Mountain Philosopher

NOLA 2010

2010-04-11T11:01:00.001-04:00

Cafe During Monde

Stewart's Excellent Rant on the Nationalization of GM

2009-06-02T23:56:00.002-04:00

"More of a traditional capitalistic ethos on the road to democratic socialism, please....consider it?"

Could be the missing chapter in Das Kapital was where Uncle Karl is believed to have penned:

"The transition from late capitalism to the democratic socialist state will occur when the money supply and/or credit markets are grossly overextended and the profit-margins are gorged with this gross overextension, that when those markets begin their inexorable, inevitable plunge, the markets will feed upon themselves to survive. The state, a mere pawn of this speculative credit/capital, will be used bleed the remaining coffers of the working class by raiding their pension funds both private and public (SEE ENRON PENSION FUND; SOCIAL SECURITY; STATE PENSION FUNDS. Concurent with this feeding on the public's fiscal jugular, the credit markets will transfer "ownership" of assets previously held in private hands to public ones in an apparent demostration of enlightend socialistic government.

But that phase in history will have not come to pass just yet.

For while the name of "owner" is transferred to public hands, the lien will still be held by the oligarchs, both traditional and newly-minted, who will then focus all their attention of maintaining deflationary pressures for decades to come to protect their investment in debt. But in a exponetial fashion, this economic Ouroboros will run out of its own tail to consume and the beast will perish to make way for the next phases of history......

Restated: as the traditional private capitalist economy dies, its last gasp courtesy of a speculative credit bubble, it will sell itself at a grealy inflated outrageous price (as it knows this is the last sale under the old rules) to the new public economy. The public economy will eventually flourish but only after it either works off its collective indenture to the bondholders or glares at them with such contempt and rage that the overlords fearing overthrow, capitualte. Either way, it will happen."

Syncretism 2008

2008-10-26T18:07:00.001-04:00

The Great Need of the Hour

2008-01-21T15:30:00.000-05:00

{speech was delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church (MLK, Jr.'s home church) on January 20, 2008}

The Scripture tells us that when Joshua and the Israelites arrived at the gates of Jericho, they could not enter. The walls of the city were too steep for any one person to climb; too strong to be taken down with brute force. And so they sat for days, unable to pass on through.

But God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city, and on the seventh day he told them that when they heard the sound of the ram's horn, they should speak with one voice. And at the chosen hour, when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

There are many lessons to take from this passage, just as there are many lessons to take from this day, just as there are many memories that fill the space of this church. As I was thinking about which ones we need to remember at this hour, my mind went back to the very beginning of the modern Civil Rights Era.

Because before Memphis and the mountaintop; before the bridge in Selma and the march on Washington; before Birmingham and the beatings; the fire hoses and the loss of those four little girls; before there was King the icon and his magnificent dream, there was King the young preacher and a people who found themselves suffering under the yoke of oppression.

And on the eve of the bus boycotts in Montgomery, at a time when many were still doubtful about the possibilities of change, a time when those in the black community mistrusted themselves, and at times mistrusted each other, King inspired with words not of anger, but of an urgency that still speaks to us today:

"Unity is the great need of the hour" is what King said. Unity is how we shall overcome.

What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.

We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick.

We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.

And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.

So we have a deficit to close. We have walls - barriers to justice and equality - that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we've come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We've come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily - that it's just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved.

All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.

But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes - a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.

It's not easy to stand in somebody else's shoes. It's not easy to see past our differences. We've all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart - that puts up walls between us.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don't think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

For most of this country's history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man's inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays - on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others - all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face - war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

But if changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.

The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country's ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.

And that is what is at stake in the great political debate we are having today. The changes that are needed are not just a matter of tinkering at the edges, and they will not come if politicians simply tell us what we want to hear. All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility. We will have to fight to fix our schools, but we will also have to challenge ourselves to be better parents. We will have to confront the biases in our criminal justice system, but we will also have to acknowledge the deep-seated violence that still resides in our own communities and marshal the will to break its grip.

That is how we will bring about the change we seek. That is how Dr. King led this country through the wilderness. He did it with words - words that he spoke not just to the children of slaves, but the children of slave owners. Words that inspired not just black but also white; not just the Christian but the Jew; not just the Southerner but also the Northerner.

He led with words, but he also led with deeds. He also led by example. He led by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family. He led by taking a stand against a war, knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity. He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause discomfort. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.

That is the unity - the hard-earned unity - that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope - the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.

The stories that give me such hope don't happen in the spotlight. They don't happen on the presidential stage. They happen in the quiet corners of our lives. They happen in the moments we least expect. Let me give you an example of one of those stories.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.

And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.

And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.

And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope - but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone

In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.

Surge to Nowhere

2008-01-20T19:03:00.000-05:00

Andrew Bacevich writing in the Washington Post:

As the violence in Baghdad and Anbar province abates, the political and economic dysfunction enveloping Iraq has become all the more apparent. The recent agreement to rehabilitate some former Baathists notwithstand ing, signs of lasting Sunni-Shiite reconciliation are scant. The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that "Iraq is sovereign," that sovereignty remains a fiction.

A nation-building project launched in the confident expectation that the United States would repeat in Iraq the successes it had achieved in Germany and Japan after 1945 instead compares unfavorably with the U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina. Even today, Iraqi electrical generation meets barely half the daily national requirements. Baghdad households now receive power an average of 12 hours each day -- six hours fewer than when Saddam Hussein ruled. Oil production still has not returned to pre-invasion levels. Reports of widespread fraud, waste and sheer ineptitude in the administration of U.S. aid have become so commonplace that they barely last a news cycle. (Recall, for example, the 110,000 AK-47s, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets intended for Iraqi security forces that, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Pentagon cannot account for.) U.S. officials repeatedly complain, to little avail, about the paralyzing squabbling inside the Iraqi parliament and the rampant corruption within Iraqi ministries. If a primary function of government is to provide services, then the government of Iraq can hardly be said to exist.
----------------------
According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.

