Hal Pepinsky (ProfessorHal) wrote:
How come the acquittal of this defendant on all but one charge(conspiracy, aka prosecutorial cheap shot)isn't framed by npr as a failure of Guantanomo detention without due process in the first place? NPR is all backwards. How come this doesn't amount to an indictment of the fiscal and political expense of thinking that "terrorism" justifies a national campaign to increase the national debt for false displays of national security and prison-industrial/military excess, which only in its sloppiness turns people into enemies of my U.S. people. I think Guantanamo politics on both sides of the political aisle is another manifestation of the state protection/corporate invested protection racket. National/homeland protection rhetoric only erodes national security. I feel as though I'm hearing rationales for Nazi religious and xenophobia from the thirties. Shame on us for not using this verdict to question the very patriotic-act enterprise that 9/11 fed in my homeland. love and peace--Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu pepinsky.blogspot.com
Thursday, November 18, 2010 4:21:04 PM
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
What Lifetime Achievement Means to Me--a message of thanks
WHAT HAVE I ACHIEVED IN A LIFETIME?
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 15, 2010
That’s about as heavy a question as one faces on retirement. The fact that people in the critical crim div of asc are giving me an award for my own lifetime achievement gives me pause, and does me genuine honor. I think the best respect I can give them back is to send a message about how I view my own achievement. Pardon me if I wax a little philosophical. I have a span of nine hours today when I don’t have to speak to another human being. I am cloistered. I want to tell those who have given me this award what lifetime achievement happens to mean to me.
One lesson life has so far taught me is that what works for me today will change tomorrow. That is why, so long ago, I began my recovery from elite legal training by renouncing the premise that I could solve any social problem by engineering. My mentor Richard Quinney helped me turn my focus to the quality of my day-to-day interactions, of how they offered me and my daily relations a greater sense of security, trust and safety or not. I have come to forgive myself for having no solutions to human problems, no recipes for success. Instead, I have come to believe that my own social security is (miraculously?) enhanced by attending to the quality of my relations moment by moment. I call this a peacemaking attitude. My best evidence is that it has worked for me and for so many others I have known. As my Norwegian mentor Birgit Brock-Utne has written, I don’t want to increase anyone’s share of the pie; I think greater personal and social security turns out to rest on changing the power-over-others recipe of the social pie.
This morning I was listening to BBC Newshour, where they had a segment on what to do about cyber-bullying, announcing a UK-centered global internet march for getting to the heart of what causes the phenomenon, as though to make schoolchildren safer. The poster child of this demonstration had hanged himself at 15. All his family knew of his being other than a happy socially successful child came from threats they found on his computer of his being beaten up the next day at school or at home if he decided to stay there. The poignant thing to me is the media’s attempt to help this child’s surviving brother profile bullies. It would be standard in bullying cases to speculate that such a child would be gay. I’m thinking that a more likely hypothesis that this young guy had failed to pay for an illicit drug deal at school, and couldn’t bring himself to tell his family how successful he was in reality an illicit drug user. Who knows? Whatever was happening, the most salient feature of the story to me is that his surviving family managed to believe that he was a perfectly happy person until he hanged himself. I am reminded of the enormous pressure on parents and children to make sure that children make their parents and siblings look good.
How many times as now does Walt Kelley aka “Pogo’s” voice sound in my head. Once again, we have met the enemy and the enemy is US. How can we remove barriers that make us keep deeply shameful secrets from our nearest and dearest relations? That is the question I keep asking myself as with growing intensity, elite journalists like those in the BBC keep trying to push interviewees into identifying and classifying enemies to fight in order to solve our problems. It’s a tragedy.
Luckily for me, I chanced upon someone 37 years ago. As I have repeatedly told Jill, I decided to call that relationship the center of my human universe. Happily, no matter how many other things change, I am secure with her and our own immediate relations. I think that focus on how to build trustworthy relations in one’s most immediate relations is the best path I have to commend to anyone in these times of profound global insecurity. To the critcrim folks, thanks so much for this evidence that my life has value to others as it does to me. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 15, 2010
That’s about as heavy a question as one faces on retirement. The fact that people in the critical crim div of asc are giving me an award for my own lifetime achievement gives me pause, and does me genuine honor. I think the best respect I can give them back is to send a message about how I view my own achievement. Pardon me if I wax a little philosophical. I have a span of nine hours today when I don’t have to speak to another human being. I am cloistered. I want to tell those who have given me this award what lifetime achievement happens to mean to me.
