The UPR Blunders Forward

I’m biased, of course, since I spent several decades working as a sort of teacher, but I have to agree with Dr. Manuel Pérez Quiñones, a professor at Virginia Tech, when he says that the worst crime in Puerto Rico has been the savage intrusion of politics on the university system.

This will sound bad—a large part of our murder rate (twice New York City’s with half the population) is drug related. And though the death of any man diminishes me—well, sorry….no. I don’t care if one pusher offs another.

But in the twenty years at which I made a living teaching ESL, it would occasionally occur to me: how can it be that I have this job? Every kid has twelve years in English classes—shouldn’t everybody be bilingual?

Oh, and why was it that I knew the rules for accentuation in Spanish, and they didn’t?

Or there was the time I was buying a $24 product that had a 35% discount. The clerk stood open-mouthed at the register—there was no calculator. $17.80, I told the clerk. Well, we waited several minutes, which I devoted to telling the clerk—once a teacher, always a teacher—the three ways that I had dreamed up to calculate the sum. But it took a manager with a calculator to prove it to him.

I am telling you, then, that we have a serious problem in Puerto Rico. And if we are ever going to get out of this morass, we’ll have to start with kids, teach them, prepare them, and then hope they’ll do a better job than we’ve done.

What Pérez Quiñones bemoans is real. I somehow slid through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but even I knew that the university’s School of Engineering was very strong. University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez has a school that is just as good, if not better.

According to Pérez Quiñones—well, let the man speak for himself:

The UPR as it has always been, was once again invaded by local Puerto Rican politics. In 5 years at Mayagüez, the campus had 4 Chancellors (i.e., campus president). The turn over in positions from Chancellor, to Deans, to Department heads was so regular, that it was a common joke to ask "who is the Dean this week?" The situation continued to deteriorate. Recently on the press there was an article about the sanctions imposed by NSF to the UPR system after an investigation of misuse of federal funds. The UPR system cancelled the Presidential Fellowships that paid the graduate studies in the US to future UPR faculty. And the faculty at their several campuses continued to either fight for their academic lives or simply hang up the boxing gloves and move on to a better (bitter?) future.

Alert readers of this blog are wondering—what’s the deal with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds?

If it were irregularities, that would be fine—almost. But it’s much more than that. Which is why in April of this year, the FBI charged onto campuses and locations holding university servings and—reportedly—confiscated a bunch of material.

That’s bad—worse is that the NSF stopped paying 50 million dollars for research projects. Or perhaps it’s 90 million dollars—the Internet is shaky today, and I can’t verify.

Nor is it the case that the NSF simply dropped this on them. The investigation has been going on since 2006, and the university was given the chance to make a Corrective Action Plan (CAP). OK—that was approved, but the university couldn’t follow its own plan.

What was the problem?

Caribbean Business Reports has this to say:

To pay professors involved in research—in addition to their basic salary and a reduced academic schedule—professors are assigned a sum of money from the grants, which can't exceed 30% of their wage as compensation for their participation, according to circular A-21.

The source said the way to report time & effort was out of control, and some professors' salaries had increased by more than 100%. "You could see professors whose basic wages were about $80,000 a year, and suddenly they were earning $300,000 annually."

Right—so you can see why the NSF was a little peeved.

There were other problems, too. Some professors were reportedly receiving money as compensation from funds earmarked for other uses, such as indirect costs.

Well, the university had to get some money from somewhere—so where to turn? To our Government Development Bank, locally called Fomento. So the university submitted a loan application to…

…the wrong people. Somehow, the university ended up submitting the application of the General Fund of the University of Puerto Rico. So they had to do it over again.

Into this comic-horrific scene came the 2012 gubernatorial elections, which the party then out of power won. So what did that mean? That the university’s president had to be changed. And guess what? The gentleman who consistently has assured us that the problem with the NSF has been resolved—only to be told by the NSF that it has not—is now the interim director!

Comic-horrific, I wrote in the last paragraph. Sorry—I’ll take that back.

We’re a strange mix, down here. Half of us don’t work. The other half works harder and often better than anyone else. And our professionals—in general—are more highly trained and educated than any I’ve seen.

They deserve so much more.