Old McDonald Had a Pterodactyl ....

2008-01-20T18:16:00.000-05:00

Maria Bamford is a crazy genius.

Patton Oswalt on Bush Supporters

2008-01-20T12:45:00.000-05:00

Huckabee Picks Up Key Endorsement

2008-01-16T16:39:00.001-05:00

"No stoppin' the Huckster now!"

Cole on the GOP

2007-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

John Cole of Balloon Juice weighs in on why the GOP is "in shambles:"

For starters, people got tired of being associated with these drooling retards. Then, when they realized that these drooling retards had ideological allies running the show in the Bush administration and then began to experience their idiotic policies, they moved from disgusted to outright hostile.
Like me. It had nothing to do with Burke, and everything to do with what the party had become. A bunch of bedwetting, loudmouth, corrupt, hypocritical, and incompetent boobs with a mean streak a mile long and no sense of fair play or proportion.

Elmo Volunteers to Explain War Injuries to Children

2007-10-05T16:56:00.001-04:00

From MSNBC:

NEW YORK - It’s not your typical Sesame Street episode. There are no lessons in letters or numbers, but there are plenty of hugs and lots of talk about feelings.
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces the hit kids’ show, is working on a DVD that will be distributed to military families. It’s designed to help injured veterans talk about their disabilities with their children.
{snip}
More than a million children have parents who are in the military and have been deployed in the last six years. And roughly 18,000 military personnel in Iraq or Afghanistan have been wounded or injured seriously enough to be evacuated.

In the new production, Rosita, a fluffy blue mop-headed muppet, is upset because her father has returned home in a wheelchair. Rosita angrily refers to the wheelchair as “that thing” and reminisces about the days when she could dance to salsa music and kick a ball with her dad.
With encouragement from Elmo, Rosita musters the nerve to talk with her parents about how she is feeling.
“Sometimes I feel a little sad, because things are so different now,” Rosita says during a family outing to the park. “I wish your legs were OK, Papi, and I wish you didn’t have to go to the doctor so much. And I just wish things could go back to the way they were!”
Rosita’s father tells her that although he may have changed, his love for her hasn’t. And he persuades her to hop on the back of his wheelchair so the two can try a new kind of dancing.
{snip}
Knell said Sesame Street is trying to model behavior and provide the vocabulary for parents who need extra help. “In many cases, Mommy and Daddy or caregivers may not have the tools necessary to deal with these very tough-to-teach issues,” Knell said.
Psychiatry professor Stephen Cozza of Uniformed Services University, which trains military doctors, said a parent’s injury or emotional problem is often “a big white elephant in the room that nobody’s talking about.”
{snip}
While the program doesn’t directly address emotional disorders faced by an estimated 20 percent of returning veterans, the DVD can help frame family conversations around that too, Cozza said.
Leslye Arsht, deputy undersecretary of defense for military community and family policy, said Sesame Street is doing something that isn’t easy for the military to tackle alone.
“There is no more credible voice for 3- to 5-year-olds than the voices of Elmo ... and parents trust him too,” Arsht said.
Army Maj. David Rozelle agreed. An amputee who spends time counseling others, Rozelle was injured in Iraq before becoming a parent to two young children.
“These little people our kids trust so much can explain limb loss and help kids cope,” he said. “We don’t do it very well ourselves.”

The statistics on deaths and injuries obviously only deal with the very tip of the iceberg. The costs of the war are nearly incalculable.

Murder, Negligent Homicide, or Taking Care of Business?

2007-10-05T16:39:00.001-04:00

Interesting debate at Blackfive in the comments regarding the incident involving US Marines at Haditha.

The official, Lt. Col. Paul Ware, said in a recommendation obtained by the North County Times that rather than face murder charges, squad leader Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich should be tried for the lesser offense of negligent homicide in the deaths of five children and two women.
Ware recommended 10 other murder charges against Wuterich be dismissed.

"I believe after reviewing all the evidence that no trier of fact can conclude Staff Sgt. Wuterich formed the criminal intent to kill," Ware wrote in reference to the women and children. "When a Marine fails to exercise due care and civilians die, the charge of negligent homicide, and not murder, is appropriate."

Blackfive blogger Uncle Jimbo made what I thought to be a reasonable analysis:

While I know that many would have preferred that no charges at all be filed, I believe that LTC Ware's judgment is proper. The actions taken by SSgt Wuterich were not designed to kill innocent Iraqis, but they certainly did, and his choices should be scrutinized. It took a generous reading of the ROE to justify the shootings and he may not even face the negligent homicide charges. But in my mind it shows that accountability matters to the Marine Corps and even if he is convicted on those charges, he and the other Marines involved are owed a huge apology from the lummox Murtha.

But most of Uncle Jimbo's readers don't see it that way. And that is troublesome.

"Mom, You've Got Homework Again in Mr. Frye's Class!"

2007-10-05T16:26:00.000-04:00

Interesting approach. Somewhat amazed the guy is getting away with it.

From The New York Times:

The parents of Damion Frye’s ninth-grade students are spending their evenings this fall doing something they thought they had left behind long ago: homework.
So far, Mr. Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.

If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.

The point, he said, is to keep parents involved in their children’s ’ education well into high school. Studies have shown that parental involvement improves the quality of the education a student receives, but teenagers seldom invite that involvement. So, Mr. Frye said, he decided to help out.

“Parents complain about never getting to see their kids’ work,” he said. “Now they have to.”

Some parents, he added, seem happy to revisit their high school years.

“There was one parent last year who would write pages and pages of stuff. It was great, so good to read,” said Mr. Frye, who graduated from Montclair High in 1994.

Others are more resistant. “When my daughter told me about the homework, I looked at her and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. I graduated. I’m done,’” said Lydia Bishop, a local real estate broker whose daughter Vanessa was in Mr. Frye’s class last year. “I did it very resentfully, but I did it.”

