it themselves. What they do is brainwash others into making the “great sacrifice.”

When a species can reason, it is obvious that war is insane unless you are defending your turf, I guess, whatever that means. I’ll have to think about it.

But suicide bombing is not only a cowards act, it is the action of a sucker, a person who has been deluded into thinking he/she will go to glory by leaders who hide behind walls, inside caves, or the basements of castles. One has to ask, if suicide bombing is so great, why wasn’t Osama bin Laden on one of the planes?

Go ahead, strap yourself with dynamite and blow yourself and a bunch of others to pieces of inanimate meat. If you do, you are a coward and a sucker. Think before you waste your life. Religion should have nothing to do with it.

During the 20th Century over 120,000,000 people died as a direct or indirect result of war. World War 1, World War 2, the Korean War, the VietNam (American) War and all the other battles, skirmishes that continue to take place now. Now there is Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan and why not include the United States of America because they are about 4% of the world’s population and they consume close to 50% of the world’s resources.

When I say they for the U.S. I should say WE because that’s where I live.

In 1968 the minimum wage kept a family 30% above the poverty level. To have the same buying power the minimum wage had in ’68, today it should be $14 an hour, at least.

Meanwhile the CEO’s of Hedge Funds, which is a type of investment, not a company, loot and pillage corporations, then pull out with fantastic sums in the billions of dollars while the working man and woman lose their jobs and pensions.

When the Iraqi war started, George W. Bush told the people of the U.S. to go shopping.

The Military Industrial Complex has become a juggernaut and we have entered the most dangerous era that humankind has ever been in.

As the super-rich get richer and the majority of the world struggle to make do and die in the wars created by the super-rich, the Earth is being raped and pillaged and soon, life as we know it, or knew it, will change radically.

Picking through the filth and residue of the most toxic garbage means, to me, to pick through the minds of the super-rich.

Greed is the watchword for our times. The weapon-makers are the United States of America. So drive your SUV while you can, the world, as we know it is about to crash down around us. Some people think food grows on shelves.

“We are in a perpetual state of frenzy — getting, spending, keeping and protecting.”

Our leaders are liars, incompetants who are driven by greed and they don’t care what happens to the rest of us. They don’t realize that when the ship goes down, they’re coming with us. We’re screwed and most of us just sit back and watch television. That’s how we fiddle while Rome burns.

Ethology is the science of the psychology of species behaviour.

When a species of animal becomes overpopulated or even just feels overpopulated, it begins to go insane. Experiments have been done with rats in the lab and with deer on an island. When the population reaches critical mass, behaviours change.

Even rats have courting rituals but when they are overpopulated and crammed into a small space, they engage in rat rape. Also the mothers disregard their young to engage in behaviours that are unusual in a normal rat society.

Normally the Alpha (dominant) rats mate while the Beta (submissive) rats don’t. Under stressed conditions the Beta rats form gangs and kill the Alpha rats and rape the female rats. Some of the female rats actually prefer the gang rats and help them kill their young.

Has the human species reached Critical Mass? Is that the reason the mass slaughters have been taking place and increasing in number?

Virginia Tech is another example of extremely aberrant behaviour. Do the principles of Ethology apply to the human animal? It would appear that they do.

I think for us to get American personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have?—— Dick Cheney, ABC’s This Week, in 1991.

Well, I guess know we see what we’re doing and what we’ve got and it ain’t good.

I’m no fan of Don Imus but I find it ironic that he gets fired for racist comments (they were offensive) but George W. Bush doesn’t get fired for sending good men and women over to Iraq to get them killed because of his shadow agenda.

It’s too bad we just couldn’t pull his advertising and fire him and Dick Cheney.

In the meantime, Global Warming and climate upset all over the world because of our thoughtless pollution of the ecosphere we live in continues at an unabated pace.

This weekend, on April 14th is Step It Up day and there are individual marches all over to protest what we have become and to make more people aware that we can change our path. See stepitup2007.org to see what local actions are taking place in your area.

In Boston there will be a One Earth, One Climate Rally from 2pm to 4pm on April 14th. Marches from all over the area will congregate there, but if you can’t walk or bicycle, take the MBTA.

There are marches beginning at 11am in Jamaica Plain, a conference in Roxbury beginning at 8am at Roxbury Community College, a demonstration in Everett Square from 11am to 2pm, a bicycle tour starting at the Coolidge Corner Library in Brookline at 9am to 11am, and a massive Massachusetts Avenue March starting at 11am in Davis Square culminating at the Rally in Boston later.

This is what’s going on in my area. Please go to stepitup2007.org to see what is going on where you live.

And if there’s nothing happening, start something.

I’m doing a poetry reading at 12:40pm at the Boston Public Library and I’m going to dedicate it to the Step It Up folks. There’ll be poetry going on all day there, from 10pm to 5pm on Saturday, and on Sunday from 1pm to 5pm with an open mike sometime Sunday afternoon.

So if you want to start with poetry downtown and then shoot for the Rally on the Boston Common from 2pm to 4pm, you can have it all.

By the way, no matter what kind of weather you’ve been having, the fact is that this has been the warmest winter in the 125 years that we’ve been keeping records.

Step It Up was started by Bill McKibben, who is the author of The End of Nature. It all began where he teaches at the Middlebury College near Burlington Vermont.

According to the Boston Globe on Thursday, April 12, some of the effects of global warming will be the death of dolphins in the Mediterranean, the extinction of some plants in the Alps and a deluge of heat waves across the European continent. Do you remember reading about the heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed tens of thousands and did immense crop damage? Just the beginning if we don’t do something about it.

