My Friend and Mentor Sam Keeper. RIP

 Sam Keeper left us on October 24.  But he didn't leave us empty handed.  He left a legacy of commitment to truth and justice and improving the human condition.  He endured unimaginably horrific pain in his last year or so but with his beloved spouse Cele at his side, and bedside, he showed us how to celebrate life.

Sam spoke to me years ago about his interest in the Hemlock Society and thoughts that someday he might wish to be in personal control of the end of  his life.  I am certain that his abiding, passionate and sweet love for his spouse of 67 years steered him away from that course, letting nature and hospice take its course to give them as much time together as possible.  This was a great love few of us will experience.

Sam was brilliant, certainly at the gifted level.  He majored in Physics and wound up supporting his family through journalism and public relations.  Sam was renowned for his mentorship of communications professionals; three come to my mind, all with brilliant careers resulting from Sam's care and feeding; Ward White, Helen Vollmer and Steve Barnhill, all at one point in Houston with Sam.  These are some of the communication industry superstars as a result of Sam's work with them.   A minor league player compared to these three, I owe much of my ad career to Sam's help.  I am grateful beyond words;  my offspring I hope are as well. As a result of my successful career, Mary Kaye and I were able to give them a pretty good start.

Sam was fluent in Spanish as well as his native tongue.  He read in that language constantly and engaged speakers in conversation to hone his spoken skills.  He was a brilliant writer and an even more incredible communications and PR strategist.   I had the privilege of working with him on countless projects and can attest to his amazing talents in that area.  He took his own firm and two major communications companies to the top of their fields with his management skills.

But my most compelling critique of Sam's work in life was the community and political service he lent his talents to.  He was an early adopter of sophisticated information technology  and brought those skills, even as a very senior citizen, to fundraising, political campaigns, voter registration. All at a scale only a few can claim to have equaled, civil rights movements and social reform causes successful only because of his professional gifts and grit.

I know of some of these first hand working side by side with Sam.  Through our work and reform through Citizens For Good Schools, we accomplished HISD integration and defeated a public school breakaway effort by racists trying to create the Westheimer Independent School District.  Sam helped defeat the Wallace and Tory Democrats and led takeover of the Texas Democratic Party by progressives.  He led massive voter registration drives with decades of work with the League of Women Voters.  He worked toward mental health reform in Harris County and Texas.  He assisted minority voter registration and mobilization of that vote for the Democratic Party. 
Sam pushed fundraising for the party and its candidates.  The list goes on, including major work with the Houston Grand Opera, The Houston Symphony, the Houston Chamber of Commerce.  Houston owes Sam so much for helping make it a major league urban center.

But all of this work, professional and civic, pales by comparison to his loving skills as a spouse, father and family member.  He adored his family as the centerpiece of his life.  Sam was charming, prickly, challenging, kind, loving and always caring about justice and repairing injustice.  He was doggedly determined, relentless in his pursuit of successful completion of a project and tireless in his endeavors to do what was right.

Thank you, Sam for bringing so much to my life and seldom letting me rest when you consistently outpaced me on things we were doing together.    I'll relish our time together for the remainder of my life.  I loved you so. 

Some Conservatives Believe We No Longer Need Public Libraries

To my amazement, a family member once argued that we ought to do away with libraries in the digital age. This is one who has few books in the house but as a child was taken to children's reading gatherings by their mother and whose household was full of books on a wide variety of topics.

That same mother, on one of my first tours of her home town, took me proudly to the Free Public Library that was the center of this historic city.  I'll never forget that about her or that city.

 Libraries are more than storage facilities; they are community gathering places.

A place where many people access the internet.

A place for children's reading gatherings.

A place for story tellers, public readings by authors and poetry contests.

A place for public meetings for those engaged in their community. and for writers to share idea and for adult and summer education. 

A place for low income people without money for Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble books, digital or otherwise to go and borrow books for free, perhaps the group that might benefit the most from enhanced education through reading. 

A place for people with noisy or inhospitable household to study and read in quiet and peace.

Many libraries across the country give refuge to the homeless during the day. 

A place for performing and visual arts and so much more. 

 There is now some research that says cognition is still better with reading from hard copy. They are one of the really good things tax dollars support, making small thinking bigger and a place to share ideas face to face.  Or alone, reading and absorbing knowledge. 

This encounter has gnawed on me for a long time and a Facebook share from another family member inspired this defense of free public libraries.