Inaugural Friday Cat Blogging

2007-10-05T11:36:00.001-04:00

This is Mr. Allen. Allen is about 20 - 25 lbs of declawed fluffy love. Strictly indoor patrol. Loves to wrestle. Very talkative (part Siamese). Major part of my and Genna's life.

The lamely named Little Kitty. Little Kitty showed up last winter. Genna called me from the driveway to tell me to bring some cat food out. A famished kitty gobbled it up and has been on steady patrol ever since, putting on several pounds. Genna sprang for a $200 outdoor, padded, insulated cat house only to watch Little Kitty snuggle up in a planter full of potting soil.

Putting food on the deck for Little Kitty kind of started a soup kitchen for the local wildlife. We get plenty of possums and there's a wily raccoon who has figured out the feeding schedule. Additionally, there was this cream colored kitty that we would see flash by upon occasion but who would run off the instant he was spotted. Very slowly he got used to us and now comes up to us for pets and will even let us hold him. Missing tail, hence the not-quite-as-lame name of Bobby. Bobby has the most musical purr, singing/purring one note as he breathes in and another as he breathes out.

Rainbow Over Whiteside Cove

2007-10-05T11:30:00.000-04:00

click for much larger image

Taken from the deck of my grandmother's house last spring after a monster thunderstorm had just passed through the valley.

Xenophobia Meets the Stupids

2007-10-04T21:29:00.000-04:00

Mexican-American citizen owns business that looks to be a bar in Reno, Nevada.
Flies Mexican flag above American flag on pole in front of business.
Someone takes a break from busy life and calls local TV station to inform them of national emergency.
Slow news day plus questionable decision made by news editor equals news team dispatched to bar.
As cameraman approaches, a feller who claims to be a vet and claims that the provenance of the long knife in his hand also is from the US Army, lowers flags and liberates Stars & Stripes while tossing the Mexican flag to the ground. Makes profound statement.
Cowed bar owner retrieves Mexican flag and goes back into bar.

But then it really goes to weird, as the local anchor who clearly was doing her makeup in civics class offers up this profound inanity:

"Federal law states it is illegal to fly any flag above an American flag."

And then she goes on to give proof she doesn't understand what it means for something to be a federal law nor does she understand federalism:

"The penalties for these laws vary from state to state."

This excellent website lays out all of proper flag etiquette, which for better or worse, as the site explains, has never risen to federal law. The anchor would have been correct to note that the bar owner was indeed violating flag etiquette as opposed to a federal law. {There is federal flag CODE but, again, not any criminal law}

There are state laws about flag displays. In Nevada for instance, there is a law which states:

"...it is a misdemeanor for anyone to deface or defile the U.S. flag or the Nevada state flag. The law also forbids the use of such flags for advertising or publicity purposes."

What's interesting here is that it is illegal to use the flag for advertising which is why car dealerships across the country vie to see which one can fly the biggest flag....because they support the troops.

Wolf over at milblog Blackfive has put his finger on who is to blame for this sad state of affairs:

"Teachers, Professors, Police, Politicians, Neighbors, Lawyers, Politicians, The President, The Governor, The Mayor, Congressmen, Senators, Legislators, Bosses, Students, Colleges, Schools, Principals, Politicians, Kids, Parents, Internet, TV, Radio, Howard Stern, Mancow, Foreigners, Al Qaeda, Islamists, The French, Movies, Hollywood, California, Pelosi, Reid, Murtha, Politicians, Schools, Councilmen, Lawyers..."

I and my fellow teachers are at the top of the anti-flag conspiracy. Hmmm. We all fly one in our classrooms. Actually, I have several, including my favorite, the Gadsden flag (pictured at the top of this post) which was first seen on the battlefield of Bunker Hill in the American Revolution, considered by many historians to be the first American flag, which is hoisted in all its 3x5' glory.

I love my country and I love the flag, all versions of it. But I sure don't like xenophobia. And xenophobia married to militarism with a stiff case believing anyone who doesn't support a war of choice is unpatriotic, is gross, obnoxious, and has nothing to do with what the flag, and more importantly, what the Constitution stands for.

If Wolf's lessons of democracy are what we are to be inculcating in Iraq, if the "deciders" have a firm a grasp of civics as the Reno anchor, then the whole enterprise is doomed, not to mention the trouble we've got here at the house.

{The YOUTUBE video cuts the anchor commentary, but you can watch the whole un-edited nastiness here}

Mark Morford Goes to Whole Foods

2007-10-03T19:24:00.000-04:00

..Why the hell can't this be the way of American business overall?