Two Wings and a Lady

Cuba y Puerto Rico son

De un pájaro las dos alas

It’s a famous quote from a poem by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, and can be translated roughly as “Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.”

Well if true, it may be that the wings of the bird are flying in completely different directions.

From the video below, it seems that the Cuban wing is set to soar. Raúl Castro has had to face the inevitable: the economy, supported all those years by the Iron Curtain buying Cuba’s sugar at inflated prices, was broke. The fields—five million acres of them—were overrun with a weed called marabú (marabou.) Nor is it just a weed—it’s highly invasive and thorny. If you attack it with a machete—pretty much the only thing at hand in lightly mechanized Cuba—you’ll end up bloody at the end of the day.

The buildings are falling down in Havana, and the state workers, who are supposed to repair the houses, are backlogged and slow to respond. How slow? One woman interviewed has waited 16 years with her ceiling propped up with four-by-fours. She worries that the roof will collapse every time it rains.

Seventy percent of the food has to be imported; supplies in the state-run shops are scant. Doctors make twenty-five dollars a month; one doctor interviewed makes a better living selling copper tubing on the side.

And so, you say, how can the wing be flapping skyward?

Well, Cuba’s economy grew 3% last year, and is expected to grow about the same this year as well. Sure, it’s not quite the 3.6% that Castro wanted, but it’s not far off.

And by allowing 181 jobs to be done by licensed private individuals, the government has at last introduced some incentive to work. In the past, there was a saying, “the government pretends to pay us; we pretend to work.” Now, there’s the beginning of an independent, free market economy.

And let’s face it, where was Miami before the Cubans arrived?

My friend Harry has a story. In those days when Harry was selling shoes, he entered a small shop, got tossed out, and went to a café. Still burning with the humiliation, he overheard a conversation among the boys—a group of middle-aged guys who were complaining: the damned Cubans had come and taken all the jobs away in Puerto Rico. Harry turned to address them.

“If the Cubans are working and you are not, it’s because they are NOT sitting in cafés drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning. They came with nothing and got a bike and sold what they could sell and now they have multinational corporations and live in gated communities. Oh, and I’m not Cuban but Puerto Rican….”

Which will explain why the Puerto Rican wing seems to be plummeting.

La producción propia es la tarea urgente contra la dependencia de fondos federales en Puerto Rico

That’s one of the headlines in today’s El Nuevo Día. Economists are urging us—as they have for all the twenty odd years I’ve lived here, to create jobs to avoid dependency on federal funds.

And on the double, since 24,200 fewer people are working here on the island than last year. Granted, that may not be a problem, since we are also shrinking in population, but government (the largest employer on the island) is reporting 20,600 fewer jobs this year than last.

Here’s Caribbean Business Report on the subject:

Puerto Rico’s population was pegged at 3,725,789 in the 2010 Census, down from the 3,808,610 registered in the 2000 Census. It marked the first time the island population had declined between census counts. The 2010 Census also showed there were 4.7 million Puerto Ricans living in the states, marking the first time more Puerto Ricans lived stateside than on the island. Only one state, Michigan, registered a drop in population in the 2010 Census, dipping 0.6 percent.

It’s happened before—in the Great Depression, droves of Puerto Ricans left, primarily workers who would man the factories of the (then) industrialized North East. Who’s leaving now?

Young professionals.

Which is why the article in Caribbean Business Report ends thus:

The population drop of nearly 83,000 over the last 10 years and the continuing exodus raises the prospect of less federal funding for Puerto Rico, increased pressure on the financially ailing public-pension system and a dramatically aging population with fewer financial resources.

Yes and no.

I’m sitting in a terrific local business, Poet’s Passage, run by a great lady, and named in fact, Lady. She explained this curious fact by noting that her father’s family came from Australia via Scotland, where they were all lords and ladies. (Tactfully, I never inquired as to the exact circumstances of the move to Australia).

And Lady has been here since 11AM—busy getting her sister store adjoining the café ready for an activity tonight. Which means that she will be here until the wee hours of the morning.

“There’s money in poetry,” she told me once, “and I sat down with the board of directors of WesternBank and convinced them—I’d made a great business plan. And in six years of business, I’ve never missed a payment.”