Meet David Brock, The Guy Who Made You A Hillary Hater

I have just finished a book you Hillary Haters, left and right, really need to read to understand how you got that way.  Not that Hillary is by any measure a perfect person.  But then, neither are you or me.  But if you possess even a modest amount of curiosity about your own biases and how they got implanted in you regarding Hillary, KILLING THE MESSENGER, The Right Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government, is strongly recommended.

What is particularly interesting about this book and the author is that this is a guy who started it all, deeply embedded in the so called Right Wing movement that Hillary and Bill liked to call the vast right wing conspiracy.  According to Brock, they really got that right.  This massive industry got its start with the Clinton campaign for the Presidency.  Ironically, Brock was a product of Cal Berkley, more noted for left wing stuff than right.  But, my own Santa Clara Political Science Department Chair was a rightist and product of the graduate program at Berkley.  So this is not unfamiliar territory for me.

But unlike many ideologues practicing the dark art of political myth-making, Brock, in the middle of a very successful career on the right, saw truth and was unable to discard it for his personal gain.  Right wing political operations are very profitable and he was doing very well.  Commissioned by one of the 90's wealthy right wing financiers of the Movement to build a major hit designed to ruin Bill and Hill before they really got started on a national level. As Brock dug deep into their dealings, lives, and character, he had an epiphany.  His own character and moral compass kicked in because all he found in Hillary was intelligence, decency, idealism and motivation to do good.

As Brock investigated the manufactured dirt on the Arkansas era Clintons, he found, as an investigator of integrity, that indeed all the Little Rock stories were completely manufactured.  This book deals with the ones about Hillary. The verbal abuse the Arkansas State Trooper Security Detail allegedly heard and  took from  the Arkansas First Lady, for one as well as her role in the allegedly illegal/unethical  real estate deals in Arkansas.  The Travelgate non-scandal and alleged Hillary role in the death of Vince Foster, all deconstructed.  Like a poorly knitted sweater, the stories unraveled and fell into a heap of tangled yarn.

Not that Hill and Bill were totally true to their early idealism, they learned by political loss in the world of arcane Arkansas politics, if they were to succeed going forward, they were going to have to abandon the progressive instinct to commit Hari Kari for truth and justice. They'd adjust to fight another day and defer some grand progressive plans for immediate change and reform for a future day when circumstances were more amenable to fixing what was broken.  Thus progressive pragmatism.

In 1997 Brock switched to the far less lucrative Democratic political operations on principal and abandoned the likes of Ann Coulter and Grover Norquist. He began the process of building Media Matters, the left watchdog designed to head off the continued right wing assault on truth so effectively executed since the beginning of the Reagan era.  By the time of Brock's defection, the right had built several so called think tanks like the Heritage Society and the Cato Institute and communications machines routinely trashing hapless Democratic campaigns and political icons.  Brock was as the heart of this machine building process and chronicles it in detail in this book.  Here you can learn the psychological manipulation these Machiavellian operators have done to your brain that makes you believe and hate Hillary the way you do.

Their methodology plays off an endemic amount of misogyny in all of us, male and female.  Our culture and history programs us to view smart, ambitious women as vicious, driven harridans set on dominating the rest of us.  The Movement adds myth making, untruth and fear mongering to round out the package. And here you are, hating, though really fearing down deep.

It took nearly twenty years for Democrats to move beyond their penchant for making long lists of programs to help you, appealing to your obvious intelligence and begin to understand how to head off bald face lies manufactured by Republicans designed to make you mistrust and judge Hillary a conniving woman bent on dominating you.  Thus the rapid response truth machine built by Media Matters to at least minimize the damage before the myth becomes solidified in the concrete of lies.  That concrete has set firmly in your brain, unless you dislodge it.

He gives you all the truth background to very current lie manufacturing in the infamous Benghazi and the  State Department email capers.  He chronicles Hillary's efforts to put distance between the Clinton Foundation and her duties at the State Department and interactions with those international figures having business with both.  This required finess and often difficult potential conflicts of interests Hillary strove to avoid.  Welcome to the real world, haters. Such potential conflicts are loaded with gray areas. He sets the record straight that she never shied away from addressing human rights issues with world leaders with whom her State Department had to do business and the Clinton Foundation accepted contributions from.   Brock shows you the brilliantly conceived Rovian technique of turning Hillary's strengths into flaws.  This is the same technique Rove created to do Kerry in; turning him from war hero (I'd rather view him an an anti-war hero anyway) into hero imposter.  In Hillary's case, ambition becomes cat claws shredding all that stands in her way.  Super caution and lawyerly word crafting into  habitual lying.  Life long Methodist values to do good to self-aggrandizement.