One lesson life has so far taught me is that what works for me today will change tomorrow. That is why, so long ago, I began my recovery from elite legal training by renouncing the premise that I could solve any social problem by engineering. My mentor Richard Quinney helped me turn my focus to the quality of my day-to-day interactions, of how they offered me and my daily relations a greater sense of security, trust and safety or not. I have come to forgive myself for having no solutions to human problems, no recipes for success. Instead, I have come to believe that my own social security is (miraculously?) enhanced by attending to the quality of my relations moment by moment. I call this a peacemaking attitude. My best evidence is that it has worked for me and for so many others I have known. As my Norwegian mentor Birgit Brock-Utne has written, I don’t want to increase anyone’s share of the pie; I think greater personal and social security turns out to rest on changing the power-over-others recipe of the social pie.
This morning I was listening to BBC Newshour, where they had a segment on what to do about cyber-bullying, announcing a UK-centered global internet march for getting to the heart of what causes the phenomenon, as though to make schoolchildren safer. The poster child of this demonstration had hanged himself at 15. All his family knew of his being other than a happy socially successful child came from threats they found on his computer of his being beaten up the next day at school or at home if he decided to stay there. The poignant thing to me is the media’s attempt to help this child’s surviving brother profile bullies. It would be standard in bullying cases to speculate that such a child would be gay. I’m thinking that a more likely hypothesis that this young guy had failed to pay for an illicit drug deal at school, and couldn’t bring himself to tell his family how successful he was in reality an illicit drug user. Who knows? Whatever was happening, the most salient feature of the story to me is that his surviving family managed to believe that he was a perfectly happy person until he hanged himself. I am reminded of the enormous pressure on parents and children to make sure that children make their parents and siblings look good.
How many times as now does Walt Kelley aka “Pogo’s” voice sound in my head. Once again, we have met the enemy and the enemy is US. How can we remove barriers that make us keep deeply shameful secrets from our nearest and dearest relations? That is the question I keep asking myself as with growing intensity, elite journalists like those in the BBC keep trying to push interviewees into identifying and classifying enemies to fight in order to solve our problems. It’s a tragedy.
Luckily for me, I chanced upon someone 37 years ago. As I have repeatedly told Jill, I decided to call that relationship the center of my human universe. Happily, no matter how many other things change, I am secure with her and our own immediate relations. I think that focus on how to build trustworthy relations in one’s most immediate relations is the best path I have to commend to anyone in these times of profound global insecurity. To the critcrim folks, thanks so much for this evidence that my life has value to others as it does to me. Love and peace--hal
Saturday, November 13, 2010
fiscal insanity
Gambling at the Currency Table
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 13, 2010
I’m listening to the BBC on currency contention. Gold now sells for $1400 an ounce. Will it rise to $2000. The IMF says gold is an undependable hedge against currency inflation. So…what currency to invest in? The US fed has bet $600 billion against the dollar. As a result, US banks will lend abroad rather than at home. Democracynow.org was the first to point this elemental economic logic out. Now the BBC notices. Maybe even NPR will catch on.
I’m a devout Muslim when it comes to the immorality of speculating on making money out of having money. It is obscene that we in the US hear daily quotes from stock markets, which President George W. Bush wanted us seniors to bet on in lieu of contributing to our social security pensions. Our fixation on how to make money out of realigning global exports and imports is equally obscene. And so I strive to live locally, familially, independently as I can from global fiscal insanity. Love and peace--hal
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
November 13, 2010
I’m listening to the BBC on currency contention. Gold now sells for $1400 an ounce. Will it rise to $2000. The IMF says gold is an undependable hedge against currency inflation. So…what currency to invest in? The US fed has bet $600 billion against the dollar. As a result, US banks will lend abroad rather than at home. Democracynow.org was the first to point this elemental economic logic out. Now the BBC notices. Maybe even NPR will catch on.
I’m a devout Muslim when it comes to the immorality of speculating on making money out of having money. It is obscene that we in the US hear daily quotes from stock markets, which President George W. Bush wanted us seniors to bet on in lieu of contributing to our social security pensions. Our fixation on how to make money out of realigning global exports and imports is equally obscene. And so I strive to live locally, familially, independently as I can from global fiscal insanity. Love and peace--hal
Monday, November 8, 2010
critical criminology lifetime achievement award
Michael (Coyle), please forward this message to division members. Thanks for your enthusiasm.