She’s less person than dynamo, raising the emotional temperature by several degrees every time she comes into the café. She kisses everyone; she calls out, “Hi, Marc!” from fifty feet away. She’s home-schooling her child or she’s painting one of her poems onto a piece of canvas or she’s busy telling a customer about poetry night, every Tuesday night at 7 PM. She admits it privately—some of the poetry heard there may not last in the canon of Puerto Rican / Latin American literature, but that’s not the point. She’s seen poets grow, as she has; she’s seen self-esteem bloom. It’s a space, a necessary space.

An embracing space. How embracing? The gentleman at the table two doors down is busy working at his computer. He also serves me coffee—and very good it is—when he’s working. How many other workers choose to hang out at their workplace when not on the job? (I except bars….)

Lady dropped out of high school to help in the family business. But it hasn’t stopped her. “Who’s your favorite female poet of the 20^th century,” she once asked me, and we went on to talk about Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore—an army of great poets. I was sweating to hold up my end of the conversation. 

The only resource Puerto Rico has is an amazing human potential. And looking at Lady charge into her café, greet the customers, kiss the staff, give the order to clean the bathrooms, and then take a dirty plate off the table while kissing the customer—I’m convinced.

The two wings can soar upward again.

Wraiths Wrapped in Blankets

Who knows why I had to watch it? I had, after all, lived it.

Actually, I hadn’t. By in my years as a nurse, I had seen a lot of bulimics and anorectics; as well, I had worked on the eating disorder unit at University of Wisconsin Hospital.

And the documentary Thin, by Lauren Greenfield, brought it all back, from the moment I saw the first wraith wrapped in her blanket coming down the hall. Nor does Greenfield hold back—at times it’s unbearable, almost too painful. A fifteen-year old girl is confronted in group therapy, and breaks down shrieking, “I just want to be thin!” Another patient is kicked out of the institution, and has to call her mother, who spits out her rage at the staff. You can hear the desperation behind the fury, and it’s well justified: the patient later killed herself.

And it made me remember: this is nursing in which you never really know what you’re doing. Can you believe the patient when she breaks down and swears she really, really wants to get better? Should you trust your gut, which is telling you, “nah, bullshit?” And what’s better—to tell the truth, and say, “I don’t believe you?” Or do you say nothing at all?

The really dangerous nurses were the ones who thought they knew what they were doing. For them, it was simple—believe the least of what the patient says, set limits, and then follow up with consequences. On psych wards, that often meant seclusion or restraints; sadly, there were times when I thought the staff had egged the patient on.

In the film, Greenfield captures the uncertainty and the anguish of the staff, as they struggle to understand what’s going on on their ward, who the players are, and what to do about the situation.

One of the most telling moments of the film is the patient who sketches a life-size outline of what she thinks she looks like—she produces a chubby figure. The art therapist the puts the patient against the sketch are draws the patient. But that’s not enough to convince the patient—who then writes “fat,” “chubby,” and a host of other epitaphs on different parts of the sketch. At the end, she writes, “help me.”

There’s the frustration of the insurance running out—the patient is nowhere near ready, you know you’ll see her again. At least, you hope you’ll see her again—if not, she’ll be dead.

There are the relatives, who are almost more anguished than the patients. The patients, after all, are very often in denial, but mothers know perfectly well how sick their kids are. One patient reports her boyfriend saying, “I want to be with you for the rest of my life, but the way you’re going, I’m gonna bury you in five years.”

It’s possible—the mortality rate is between 10% and 20%.

To make the documentary, Greenfield spent six months living in the facility.

It’s a remarkable achievement.  

  

...Just so you know

She was impossible not to like, but I expected that. I know her sister, I’ve met her mother and her brother, and she’s lived for years in Canada. So it was clear—she’d be a nice, fun, intelligent woman. And she was.

She was also terrified of setting foot on American soil.

Which was literally about all she had to do—she was flying from Ottawa to Puerto Rico, and had a layover in JFK. But even that freaked her. Would she be safe? Would she be caught in crossfire? Who knew what could happen?

You guys up there? This is how the rest of the world is seeing us.

Consider the fact that the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, has just spoken to the NAACP, and revealed that he has had to sit down with his son—as his father sat down with him—and explain how to behave with the police. The message—yes, the police are racist; yes they will stop you unfairly; no, you can’t trust them.