We need to stop fighting and take a look around us. While we ravage each other because of whatever, the world we live in is degrading because of us.

I’d like to get to this blog more often and I cry your pardon, I’ll be trying.

Hope to see you folks somewhere on a healthy planet called Earth. Let’s make it happen.

In today’s world, warriors have a place to go. Blackwater. One person owns it. His name is Erik Prince and he is a “radical right-wing Christian mega-millionaire.

When L. Paul Bremer, who was Bush’s brainchild in Iraq until some time in 2004, was traveling around Baghdad he was protected by warriors from Blackwater.

These warriors are unhindered by laws. A decree called Order 17 protects them from prosecution for war crimes. Heck, it protects them from prosecution, period. They can literally do anything.

The American press calls them “civilian contractors” which makes them seem like benign workers, but that is far from the case. Erik Prince himself, when asked about his private army defined it like this — “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use Fedex? Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what Fedex did to the postal service.”

When Blackwater searches for mercenaries, they do not discriminate. If you’re a warrior, someone who can kill excellently, efficiently and without a qualm, it doesn’t matter whether you’re black, white, oriental or Martian. It doesn’t matter what country you come from. The only thing that matters is your loyalty to your command.

Blackwater may be the most powerful army in the world; they don’t wear uniforms that make them stand out and they get the job done here in the U.S. and overseas, wherever they are needed.

The owner of Blackwater donates only to the Republican Party and knows what he wants. The question is — does he want what is best for our country — or the world for that matter.

What would it take to have a military coup in the United States? In any case, we might not need one; it could already be happening. Who does George W. Bush work for?

Prince says his forces are “accountable to our country.” Just what does that mean?

United States Representative Dennis Kucinich said, and I quote, “These private contractors can get away with murder . . . they do not appear to be subject to any laws at all and so therefore they have more of a license to be able to take the law into their own hands.”

Blackwater says they can do anything. They claim to be part of the U.S. Total Force and also claim immunity from civilian litigation in the United States.

The only thing I like about them is their name. Blackwater. It doesn’t sound like anything I’d want to drink.

In May of 2004, Blackwater opened a new division, called Greystone Limited and registered it as a “tax-exempt” corporate entity. Some of the countries recruits have come from are: the Philippines, Chile, Nepal, Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Peru, all countries which have questionable human rights records.

Forget Iraq for a moment. When Katrina hit New Orleans, Blackwater picked up some contracts to work there — about $243,000 a day’s worth.

“Unlike police officers, they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights,” says CCR’s Michael Ratner. He also says, “These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.”

I want to close this column with the fact that over 1,000 journalists have died covering local stories in their home countries over the past ten years.

Since 2000 the toll has increased. 147 killed in 2005. In 2006, a record 168 journalists have been assassinated.

“The figures show that killing a journalist is virtually risk-free. Nine out of ten murderers in the past decade have never been prosecuted,” according to Richard Sambrook, the chairman of the special inquiry and global news director for the BBC world.

Two years ago the institute decided to create a central authority for keeping track of assassinations of journalists.

Just recently, a Russian reporter covering a political hotball story was warned off. In the beginning of this month Ivan Safronov, the journalist covering a story about Russia’s plans to sell top-shelf missiles to Syria and Iran, “fell” to his death from his apartment building from a stairwell window between the fourth and fifth floors.

I find it constantly amazing what humans are capable of. When I was a little boy playing hide and seek in the woods with some friends. Suddenly, three teenagers appeared and grabbed me. They were much bigger than us; I imagine we were about 8 and they were about 14 years old, and the two boys I was with became frightened and ran away.

I don’t know where this would have gone but they beat and tortured me for over an hour and suddenly I broke away and ran out of the woods. I was running down the street, literally afraid for my life with them hot on my trail when my father came up. My friends had gone to my house and told my parents.

He grabbed two of them and knocked their heads together. Nothing like this had ever happened to me and I remember asking, “Why did they do this? This is as crazy as war.”

I am still asking “Why do we do this? Are we a crazed species? Shouldn’t we know better by now? We are so intelligent. How can we be so stupid??”

War will be the end of us. While we fight and ignore global warming and the spread of different types of pollution in our world, the Earth is becoming diseased.

Soon, all there will be left is Blackwater, Blackwater, Blackwater, but none to drink.

After NAFTA was passed the corporate beasts from the US unloaded cheap corn into Mexico, some not fit for human consumption, and the Mexican farmers were driven out of business because they couldn’t compete. Some of them took out loans and went under; lost their land.

When some of the Genetically Modified corn was used as seed by the farmers, the pollen contaminated other farms, destroying corn strains that were over 10,000 years old.

They call this Genetic Drift. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, it won’t go back in.

Many young Oaxacans, driven from their lands, had to go work in sweat shops in Northern Mexico or in the fields, factories, warehouses, restaurants and hotels of the U.S.

Families that survived the invasion of the Aztec Empire are being destroyed.

The end results of this ecosystem rape has yet to be seen.

This news was taken from the Earth First! Journal. One can subscribe to them by sending a check made out to Earth First! to Earth First!, PO Box 3023, Tucson, AZ 85702.

They also have a website at www.earthfirstjournal.org

They are a wonderful magazine that prints the news that you won’t find anywhere else. Poetry also.

It’s only $25 a year and worth a hell of a lot more than that.