You get the idea.  All the negative, bad stuff you believe about her in spite of the truth and fact-based narratives you choose to ignore because the bad stuff is just easier to process.  Somehow, the Clintons both managed to muster a cherished value, forgiveness, in creating a non-adversarial relationship with the contrite Brock.  Just maybe you have the self discipline to at least rethink your hate.  Just as Hillary, unassailably the most scrutinized  and publicly flogged woman in American history Brock points out, has somehow managed to navigate through her life without obvious bitterness or retaliation against those who oppose her assent to political power.  Do you have this much character? 

So, those few of you haters out there on the left (I've given up on the crazy right haters long ago), chip away at the concrete in your brain to allow at least some truth to seep in.  Try to get your powerful women fear under some control.  That will enable you to read this book with new eyes and perhaps not wind up loving Hillary, but at least  having some grasp of the reality of her character, morality and good values that those who know her intimately attest.  It will give you some understanding that, yes, Hillary has changed her personal position on some issues.  But, you might better understand after reading Brock that part of the political craft is adjusting your issues based on what your constituency tells you its wants of you, as long as you don't abandon your moral compass.  If not, if you are just too comfortable being a left hater of this alleged corporate Democrat, lapdog for her Wall Street buddies,  neo-liberal and interventionist, go ahead, give us Donald Trump via your non vote, write in vote or vote for a third party candidate with no reasonable chance of winning.

Trump/Johnson Libertarianism vs. It Takes A Village/Clinton

The 2016 Campaign embodies the classical American conflict between Liberalism and Conservatism, Democratic values vs. Libertarian values.  This is really nothing new.  It's just louder and more extreme today than perhaps yesteryear's conflicts and political contests.

On the domestic front  the Trump version of Republicanism is nearly identical to the Gary Johnson version of Libertarianism.  The only difference of consequence is that Johnson is less crass, less noisy and less bombastic.

Those shared values, in contrast to Liberalism and the Democratic Party's values, are about me, myself and I.  I, me and mine.  This strain of Americanism is all about rugged individualism.  I'll take care of mine, you take care of yours.  We have heard it every day, thanks to a lapdog media from Trump.  How great he is.  How wonderful his family is.  How beautiful the women in his life are.  And how he knows how to "make America great again" just like he and his family are.  Greatly wealthy.  Greatly successful.  Greatly white.  Greatly smart and really good at helping themselves at the trough of life,  taking as much as possible.  Woe is the business associate who gets in Trump's way or threatens his bottom line.  Ruthless is good because it helps me and mine.  Greed is good as expropriated from the Reagan era.  This is just the Reagan era on steroids.  You're on your own out there, buddy, good luck.  But don't get in my way.

Read Atlas Shrugged.  Listen to Paul Ryan.  Hear Ron Paul and his Senator son.  It is the same tune, different singers.  Gary Johnson is the soft Irish tenor of the song; Trump the heavy metal version.
Johnson-government with a soft touch on our lives, letting us do it our way, regardless of public/social consequence.  Keeping the immigrants in line so as to not interfere.  Weed is OK, very appealing to the millennials.  Let the market do its thing without a cleanup crew following behind, this kind of stuff.
Trump is just more harsh, more intemperate, with chest beating and loud bellowing.

The people this message and life-vision appeals to are those who see themselves as captains of their own ship, owing no one for their success or failure, loyal to their family members who they see as their only responsibility.  If they experience failure, it is usually a government or government policy to blame, not themselves.  They take care of  themselves and their own and deplore those whose performance in that area is less than theirs.   If others fail then they're usually deserving of their failure.  Thus worthy of being cut loose or disenfranchised, lesser beings.

Now contrast that with the first major Party nominee who is a woman who authored a book entitled It Takes a Village.  In spite of being vilified for decades for being a liberal, a bleeding heart liberal who endured a humiliation on a massive scale before the world by her spouse and summoned the energy and self confidence to write this amazing book to share with her countrymen.  This book and this woman of many imperfections (like all of us) gives us the core message of her life.  And the core message of her political tribe, the Democrats.  Both are about taking care of oneself, taking care of one's family but also making a life which shares its abundance and grief with the village, the village of the United States of America.