This from the Attorney General?

Consider the fact that whites who kill blacks in “Stand-your-ground” states are 342% more likely to be exonerated that whites who kill other whites. Check out the chart below, based on 5,000 killings…..

Or what about the black woman who got 20 years for firing a warning shot at her ex-husband, against whom she had a restraining order?

It may be the horrific cold that has fallen upon me, or it may be true, but everything seemed seriously skewed. First of all, who dreamed up Stand-your-ground? OK—I’ve looked it up, and apparently it goes back to the very end of the 19^th century. Florida, however, only enacted the stand-your-ground law in 2005. And according to CBS Miami, deaths due to self-defense are up nearly triple since the law was enacted. 

OK—and this is how Wikipedia describes the moments before the shooting:

At approximately 7:09 PM,[Note 4] Zimmerman called the Sanford police non-emergency number to report what he considered a suspicious person in the Twin Lakes community.[69] Zimmerman stated, "We've had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there's a real suspicious guy."[32] He described an unknown male "just walking around looking about" in the rain and said, "This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something."[70] Zimmerman reported that the person had his hand in his waistband and was walking around looking at homes.[71] On the recording, Zimmerman is heard saying, "these assholes, they always get away."[72][73]

About two minutes into the call, Zimmerman said, "he's running."[12] The dispatcher asked, "He's running? Which way is he running?"[74] The sound of a car door chime is heard, indicating Zimmerman opened his car door.[75] Zimmerman followed Martin, eventually losing sight of him.[12] The dispatcher asked Zimmerman if he was following him. When Zimmerman answered, "yeah," the dispatcher said, "We don't need you to do that." Zimmerman responded, "Okay."[76] Zimmerman asked that police call him upon their arrival so he could provide his location.[12] Zimmerman ended the call at 7:15 p.m.[12]

After Zimmerman ended his call with police, a violent encounter took place between Martin and Zimmerman, which ended when Zimmerman fatally shot Martin 70 yards (64 m) from the rear door of the townhouse where Martin was staying.

OK, so Martin was running away from Zimmerman. Zimmerman is chasing Martin—how in hell can this be self-defense? In Florida, can you really chase someone down, get into a fight, fear for your life, and kill? If so, nobody is safe.

Which is what the black guy on the documentary said—is it now open season on young black men? What was Martin supposed to do? If he had stopped in his tracks and held his hands up, would that have prevented Zimmerman from attacking him? If he had walked toward Zimmerman, would that have been perceived as “threatening?” Having been branded as an “asshole who always gets away,” there was virtually nothing Martin could do.

Well, into this gloomy picture enters Georg Philipp Telemann, the baroque composer who, at the time, was much more respected than a guy called Johann Sebastian Bach. And who knew that there was such a thing as a chalumeau? Originally a folk instrument, it was popular during the baroque period, but then was replaced by the clarinet. And guess what? I like it much more.

Enjoy, guys. I’m putting this cold to bed.

Grrrr

Grrrrr….

This is a letter to the world that will never be read, since at the moment I am without Internet access. And why is it that it puts me into a total funk?

Consider, I have lost my mind, my mother, my job. I should know something about perspective, about what’s important and what matters.

I also feel that I’m spinning my wheels, not doing anything important, not doing what I need to do. I’m stuck, and I don’t believe in stuck. But even though I am writing every day, I’m in writer’s block—which at the moment I can’t define for you, being Internetless. Or unInterneted. Or sans Internet.

And I’m hungry—why won’t they feed me? Previously the old system worked—I gave them money and they gave me food. Today, I gave them money and now? No food.

Well, it’s clear that the world went off somewhere and decided not to take me along. But shouldn’t it have left a note on the refrigerator door? Something like, “Sorry, but you’re fucked today. Don’t try and do anything. You’ll be tired and not able to sleep. You’ll be hungry and they won’t give you food. Expect to fall and break your leg for no reason. Fire may break out. There will be insurrection in the streets. Prepare to be struck by a meteorite…. Get the picture, sucker?”