It's like some sort of drug, something warm and happy and dangerous and visceral they inject into the lighting system or mist all over the carefully constructed mountains of pornographic produce or slather all over the nearly religious seafood and meat departments because, oh my sweet Jesus with a Le Creuset ramekin and 10 pounds of artisanal Gruyere, there really is something frighteningly addictive about the glorious hellbeast grocerypalooza known as Whole Foods.
It's like this otherworldly vibration, this wickedly overblown slice of succulent, obnoxious, must-have lifestyle nirvana for the health-conscious semi-progressive well-moneyed hipster set and also those who really, really want to think of themselves as such.
And best/worst of all, it's all overlaid with this amazing sheen of healthy, pro-green, socially responsible attitude that effortlessly chips away at your cynicism and seems to suggest a bit more of a statement than just, you know, "Hey kids, if you shop here, if you buy into the ethos and if you eat the right kind of organic lettuce and can afford our huge tubs of crab-artichoke bisque, well, you are on the right track. You are, in fact, approaching enlightenment."
{snip}
Because here's the thing: While it's terribly easy to accuse the joint of being the very embodiment of pseudo-progressive ideals wrapped in pitch-perfect marketing that goes so far beyond a mere grocery store, so far beyond the place you need to dash into to grab some sour cream and a pack of condoms, there is indeed something more to this joint's existence, something that, in the age of bloated Wal-Marts and tract homes like a cancer and a president with a fifth-grader's vocabulary, is actually worth celebrating.
I mean, my God. Merely skimming the company's own press releases, reading up on its various foundations, its commitment to transparency in how it does business and the issues it faces as a so-called "do-gooder" company, its current No. 5 ranking in the Forbes list of the 100 best companies to work for, its surprisingly progressive positions on supporting local farmers and promoting sustainability and humane animal treatment, its commitment to community, its overall dedication to minimizing chemicals and additives and all the mountains of toxic crap our country swims in like a noxious river, well, it's tough not to sit back and go: Wait, if they can do it, why the hell can't this be the way of American business overall?
{snip}
Because it turns out — hey wow and go figure — you can actually make a great deal of money by, you know, caring about the products you sell and the people you sell them to. It turns out it might actually be possible to run a large, profitable corporation and still have something resembling a conscience, an idea that seems almost antithetical to the brutal capitalist ideal of money-uber-alles.
Yes, Whole Foods is far from perfect. Yes, the large-scale "industrial organic" model the store adheres to, as Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" so expertly lays out, has its share of major drawbacks. Yes, maybe I've just been suckered in and drunk the organic Kool-Aid. And yes, far too many of the yuppie moms who shop there have the same $400 strollers and the same Range Rovers and the same perky haircut. Whatever.
The truth remains: Would that more businesses behaved this way. Would that more corporations were cursed with a conscience, a sense of community and decency and an overall ethos of holistic health. Plus the damnable place makes you want to eat better and cook more and spend your kids' college fund on fresh duck sausage and 10 bottles of tawny port and a case of organic grass-fed free-range lube. What's not to like?

One might not like the fact that Whole Foods is "corporationy" but in Asheville we have two other alternatives, Earth Fare and Green Life which I basically cannot tell apart except for the fact that for some aesthetic twitch, I still prefer Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton, OH.

Questionable Devolving to Bizarre

2007-10-03T15:53:00.000-04:00

From Education Week:

Questionable...

The issue of whether teachers should be permitted to carry guns in schools has once again triggered heated debate among educators and lawmakers, this time in Oregon and Michigan.

The Oregon case involves a lawsuit filed by a high school teacher in the 12,400-student Medford school district who contends she should be allowed to carry a licensed concealed weapon on campus.

The teacher, who has a restraining order against her ex-husband, denied to authorities that she was carrying a gun at school. But she filed suit in the Jackson County Circuit Court on Sept. 18, under the pseudonym “Jane Doe,” claiming that her concealed-weapons permit should allow her to carry a gun on school grounds.

Oregon law allows anyone with a concealed-weapons license to carry guns into public buildings, but most school districts have rules barring employees from carrying weapons onto school grounds.

Bizarre......

In Michigan, meanwhile, state Rep. David Agema, a Republican, has introduced a bill that would give districts the option of allowing a teacher with firearm certification to have access to a registered gun on school grounds.
“We have recent federal reports that al-Qaida is targeting our schools, which are sitting targets,” said Trevor Z. Pittsley, a spokesman for Rep. Agema. “This bill is not at all about guns. It’s about keeping our kids safe.”

I admit that I have been caught fully unaware that AQ had me and my fellow teachers and students in their cross-hairs. I'm sure a handgun will thwart their pitiful plot. Maybe we can use it to shoot the survivors in the death throes of an anthrax attack.

Contemporary Political Discourse

2007-10-03T15:24:00.000-04:00

Ed Brayton of Dispatches From the Culture Wars gives us Maxim #1: (using the revived Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill spat as an illustration)

When I offered the possibility that the stories Hill told may well have been true and still not be a genuine case of sexual harassment, I was immediately attacked from both sides; the liberals claiming that I was obviously a sexist who thinks all women are liars, while the conservatives were claiming that I'm obviously biased against Thomas, probably because he's black, for even suggesting that he could possibly have made a few crude comments. And that, sadly, is pretty normal for political discourse these days.

It's not enough that our political opponents be wrong, they must be evil. We can't just explain why we think they're wrong, we have to imagine some glaringly obvious character flaw that explains why they're wrong. I'm sure I'm guilty of this from time to time myself, but it's something we should all try and avoid as much as possible.

Partisan politics is far too much like sports rivalries. Once you begin to identify yourself as an advocate of X and an opponent of Y, it is all too easy to set up cognitive filters that distort the way we see reality. The X filter strains out any information that might cause one to question X, while the Y filter strains out any information that might cause one to consider Y.

We build up simplistic dichotomies with entirely different standards for belief and we begin to think solely in terms of Us and Them. If one of Us is accused something wrong, we demand absolute proof before we'll accept it; if one of Them is accused of doing something wrong, the mere allegation is all the proof necessary. After all, we all know what They are like, don't we?

Yep

Pulp Fiction Suitcase

2007-10-03T11:52:00.001-04:00

What was in the suitcase that Jules and Vincent had to retrieve?

This makes sense to me.

Sir Al

2007-10-01T08:58:00.000-04:00

click for larger image

Moonshine Patriot's take on the Diane Sawyer/Jenna Bush Interview

2007-10-01T07:07:00.000-04:00

From the Moonshine Patriot

Sawyer: who is the disciplinarian in the family mom or dad

Jenna: Grandma Barbara that woman is pure evil

{snip}

Diane: describe yur fiancee

Jenna: he's outdoorsy he's a lumberjack and he's okay

Diane: but he's really political

Jenna: no not really he only worked with karl rove to get ahead
Diane: does he get to sleep with Not Jenna

Jenna: yes i will be traveling alot

Diane: what will you do differently from Chimpy and the Joker

Jenna: well based on their example and my whole family i think we'll just skip the whole having kids thing

Diane Sawyer: yes three generations of imbeciles is probably enough

Diane: your dad is teh most powerful man in teh hemisphere

Jenna: yes I’ve learned to read and met black people

Diane: you wrote a book

Jenna: yes its like bob marley meets a Bennetton ad

A Heart Touched, a Mind Opened

2007-09-26T22:54:00.000-04:00

Things we never said come together
The hidden truth no longer haunting me
Tonight we touched on the things that were never spoken
That kind of understanding sets me free
--Elton John

Mark Morford reports:

It was one of those surreal, suspended moments, an unexpected little hiccup in the otherwise bleak sociopolitical continuum where you couldn’t help but pause and gasp and sit back and let your bitter cynicism and your hard-won ennui fall away and actually allow yourself, for now, just this once, really and truly believe what you were seeing.