This is the core difference between Democrats and Republicans.  The core difference between liberalism and conservatism and Libertarianism.   Some times liberalism is expressed this way...."we are all in this together." In my view, and if you have heart, you view this as the glue that binds a workable society.  The alternative is dog eat dog.  Here are a couple of examples:  Some in our society are excluded because of race.  Some among the excluded adopt a dog eat dog lifestyle out of desperation and rejection, shooting it out on the streets in drug deals gone bad.  This is nothing more than Libertarianism taken to a Trump extreme.  Or, as I so well remember in my first trip in Mexico in the 60's, affluent people living behind concrete walls and electrified iron gates to keep out the rabble.  American developers adopted this lifestyle in the Reagan era.....they called them gated communities.
Or in rural areas,  people who buy acreage surrounding theirs to prevent neighbors from being too close.  It is the same mindset.   People preferring to go it alone, without the village.  This is their right.

But when things go wrong, it is usually the village who comes to their rescue.  So they too ultimately reap the benefit of the village but don't pay the price by contributing back to the village.  These are the people who do not volunteer, do not run for office or work in political campaigns.  They isolate.  Many do not vote.   Or if they do--that is all they do in the political order.  And if all they do is vote, they make a big deal out of the lousy choices they had. But they'd done nothing to put forth better candidates in the village.  Usually their excuse is that they are too busy taking care of their own.

So the contrast and choice is really clear for me.  A perfect village? Of course not.  A mayor of the village with imperfections?  Sure.  A village idiot here and there?  Sure.  But it beats living it out on an island or behind a really big wall alone, in my humble opinion.

Assault Weapons Assault Logic

So, Orlando, here we go again.  In addition to the massacre of native populations by our ancestors, we Americans have now achieved a new milestone in our killing culture.  This is public madness achieving new heights exceeded only by our record as the only culture ever having used nuclear weapons on other human beings.  This is our killing culture and we are damned proud of it.

Little kids are given toy guns at the earliest age.  They are frequently seen in film cartoons.  Oh, it is only childhood fun we say.  Just stretching little imaginations.  TV shows and action adventure movies aimed at more adult populations, loaded with firearms and killing so to speak.

Gun shows, gun shops everywhere.  War movies galore, glorifying people discharging firearms and much, much more.  Oh, it is just fantasy we say.  Or story telling for amusement.  But the images of armed soldiers and cowboys are everywhere.  Video games with characters shooting one another?  Just more of a healthy fantasy outlet?  This is totally nuts.

Come on, people.  We display the killing culture everywhere from infancy onto decrepit old age in America.  2nd Amendment?  We fantasize that this translates into a basic human right to bear arms when the real historic intention of this language so obvious and so clear.   The reinterpretation of this Amendment is very recent in our history in the interest of maximizing our distorted sense of liberty and freedom to do whatever the hell we want to whomsoever we want.

This is a killing culture and we all know it.  But it is now time to put aside the fantasy and myth and address this madness.  We rolled back a perfectly reasonable automatic weapons ban not too many years ago in the interest of some whacked out sense of liberty.  Some actually think a brigade of patriots armed with AR 15's can save us from a tyrannical government armed with every conceivable form of weapon by land, sea and air.  Get real.  This is total fantasy.  Peddled by a twisted bunch of armed self appointed militia members and supported by a totally sold out Congress and a gun lobby loaded for bear.  Or is it bare?  It doesn't matter linguistically.  It matters financially to Congressional campaign coffers.

Yea, sure, sport shooting, target practice.  How the hell do you know how accurate you are when dozens of rounds shred your target with an AR 15.  This is a weapon of war.  Darts are a much more accurate measure of target accuracy.  This is a weapon designed not only to kill, but shred a human body.  It is a killing machine and you using them are a killing people.  Sick.  Disturbed.  Delusional and not in touch with humanity or reality.   A hunting weapon?  Oh, you say you do it for sport and the meat to consume.  But you know an animal doesn't have any sporting chance to get out alive.  And you know, if you spent any time thinking, that AR 15's shred a carcass and render it inedible.


We've been sold a fantasy, people.  Get your feet on the ground and heads screwed on and do a moment of thinking, not feeling.  We are killing one another.  Congress, it is way past time to restore some sanity and get us some gun control.  You are pledged to keep us safe.  This is not safe and you know it.  Yes, smart guns, thorough background checks, gun registration and ownership tracking and stiff penalties for not reporting change of ownership when you sell it to a similarly crazed buddy.  And for sure, banning of all automatic weapons of war.  Maybe even a requirement to keep semi automatic long guns and high capacity magazine revolvers registered and stored at the local National Guard Armory, not your hall closet.  And qualify and insure people for their use just like we are required to do with automobiles.  That seems reasonable, doesn't it?  Get on this people. 

Getting A Trivial Matter Off My Chest.