And this guy at the café which is not a café since that would imply food and that, it appears, is reserved for other people, all of whom are sitting in front of plates and slowly munching away…. Now then, why is it that my least favorite person in the café has decided to fuck around with the staff, distracting them when they should be exerting themselves at full speed with the obviously imperative, critically important task of feeding me? No but there he is, and worse, he has an Argentinian accent, which totally drives me insane. It’s Spanish with a heavy Italian inflection. And now, guess what? He has chosen to stand between a seriously beautiful guy—a man who doesn’t know, though I could tell him, that his identical twin is named Adonis—and me.

And why do I have to go to Boquerón? It was supposed to be a hotel, Copamarina, which was nice, but now it’s a timeshare in Boquerón and people will be sleeping in the living rooms, which is crazy. And where will I go when I wake up, as I always do, at three in the morning and there are sleeping and probably snoring bodies in the living room?

Outside, said Mr. Fernández, or the hotel lobby. So the whole world will be sleeping and I’ll be up and bug eyed and pacing around the lobby, accompanied with the sound of profoundly unjustly earned snores.

Well, well—I shouldn’t complain. Because my mother-in-law has decreed that she wants vegetarian lasagna, and guess what? That falls on Mr. Fernández, who has almost never made lasagna in his life and who cannot even eat lasagna, since it has pasta, and that has become the fatalist-no-computer-I-meant-fatalest (and you know where that red squiggle can go, don’t you?) of poisons. So Mr. Fernández has washed the pan that was collecting the water draining from the third floor, and he is now probably elbow-deep in that infernal pasta, which will kill us all.

Well, I for one refuse to eat it, on general principle, and to spite my mother-in-law, whom in fact I like except on days when there is no Internet and no food. No, I intend to sit at the table but with my back turned to it, in silent but very much obvious protest. Nor am I going to talk to anyone at all—not a word will be wrenched from my lips—for the entire week we’re there, since it should be Copamarina but it’s not so guess what! No words from Marc!

Hey, maybe I’ll make a sign! “I AM NOT TALKING BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE I SHOULDN’T BE AND I PROTEST AND UNTIL THE PLACE IS RIGHT AND THE FOOD COMES WHEN IT SHOULD AND THE INTERNET AGREES TO BE AVAILABLE INSTEAD OF OFF SOMEWHERE ELSE, DAMMIT, I AM NOT TALKING AND YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!”

That’s what I’ll do. I’m tired of being adult and reasonable and nice and not making a fuss and going with the flow. I’m gonna get good and mad, and tell the whole world about it. In fact, you know that lasagna? I’m gonna spit on it, on the whole pan of it, so that no one can eat it. That’s what I’m gonna do, and just wait and see! Then we’ll have to go to Copamarina which is where we should be and not in Boquerón where I can’t go anywhere when I can’t sleep! Hah!

Now let’s see—what else can I do?

And now it’s several hours later and Jaime has come in and made me drink three beers, so now I can’t think!

Grrr….

Dammit!

I knew at the time that it would come to this. All right—I couldn’t imagine quite how bad the “this” was going to be, but I knew it would be bad.

In 1989, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the railroads had the right to ask their workers to go into a room and piss in a cup. There had been accidents before, drugs were found to be the culprit, and so the railroads decided to check for drugs via urine testing.

Did it ever make sense?

Of course not. If you smoked a joint on Saturday night, you were spilling metabolites in your urine on Monday—but you weren’t under the effects of the drug. Conversely, if you snorted cocaine on the way to work, you were soaring like a kite, but not spilling metabolites.

Then there was the problem of all the over the counter drugs like Sudafed which gave false positives—sure, more sophisticated tests were available, but unsurprisingly, they were also more expensive.

It was a period of drug hysteria—remember dear Nancy Reagan peering out of the darkness that was presumably drug addiction and whispering hamishly (in the manner of a ham, computer—lump it!), “just say no!?” Remember Bill, who smoked but didn’t inhale?

Of all people, Antonin Scalia got it. Here’s what he said:

The impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point…symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search.

Right—knew we had to agree on something….

So I was prepared, when Wal-Mart wanted me to come work as an English teacher, for the ordeal of taking the bus out to a clinic, pissing in the bottle with the bathroom door six inches ajar, not washing my hands until after I had given the bottle to the apologetic technician. She took it, stuck a thermometer in it, and then let me use the sink.