Many thanks for this award. I am deeply moved by the sincerity of those who put my name forward and of those who have urged me to make a special trip to San Francisco to receive this recognition.
I feel closely linked to the critical criminology division. When I was appointed then elected token radical on the ASC Executive Board in the early eighties, my primary mission was to get the board to adopt rules that would allow members to create their own divisions. A few years later, I allowed myself to be on the ballot as chair of this division, and found out on the way from the airport to the convention hotel that I was it. Brian MacLean, first editor of the division newsletter, gave me space for a column that I labeled “views from the throne.” Brian drew a toilet seat beside the column. My time as chair was a disaster. I was nearly impeached. While as a prepubescent used to sit on the toilet in my bathroom imagining giving orders in the Oval Office (no kidding), I figure that the only formal office I was ever fit to hold was professor.
Beyond my family, my students and personal collegial friends stand out for making this old man feel his professional life has been worthwhile. I know that some of them will speak at the reception where I receive the award. I will let them speak for themselves. Again, to those who have urged me to make a last-minute plane reservation to San Francisco, and especially to Chris Magno who called to offer me a free room together, you flatter me at this moment most of all.
Again, thanks so very much for this award. I expect to be at ASC next year. Be in touch. Love and peace--Hal
Many thanks for this award. I am deeply moved by the sincerity of those who put my name forward and of those who have urged me to make a special trip to San Francisco to receive this recognition.
I feel closely linked to the critical criminology division. When I was appointed then elected token radical on the ASC Executive Board in the early eighties, my primary mission was to get the board to adopt rules that would allow members to create their own divisions. A few years later, I allowed myself to be on the ballot as chair of this division, and found out on the way from the airport to the convention hotel that I was it. Brian MacLean, first editor of the division newsletter, gave me space for a column that I labeled “views from the throne.” Brian drew a toilet seat beside the column. My time as chair was a disaster. I was nearly impeached. While as a prepubescent used to sit on the toilet in my bathroom imagining giving orders in the Oval Office (no kidding), I figure that the only formal office I was ever fit to hold was professor.
Beyond my family, my students and personal collegial friends stand out for making this old man feel his professional life has been worthwhile. I know that some of them will speak at the reception where I receive the award. I will let them speak for themselves. Again, to those who have urged me to make a last-minute plane reservation to San Francisco, and especially to Chris Magno who called to offer me a free room together, you flatter me at this moment most of all.
Again, thanks so very much for this award. I expect to be at ASC next year. Be in touch. Love and peace--Hal
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Explosives from Yemen to US: bogus!
I posted this to npr about the lead story today on all things considered:
The mailings are obviously suspect for being an effort at political disinformation and propaganda, timed just before the election. What genuine serious terrorist would try to send exploding packages to US Jews from so obvious a place of origin as the latest scapegoat for terrorism, Yemen. These packages were apparently meant to be found, don't you think? From a perhaps gullible White House to the CIA to Mossad in Israel, this looks to me like a crude black op.
The mailings are obviously suspect for being an effort at political disinformation and propaganda, timed just before the election. What genuine serious terrorist would try to send exploding packages to US Jews from so obvious a place of origin as the latest scapegoat for terrorism, Yemen. These packages were apparently meant to be found, don't you think? From a perhaps gullible White House to the CIA to Mossad in Israel, this looks to me like a crude black op.
Monday, October 18, 2010
I'm embarrassed
Yesterday I impetuously (as usual) posted a blog in which I made 2 big mistakes about my own past. I said I hadn't voted for a successful candidate for president since I first voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968, forgetting to mention that I voted for Barack Obama. I claimed that Richard Quinney's and my book was written in 1980 (confusing it in my own mind with a 1980 book I devoted to crime measurement), when Criminology as Peacemaking was published in 1991.
It's funny how I discover these mistakes. I am lying awake in bed or listening to music and just thinking about what I wrote, and then bingo, I remember these mistakes in reporting about events in my own life. Humbling in a milieu where people are focused on dementia. On the other hand, my memory of external events I blog about seem to remain pretty reliable. Interesting...love and peace--hal
It's funny how I discover these mistakes. I am lying awake in bed or listening to music and just thinking about what I wrote, and then bingo, I remember these mistakes in reporting about events in my own life. Humbling in a milieu where people are focused on dementia. On the other hand, my memory of external events I blog about seem to remain pretty reliable. Interesting...love and peace--hal
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