This will be quick.  Much is made of fashion trends of our youth and racists like to equate course behaviors with "ghetto culture".  Well let me tell you, especially readers under fifty that not much really changes over the decades in my experience.

This really pisses people off today.  But I hate to pop your comfortable bubble but when I was growing up in the 50, a very similar fashion trend hit at least my home town of San Francisco and I suspect many other areas.

Levi's were made there and very popular among particularly anglo pre-teens and teens.  But we modified them by cutting off the belt loops,  folding the waist band in half and pulling the somewhat oversized jeans down our butt.  Yes, right over the butt crack.  We thought that made us look cool and tough.  Couldn't find butt pictures of this era to show you but to assist your imagination, a parallel fashion trend usually went along with this.  That was the flat top, but with long sides combed into a "duck tail" with a "widows peak" in the front.  Most of us kept this in place with a greasy petroleum jelly type hair dressing.  Here is what it looked like, accompanying the but crack Levi's.



The point?  I suppose just to piss off older people.  Nothing really changes, now does it?
 

The Horror of Terror War In Perspective

 

The horrific San Bernardino slaughter of innocents has dominated our news now for a couple of weeks.  And horrific it was, given the families devastated and communities moved to stark terror in our nation.  Presidential candidates are now stoking that bone-chilling terror.

This unjustified act by a seemingly quiet young California couple was the eighth of terror attacks  tied to sympathizers/supporters of Jihad  with ties to  foreign Islamic groups on our soil including 2001 and 9-11.  Eight.  Let that sink in.  It is a lot.  The toll of 25 innocent lives taken in San Bernardino bring the grand total on our soil to 3,270.  A fear inducing number for sure.

Now put these tragedies we have experienced on our soil in perspective to others resulting from what we Americans perceive as justified retaliation, excluding the endless war we launched in Afghanistan.   Take that in for a minute.  We'll now discuss retaliation which some characterize as actions to keep our homeland safe from other slaughters of American innocents.  Those not counted in the horrific cost of all lives lost resulting in our invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. 

Let's first talk drone attacks we have initiated in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other African/middle eastern lands.  There have been 421 U.S. drone strikes through Dec. of 2015 from their origination several years back, starting with Bush and now continuing with Obama.  Human rights organizations have reported 5,700 civilians/non-combatants  killed and maimed by those attacks.  Let that soak in for a minute. 

Nearly twice the body count of innocent civilians killed and maimed  on our soil by Jihad related
terrorists.  Not a bad ratio I presume in the mind of those seeking retribution.  Though experts are projecting that such drone killings aren't having much positive impact on our homeland security.

So, in terms of impact, let's now examine the results of bombings in Iraq and Syria, exclusive of our earlier Iraq invasion.  Here we are talking about 2014 and 2015, the so called air war against ISIL.

We have launched since inception 8,786 air strikes in Iraq and Syria.  Let that soak in, up to Dec. 7 2015, 8,786 air strikes.  Pretty big number, especially when compared to the 8 strikes including 9-11 forward on our soil.  Over a thousand times as many.  Do you see any significant impact on homeland security with that immense ratio difference?  Maybe it makes some of you feel safer.   Not me.

What have 8,786 air strikes in Iraq and Syria produced? CENTCOM estimates say about 20,000 ISIL warriors vaporized.   See any homeland security results here?  How about results on their land and victim acquisition there?  Not so much, eh? 

Now, their victim count compared to ours at 3,270.  Civilians alone, not including ISIL warriors, stand at 2,104, according to Airwars.com, up through December 7, 2015 for the past two years. Over  three times as many of this total in 2015 to date compared to  2014 when the bombs started raining down on them. 

So, drones plus bombs equals 7,804 civilians killed or maimed there compared to our 3,270.  Retribution seekers, how about that over two to one ratio in our favor?  Satisfied yet?  How about enhanced homeland security results?  Not so much, eh?  Attacks here seem to be escalating in recent months. 

Now, when you hear or read devotees to Islamic fundamentalism claim that they feel Islamic people as whole are under assault by the west, does it seem that though twisted, they might have a point?
Even if you don't agree they have a point, are we getting the desired result?  Eliminating the twisted among them?  Not so much.  Reducing the flow of recruits into ISIL ranks?  Not so much.  Stemming the flow of funding from sympathizers?  Not so much.  Stopping them from their building their twisted Caliphate?  Not so much.  World peace?  Not so much.  Homeland security?   Not so much either.  To keep up with the ever growing carnage, I urge you to visit Airwars.com.

So, what then is the point of all this carnage?  Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.