Full disclosure: I last used marijuana in—was it the eighties? Nineties? You get the point….

So I knew about that. What didn’t I know?

47% of employers routinely do a credit check on job applicants.

Well, you can imagine the snort I made—even Franny, my beloved mother resting quietly in the afterlife, couldn’t have done better.

Consider the case of Alfred J. Carpenter, a shoe salesman in New York City who got laid off. Not a problem, he thought—his resume was good, he had worked for some high-end names like Ferragamo and J. M. Weston. And since he was healthy, he didn’t need to get health insurance, he reasoned.

Wrong—he tore two ligaments in his knee playing roller hockey. And so the bills piled up, and he was struggling to pay them. A friend thought he could work at Bergdorf Goodman; he applied and all was well. But then that went sour, too; soon he was in bankruptcy. But he kept applying for positions, and even took to disclosing his poor credit with prospective employers. No luck, and no dice. Down to his last 200 dollars, he’s now on welfare and food stamps.

The irony of it is that the company has to ask your permission to check your credit. But if you say no? Is there anyone out there who seriously thinks that if you way no, that won’t be held against you? If so, please contact me at once, since I have several really nice pieces of real estate—including bridges—to sell at the moment.

I can hear you—what possible reason would an employer have to check your credit? Well, The New York Times says this:

“Employers are looking for a sense of responsibility,” said Richard Mellor, a vice president at the National Retail Federation. “They want to see that an individual pays their bills on time and takes responsibility for what they buy.”

There are several problems. First is the obvious one—anyone in this economy looking for a job is probably not going to have the best credit. Here’s The New York Times again:

“Someone loses their job,” Ms. Wu said, “so they can’t pay their bills — and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.” It can also be a kind of backdoor job discrimination, Ms. Wu contends, given the numerous studies that demonstrate that those black, Latino or simply poor are more likely to have lower credit scores than those who are white and have means.

Obviously, Ms. Wu gets it. And she goes on to say:

To Ms. Wu and others, a credit report says more about a person’s economic circumstances than his or her moral character. “Some people can go to daddy and say, ‘I can’t pay my bills, will you bail me out?’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And others can’t.”

The other problem? Often, the credit agencies’ reports are incorrect, and everybody who has ever had to deal with these agencies knows—it’s a nightmare. Somehow, the mistake that you corrected in January appears regularly in February.

The solution? Well, nine states have laws regulating or prohibiting the use of credit checks by employers recruiting personnel. But it should be at the federal level—not the state level.

So it was the snowball effect, just as Scalia—probably—feared. First it was just pissing into a cup, then it was giving up your credit privacy, and now? It’s having the government get your telephone / Internet history, if not listening in on your calls or reading your email.

It was Vonnegut, I think, who observed that the Star Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question. Remember? We sing it at every baseball game….

And does that flag still wave, over the free and the brave?

Who's Crazy?

Well—so where is everybody? A guy comes out and says that he tapped Obama’s phone, as well as Senator Feinstein, Supreme Court justice Alito, General David Petraeus, and a host of others. He goes on to suggest that Obama may be being blackmailed, and that there is a sinister force at work. He calls it a “rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities at a monstrous scale on steroids."

And the guy—Russell Tice—has a track record: he worked for twenty years in the Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Department of Intelligence Agency, and ended up in the National Security Agency. He turned to The New York Times in 2005, and was one of the principal sources for the wiretapping revelations published that year.

So he has the connections, and he has big news—shouldn’t be a problem to pick up the phone and get the news splashed over the country’s papers, computer screens, and cell phones. Instead, with the exception of the Huffington Post, the mainstream media have ignored Tice’s most recent allegations.

Instead, Tice had to go to another whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, and make his revelations on her Boiling Frogs podcast. And Sibel, who worked as a translator for the FBI until 2002, makes a damning charge: the mainstream media are controlled by the corporations and the government. She tells the story of MSNBC who sent a town car to pick up Tice for an interview, and then cancelled the interview on the way to the studio. Huffington Post picked up the news, and then MSNBC called again, stating that they hadn’t canceled, rather they had only meant to reschedule. The town car arrives again, and all is well until minutes before the interview. Then, Tice is told that MSNBC’s New York lawyers have advised them—don’t talk about the recent allegations, just talk in general terms. He protests: he’s in the studio to do just that, but goes through with the interview, anyway.