Could it really be happening? Was there really any way in hell a straight white male BushCo-era Republican would dare step up to a live microphone in front of a TV camera in a major American city and honestly admit that, well, he was wrong, and he is very sorry, and he has now officially reversed his position and now fully supports gay marriage and will actually sign a city council resolution acknowledging and advocating same?

And furthermore could this politician, during said cynicism-defying announcement, actually choke back tears — real, human tears, not the fake, creepy kind you see from, say, Ted Haggard or Larry Craig or Lynne Cheney after four martinis and an hour staring at her husband — such a genuine display of emotion that you can’t help but think it might actually be coupled to a living, breathing human soul?

Yes, it happened. Just recently, down in San Diego. Jerry Sanders is the politico, and he’s apparently very much a (moderate) Republican mayor and a former police chief, and he apparently has a gay daughter no one really knew was gay and members of his mayoral staff are also gay and somehow, some way, both these facts played into his decision to reverse his position on gay marriage and go public in what has to be one of the most honest, humble and heartfelt public displays of ideological evolution by a Republican since … well, I can’t even think of any. Can you?

Coming Home

2007-09-26T18:32:00.000-04:00

My hometown of Highlands, NC lost its soul for me sometime in the 1980s. Fritzie Sheumaker traveled back to Highlands recently to visit her father's grave at the Highlands Cemetery and wrote this wonderful account. Her writing captures the town the way it was.

When I was growing up, I thought all cemeteries were like this one -- unbelievably sited, landscaped, and secluded. If you ever go to Highlands, the cemetery is a must see, especially in the fall when the leaves are in full crimson and gold. The trees nestle the graves, creating a sacred space and the orientation is sloped towards the west so that the setting sun is visible before it fades below the ridgeline, casting long shadows over the soft rolling grass terraces.

Coming Home

"Bul-l-l-y!" Buzz Beaty would call loudly across the street whenever my father would drive by the corner filling station. Any number of fishing buddies, hunting cronies, and drinking companions habitually lounged outside the two-pump Sinclair Gas and Oil. Propped back in a motley collection of second-hand chairs, the men acted as sentries whose main purpose was keeping up with the comings and goings of townsfolk and visitors in tiny Highlands, North Carolina. Affectionately called Billy by most, my father would raise his arm in salute to the group, and, more often than not, drop by for an exchange of comfortable old fish stories, inside jokes, and outrageous lies. Long before Gomer and Goober, the gas station group included native sons with names like Buzz, Dead-Eye, Jimbo, and Pee-Wee.
{snip}
Highlands always grew in the summer months. During the winter, its population was little more than 500, and most of those folk were related to five or six big families. June brought what we called "the summer people," mostly wealthy Georgians and Floridians escaping to the cool mountain air. Their summer "cottages" were usually large homes with spacious lawns and breathtaking views, and many year-round Highlands residents made their living building, painting, repairing, or cleaning these houses. Summer was a bustling time, and even the boys at the Sinclair station had to cut back on their lounging time. Still, the only traffic jam in the 1950's was two cars stopping at the town's one traffic light at the Bill's Soda Shop corner.
Bill's was a great place for ice cream or cherry Cokes. The little shop boasted a Formica counter and vinyl covered stools as well as several tables for two with curved-back ice cream parlor chairs. Two huge pinball machines dominated one wall. They had impressive light and sound effects, and the rousing TILT alarms could be heard on the sidewalk outside. A big attraction was the magazine rack where browsing was welcome and expected. One end of the rack held comic books, and I bought my childhood copies of Superman, Archie, and Little Lulu at Bill's.
Across the street was the Highlander Restaurant with substantial country fare offered inside and a row of newspaper vending machines outside. In summer one could buy the Miami Herald and Saint Petersburg Times (only a day or two old), but in winter only the Asheville Citizen box held papers. The Highlander smelled of coffee and fried everything, and its shiny red counter stools were usually full. My father would bring me here for hot chocolate after we had dropped my sister and cousins off at school. Sipping the hot liquid, I would listen to Daddy talk politics with the regulars.
Next door was Potts' Market. Owned by my mother's uncle, the grocery was a compact affair of shelves and produce bins up front and the meat case in the rear. Cousin Steve, in his blood-stained apron, managed the artful cutting of roasts and steaks to display in the glass case. We did our shopping here, of course, but often our groceries were delivered to the back door at home. The Potts family dominated the adjacent US Post Office as well, with my mother, cousin Bud, and my Uncle Nick all working to sort and post the Highlands mail. "My daddy doesn't have a job, but my mama works at the post office," my sister had once announced to neighbors. Since Daddy traveled and had no office to visit, Becky concluded he surely was unemployed.
{snip}
Leaving downtown, we passed the new post office. A few old homes on this street looked the same, but rows of condominiums had replaced many familiar landmarks. At the stop sign, I noticed the lot once occupied by Crane's Riding stable was now home to a row of silver Airstream trailer homes. They were neatly positioned and surrounded with bright flowers. The same stream where we had watered the horses bubbled through, and I had to admit even a trailer park was an improvement over the stable. Neatness was never a strong suit for the Cranes, and the area around the stable was always squishy from a trickling water hose, mud, and horse manure. The building itself was a tumble-down row of stalls with ill-fitting doors and lopsided walls. Bridles and halters hung haphazardly on nails, and the Cranes themselves had learned a lot about lounging from the boys at the Sinclair station. Nevertheless, my sister and I had enjoyed many rides with Oscar and Chester Crane as we imagined ourselves as characters in National Velvet or My Friend Flicka.
{snip}
Positioned on three tiers of sloping hillside, the cemetery was surrounded by dense forest. Well beyond the tops of the most distant trees, a line of the stately Appalachian mountains rose and fell against the blue sky. The mountains extended to the horizon and the farthest peaks were themselves a dark blue. The air was clear and as quiet as a majestic cathedral. Here and there among the headstones were outcroppings of granite, making the man-made markers look almost natural. It was a beautiful scene with the right to be termed a bit of heaven on earth. As I welcomed the compassionate embrace of family and friends gathered at Daddy's graveside, I thought, Daddy, it is exactly as I remembered. Welcome home.