Edmonds makes further charges in an interview on the James Corbett Report. She alleges that the whistleblowing process that is supposed to protect people who step forward is completely ineffective. And she should know: she was fired in 2002 and the FBI’s own internal process stated that it was likely true that “some” of her claims of retaliation were true.

She also maintains that the FBI keeps both digital and paper files in huge quantities. And if, in the process of investigating a person who FISA has issued an order on, the FBI gets information on another, non-FISA ordered person—the policy is to destroy that evidence. Does it? No way—it keeps everything, because guess what? It may come in handy.

Edmonds makes the point that Congress has never taken on the FBI in any meaningful way—removing a director, taking it to the justice department, etc.

Edmonds goes places I wouldn’t go. She’s convinced that the Boston bombings were a government sponsored set up; she has appeared on The Alex Jones Show. It’s hard to know—who’s telling the truth?

But check out the two clips below—and you decide.   

The Rest of the Story?

It’s an invitation into the shadowy world of conspiracy theory.

As you can see in the video below, the first NSA whistle blower, Russell Tice, is making some heavy charges. No, he says, NSA is listening in on calls, not just collecting metadata. The NSA listened in on Barack Obama, when he was running for Senate; they spied on Supreme Court justice Alito, as well as General Petraeus. They’ve spied on any general above a three star level, and also Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The activity seemed to take place in the evenings, and seemed to be directed by someone connected to the vice president at the time, Dick Cheney. And Tice, though a Republican, decided to vote for Obama just on the hope that Obama would follow through and stop the abuse.

Tice is asked—why is this going on, is it blackmail? He fumbles for a bit, and then says the obvious. What else can it be?

It’s an old trick. When I was growing up, the local police chief had secret files on people, and knew that an alderman had a daughter working as a prostitute in a west coast city. That kind of information comes in handy when the police need a little boost in budget, of the chief himself needs a little help in a corruption scandal.

What’s new is the capacity to snoop, and the sheer power that we—or is it they?—have to spy. Here’s Tice on the subject:

Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability.

"I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity … to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now." 

I came on Tice through the usual circuitous path—investigating a report that Gilberto Valle, a NYPD cop, had been found guilty of accessing an FBI database, the National Crime Information Center, obtaining information, plotting to abduct women, all for the purpose of…

…eating them.

OK—my day has not been improved by realizing that there is a fetish—for some—for cannibalism. Valle, who was turned in by his wife, maintains that it was an innocent, though kinky, fetish. The prosecution maintained that he was on a street corner where he had said he’d be in one of his communications—and the block of the street where one of his “victims” lived. Was he there to abduct? Had he moved out of fantasy and into the street?

However interesting the question, the point is that he tapped into a system that 90,000 law enforcement agencies can access. Here’s Business Insider on the subject:

• Tom Hays of The Associated Press reports there are "a batch of corruption cases in recent years against NYPD officers accused of abusing the FBI-operated National Crime Information Center database to cyber snoop on co-workers, tip off drug dealers, stage robberies and — most notoriously — scheme to abduct and eat women."

Speaking of which, the same article goes on to say this:

In 2008 two former NSA analysts who worked at the NSA center in Fort Gordon, Georgia told ABC they and their coworkers had listened in on the personal phone calls of soldiers stationed overseas.

"Hey, check this out," one said he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy.'"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-nsa-can-abuse-data-on-americans-2013-7#ixzz2YesFhNIz

No, it wasn’t crazy. It’s scary, and much more.

Tice was the original whistle blower, leaking the phone monitoring scandal in 2005. And at the end of the interview, he’s asked, “are we living in a police state?”

His answer is nuanced: it a light police state. No, we don’t have all the oppression of the old communist regimes. We’ve learned subtlety; the iron fist wears a velvet glove but is—after all…

A fist.

A Great Concerto Grosso

All right—let’s get the players straight. In the clip below, you have three groups of people. On the left will be a baroque flute and violin—and they’re the soloists. Next up are the cello and the harpsichord. The cello is playing at times the basso continuo, which for any less complicated composer / thinker than Bach, would be simple chords that provided the harmonic structure. But here Bach has the cello constantly shifting back and forth from the traditional role to one of almost soloist status. The cellist who doesn’t itch to play these parts is dead.

The continuo, by the way, is often left unspecified by baroque composers—whatever bass instrument came along could be used. Nor was the part frequently written out; like jazz musicians today, there was a complicated notation of numbers denoting notes based on the bass note. Sounds complicated? Initially it is, but after a bit, it starts to feel natural. Here, by the way, is what it looks like….

The other part of the basso continuo is the harpsichord, or really, any other keyboard or strummed instrument (The theorbo makes a really good one). And in this concerto, the Brandenburg 5, the harpsichord is given what some have called the first modern cadenza. It’s the long, showy solo at the end of the first movement. The cadenza, designed to showcase the virtuosity of the soloist, is also meant to fool around with the main themes of the movement—it’s all a showy rehash.

And this cadenza is spectacular—I’ve heard knowledgeable folk argue that it shouldn’t be played on the harpsichord at all. It’s so far ahead of its time, the thinking goes, that the piano is better suited to bring out all the nuances. Bach was writing for an instrument that didn’t exist. (Don’t please, argue this point with anyone connected to what is now being called HIP—historically informed performance.)

OK—you have on the left two soloists; in the center is the harpsichord and the cellist, who are both soloists and basso continuo; so who’s on the right? Well, it’s a little group called the ripieno—yes, computer, there are words you don’t know—who join in and form an “orchestral” backdrop. In this case, you have a violin, viola, and bass.

Bach wrote this concerto in 1719, and dedicated it to the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt. Here, should you ever need an example of a dedication that goes from fulsome straight into brownnose, is the dedication:

As I had the good fortune a few years ago to be heard by Your Royal Highness, at Your Highness's commands, and as I noticed then that Your Highness took some pleasure in the little talents which Heaven has given me for Music, and as in taking Leave of Your Royal Highness, Your Highness deigned to honour me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness's most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him.[3][4]

All right—be fair. It was the style of the time.

And it also has to be said—this is a terrific piece of music. Yes, it may be a warhorse, a piece that is played so often it stops sounding new. Then, the curious thing happens—people shun the work because it seems trite, or overplayed. And then, of course, you go years without sitting down to listen to it again. And then when you hear it, you’re amazed—what were you doing all this time, listening to perfectly good though obscure music but neglecting a masterpiece?

Well, fortunately we have YouTube, which spies on me and then makes suggestions (I know, I should be upset and I’m not…). So when they suggested that I listen to the Croatian Baroque Ensemble playing the Brandenburg 5^th, I thought, ‘why not?’  Nor was I disappointed—they’re a knockout.    

I may have shot myself in the musical foot, by starting out with Bach—what else do you play after that?

Well, Corelli came to mind, and he wrote, in the good Baroque manner, a set of twelve of the little guys, written in the 1690’s but published in 1714—almost exactly at the time of Bach’s Brandenburgs. And they are as clean and fresh three hundred year later as the day Corelli wrote them. One of them gets trotted out regularly at Christmas—it even bears the name “Christmas Concerto.” The name was given by Corelli himself: Fatto per la notte di Natale ("Made for the night of Christmas").

It’s serenic—all right, not a word, but you know what I mean—music punctuated by gleeful, almost manic, sections. And check the guy playing what looks like a weird guitar or lute; that’s a theorbo.

Handel wrote two sets of concerti grossi—and composed them in 1739. Yes, they’re conventional—there’s nothing as thought-out as Bach, nor really as fresh as Corelli. But still, Handel on an off day is still Handel.

After the baroque era, everybody went off to compose other things, until, in the twentieth century, the form was rediscovered. Ernest Bloch composed one in 1925 in Cleveland Ohio. To me, it’s bombastic and unpleasant music; but interesting to listen to. Stravinsky, more notably, composed Dumbarton Oaks in 1937—and the main theme of the first movement is a direct reference to the Third Brandenburg Concerto. Lastly, Vaughan Williams composed a concerto grosso in 1950. Here they all are….