I knew Jimbo and Dead-eye. I spent my youth playing pinball at Bill's, ate God knows how many meals at the Highlander and rode the worn out horses at Crane's. I relished the 50 cent movie matinées at the Galax Theater. A kid on a spyder bike with a banana seat, I could go anywhere as long as I was home by 5:45 for dinner.

One detail left out was the window between the theater lobby and a diner called Prof's, owned by a long-time teacher and principal, Prof Newton. You could get a hot dog, cheeseburger, fries, cherry smashes -- anything -- at the Prof's window and go enjoy the flick. I grew up in paradise.

"A Big Family of Shits"

2007-09-22T23:17:00.000-04:00

Louis Auchincloss tears back the veil on a slice of upper echelon WASP society and its not so pleasant impact on the country.

From the Financial Times:

As Vidal complained in the same essay for the New York Review of Books, “of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs. Yet such is the vastness of our society and the remoteness of academics and bookchatterers from actual power that those who should be most in this writer’s debt have no idea what a useful service he renders us by revealing and, in some ways, betraying his class.”
{snip}
“It is a myth,” he continues, that a once great and powerful class of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants has been pushed aside; the ruling class has simply eliminated the ethnic and religious bars to entry, and expanded. “Proust studied this very carefully,” he says. “He understood that society would take in anybody it wants.”
Indeed, at the very centre of American politics is the great dynastic Wasp story of our time, the Bush family (both presidents: Philips Andover – America’s Eton – Yale, Skull and Bones). Surely this is the grist for a great society novel? Auchincloss demurs. “I just think the Bushes are a big family of shits,” he says with a sibilant hiss, “they might have existed anywhere.” The statement sits oddly with the photograph on the mantelpiece, which is of the Bushes welcoming Auchincloss to the Oval Office after he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2005. “That’s because all the grandchildren are there,” he replies, noting that he has received an enormous amount of grief from friends over the picture. As befits a lawyer, his defence is a touch legalistic: “I didn’t accept a prize from George W Bush, I accepted a prize from the President of the United States. Who am I to turn that down? The grandchildren had a lovely time!”
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “ ‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” He pauses before invoking a 20th-century American foreign-policy who’s who: “There was Cy Vance, Bill Scranton, Ted Beale, both Bundys, Bill and McGeorge – they all got behind that war in Vietnam and they pushed it as far as they could. And we lost a quarter of a million men. They were all idealistic, good, virtuous,” says Auchincloss, “the finest men you could find. It was the most disillusioning thing that happened in my life.”

Moonshine Patriot on Hitch and Moveon

2007-09-22T13:38:00.000-04:00

Todd: Moveon is like Chris Hitchens they're fun and you used to like them - but then they keep showing up at parties drunk and pissing on the carpet yelling ‘fuck you all’

More here.

Colbert on Blogs

2007-09-22T11:51:00.000-04:00

Pretty scathing critique of armchair activism

Coen Bros. Movie Premise

2007-09-19T12:40:00.000-04:00

Man dies after armless artist's head-butt:

SNELLVILLE, Ga. - Police are investigating the death of a man who collapsed after he was head-butted by an armless man in a fight over a woman. Snellville Police Chief Roy Whitehead said the two men, Charles Keith Teer and William Russell Redfern, scuffled Monday afternoon in the driveway of a suburban Atlanta home.
Police say Redfern, who was born with no right arm and only a short stump for his left arm, kicked Teer and Teer hit Redfern during the fight, which was due to long-standing bad blood over a woman who once dated Teer and now dates Redfern.
After bystanders separated them, Redfern "came back and head-butted (Teer) one time," Whitehead said.
Teer complained of feeling dizzy, collapsed and died, Whitehead said.
{snip}
Known by the nickname "Rusty," Redfern made a name for himself in the late 1980s for pen and ink drawings he does using his foot.
{snip}
According to the site, he started Redfern Originals Inc. in 1987, producing Christmas cards, stationery and limited-edition prints.

At least it happened in Georgia and not North Carolina

Doghouse Riley on the Patriot Scandal

2007-09-18T22:29:00.000-04:00

Doghouse Riley is an irascible, aged Hoosier with wicked, literate, funny-as-hell acid in his pen. He posts on a wide variety of socio/poli/cultural issues as well as mockingly complaining about his wife henpecking him to complete home improvement projects.

He nails the Belichick spy story in my opinion.

NICE of NBC to make room in its innovative Sunday Night Football halftime show (it's four guys sitting around a table, but...only two of them are ex-jocks! And they aren't all yelling all the time! ) for an Al Michaels taped interview with Pats owner Robert Kraft (opening question: "Bob, did you have any knowledge of this practice before this week?" surprising answer: "Of course I did, Al. I've been directing it for years from my personal nuclear sub. There's just something so exciting about it. I started peeping into girls' restrooms when I was four, you know"). Because god knows in the roughly two hours of football I'd watched to that point--just football, no pre-game, halftime, or Sunday morning analysis type--I'd heard only twenty minutes or so of low-cal apologias for systematic electronic cheating of the remarkably hubristic American sort. In a game! We can no longer expect all our fellow citizens to agree that a game should be played by the rules.

Don't get me wrong. It's nice to see the Corporate Apology Kabuki in action every now and then. It reminds us why we have a Fourteenth Amendment.

One of the unexpected insights of old age is this: in a Universe of constant change, the only changes that actually matter to people are the ones which are beneath insignificance. If you buy a new suit, the third time you wear it in public young people will nudge each other and snigger at the ancient relic you've draped yourself in. A supreme non-talent like Ms Spears fumbles and stumbles her way through a lip-sync'd stroll among professional dancers--which aside from her inexplicably fascinating personal life is her one claim to fleeting fame--and the whole country goes out of its collective gourd. Yet the administration runs a Reader's Digest version of Vietnam and gets re-elected in the teeth of it a year-and-a-half later.

Make sure you read the whole thing.

The Tell-Tale Tape Recorder

2007-09-18T21:23:00.000-04:00

The guilty convict themselves.

From The NYTimes:

Cable talking heads and gossip Web site owners covering the latest O.J. Simpson news can’t believe their lucky stars that an audio recording apparently from the incident has somehow emerged.

But the ex-wife of one of the suspects says it’s actually quite common for folks around the football great and former murder defendant to have a tape rolling.
“Many people carry recorders around him to see if they can catch him slipping to make money,” said Debbie Alexander, 41, former wife of Walter Alexander, 46, of Mesa, Arizona.

No doubt I now grew VERY pale; but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased -- and what could I do? It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND -- MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased. O God! what COULD I do? I foamed -- I raved -- I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly , and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! -- no, no? They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! -- they were making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now -- again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER! --

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!"

A Better iPhone for ....$133

2007-09-17T22:06:00.000-04:00

From The Japan Times:

SANCHUNG, Taipei

At the end of an alley in Taiwan's most violent city, a black Mercedes-Benz sedan blocks a sliding-glass door that opens only from within. Inside, technophiles can buy iPhone knockoffs for two-thirds the legitimate price.

With a touch-screen and Apple Inc.'s logo on the back, the "iClones" look just like the real thing. Apple won't offer iPhones — which combine a phone, music and video player with wireless Internet — in Asia until 2008. The owner of the shop in Sanchung, a Taipei suburb, says he began selling "aifungs" in December, six months before the iPhone went on sale in the U.S.

"We can't ignore iPhone because it's so hot," says Ben, who spoke on condition he be identified only by his first name because selling pirated phones is illegal.

The clones show how fast Asian counterfeiters move. Ben says his company designed the fakes from pictures posted on the Internet before Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January. Knockoffs cost the global economy $650 billion annually, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates. Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock wouldn't discuss how much the company loses as a result of phony products.
{snip}
"The guts aren't hard," Ben says. "The hard part is the design and the exterior."
{snip}
In Sanchung, Ben's clones carry a notice in fractured English that reads: "Waring. It will break the law without authorized by Apple Inc., if you use 'iPhone' logo on any electronic pruducts."

While the knockoffs resemble iPhones, they don't use Apple software. Ben says his phones have the advantage of working on any network, while iPhones connect only to AT&T Inc.'s system.

"It's the exterior we are imitating," Ben says. "If customers want functions, we can offer more and much better functions than the real phone."

"My iPhone-Fu is Greater Than Your's Mr. Jobs."

More iPhone clones and killers here.

Global Warming = Drowning in a Sea of Mammoth Shit

2007-09-17T16:40:00.001-04:00

Actual mammoth dung....no shit!

I guess we might as well drill ANWAR if this is what we've got to look forward to:

DUVANNY YAR, Russia - Sergei Zimov bends down, picks up a handful of syrupy mud and holds it up to his nose. It smells like a cow pat, but he knows better.

“It smells like mammoth dung,” he says.

This is more than just another symptom of global warming.

For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation.

But Zimov, a scientist who for almost 30 years has studied climate change in Russia’s Arctic, believes that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

“This will lead to a type of global warming which will be impossible to stop,” he said.

When the organic matter left behind by mammoths and other wildlife is exposed to the air by the thawing permafrost, his theory runs, microbes that have been dormant for thousands of years spring back into action.

As a by-product they emit carbon dioxide and — even more damaging in terms of its impact on the climate — methane gas.

According to Zimov, the microbes are going to start emitting these gases in enormous quantities.

Here in Yakutia, a region in the northeastern corner of Siberia, the belt of permafrost containing the mammoth-era soil covers an area roughly the size of France and Germany combined. There is even more of it elsewhere in Siberia.

“The deposits of organic matter in these soils are so gigantic that they dwarf global oil reserves,” Zimov said.

U.S. government statistics show mankind emits about 7 billion metric tons of carbon a year.

“Permafrost areas hold 500 billion tons of carbon, which can fast turn into greenhouse gases,” Zimov said. “If you don’t stop emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere ... the Kyoto Protocol (an international pact aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions) will seem like childish prattle.”

Hmmm. I say we throw Mr. False Prophet himself, Senator Inhofe in the lake of sulfur:

"As I said on the Senate floor on July 28, 2003, "much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science." I called the threat of catastrophic global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," a statement that, to put it mildly, was not viewed kindly by environmental extremists and their elitist organizations."

"And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever." Revelation 20:10

Haunted Child's Room

2007-09-17T16:31:00.000-04:00

If you are easily scared, keep the lights on. Truly unnerving.

http://view.break.com/312640 - Watch more free videos

Beyond Dilettantism...

2007-09-16T17:40:00.001-04:00

Enrevanche points us to a very cool Ask Metafilter thread:

"What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) to laypeople?"

As Brother Barry points out, betcha can't just order one book.

I think my first one will be bell hooks' Teaching to Transgres s. Publisher's Weekly review:

Cultural theorist hooks means to challenge preconceptions, and it is a rare reader who will be able to walk away from her without considerable thought. Despite the frequent appearance of the dry word "pedagogy," this collection of essays about teaching is anything but dull or detached. hooks begins her meditations on class, gender and race in the classroom with the confession that she never wanted to teach. By combining personal narrative, essay, critical theory, dialogue and a fantasy interview with herself (the latter artificial construct being the least successful), hooks declares that education today is failing students by refusing to acknowledge their particular histories. Criticizing the teaching establishment for employing an over-factualized knowledge to deny and suppress diversity, hooks accuses colleagues of using "the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power." Far from a castigation of her field, however, Teaching to Transgress is full of hope and excitement for the possibility of education to liberate and include. She is a gentle, though firm, critic, as in the essay "Holding My Sister's Hand," which could well become a classic about the distrust between black and white feminists. While some will find her rejection of certain difficult theory narrow-minded, it is a small flaw in an inspired and thought-provoking collection

More on the Fallon/Petraeus Thing

2007-09-16T11:09:00.000-04:00

When I came out of semi-retirement, it was fated that Chap and I would likely resurrect our ongoing blog feud over the war.

Yep.

Chap and some other mil-blogs have taken on the issue as to whether Admiral Fallon called General Petraeus an "ass-kissing little chickenshit." You can read Chap's first take on the matter here, my first comment, and then Chap's rebuttal.

Here's my next round:

{Chap wrote} What equally bizarre information are you using to expect that the cabinet-level appointee is expected and encouraged by the President to follow a different strategy than the President’s? Put in another way, what evidence do you have to think that this is so, since it flies in the face of what the military is about?

That bizarre information is American military and political history. The most accessible data to me are the pol-mil machinations of the Lincoln Administration and the Union Army. You can go read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals among many other books to get a good idea of the infighting within the Lincoln administration. They did not speak with one voice; leaks, backstabbing, even an attempt to un-nominate Lincoln right before Atlanta fell were all part of the scene. Lincoln's lack of control, both in the military and political sense, of the Army is legendary and hardly needs to be rehashed. Other easily accessible examples are VP picks -- not done because the top guy loves 'em or is in agreement with him but historically done because it brings factions together -- JFK/LBJ, Ike/Dick, Carter/Mondale etc. Cabinet appointments are also are made with the notion of pleasing various disparate factions.

Our substitutes for parliamentary government are Presidencies which are quite frequently coalitions of different factions much as ruling majorities operate in parliamentary systems. The stronger the President's faction, the less he has to rely upon coalitions and sharing of power. The weaker the President's faction, say in the wake of a 2006 election where, to use his word, he took a "thumpin", the more concessions have to be made to other factions. In this particular case, the concession was to his father's faction, the global realists -- enter Bob Gates. Does Gates see the world in vastly different terms than the President? Don't think so. But his pivotal role and endorsement of the ISG and its findings put him squarely at odds with a president who did not want to change strategy. It is logical to assume that Gates would select people, like Fallon, to further his views in an attempt to rudder the administration towards ISG goals.

There's no slam at PAOs with the spokespuppet comment. I'm a spokespuppet and I tell my students that. The state of NC, the State Board of Education, the NC Dept of Public Instruction, all under the heavy influence of NC Citizens for Business and Industry, wrote the course of study I have to deliver and which my students are tested on and my school and district evaluated. But unlike the PAO, I have tenure and can mouth off about being a spokespuppet without real fear of retribution. He, on the other hand, has to follow orders, or so I've been told, or there are severe consequences in store.

Let's backtrack just a bit. I was remiss in my first comment to not mention the fact that there was a bit of corroboration outside the admittedly dubious Inter-Press News Service. And that corroboration came from the editorially neoconservative paper, The Washington Post, which reported on Sept 9th :

"The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops.

One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men.

"Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it."

Again, no direct confirmation of the slur, but corroboration of an environment from which it may have well sprung.

Ironically, I find the response Blackfive got from CENTCOM to be perhaps the most damning:

Jim,
Thanks for your inquiry.

The story is inaccurate. Admiral Fallon and General Petraeus have an outstanding relationship.

LCDR Scott Miller
CENTCOM Public Affairs

That's a textbook non-denial denial. The story is "inaccurate?" How so? Did Fallon say General Petraeus was a "BIG......?" We have no idea. Why not categorically state that Admiral Fallon never uttered either the purported sentiment nor anything remotely like it? Outstanding relationship? First, what's that mean exactly? Second, I can have an excellent relationship with someone, especially someone I respect, get frustrated and/or disappointed with one of their actions or utterances and call them on it in harsh terms, and still have a good relationship. Good relationships don't preclude harsh words between comrades.

In spite of all the space I've burned, I don't think this is the main issue. What is the issue is a man of most excellent reputation and service being placed in a horrible situation, both militarily and politically. General Petraeus has not only been asked to pick up the pieces of a failed military policy, he has been ordered to stand in for the President as a spokesman for the war, not unlike the LCDR at CENTCOM, to defend a policy he would not appear to endorse 100%.

And has that happened before?

"Several factors kept the chiefs from challenging the president’s subterfuges. The Professional code of the military officer prohibits him or her from engaging in political activity. Actions that could have undermined the administration’s credibility and derail its ... policy could not have been undertaken lightly.

The president was lying, and he expected the chiefs to lie as well or, at least, to withhold the whole truth. Although the president should not have placed the chiefs in that position, the flag officers should not have tolerated it when he had."

That would be from one Colonel H.R. McMaster, current adviser to General Petraeus, from his Dereliction of Duty, a commentary on Vietnam. Col. McMaster has been passed over twice for promotion to Brigadier General in the past two years but one shouldn't infer anything from that as there is never anything to see; we should all just move along since Machiavelli has been rendered inoperative in the American armed forces.

Chap updates here & here.

I respond back here.

Friedman: No More Friedman Units

2007-09-16T08:58:00.000-04:00

After both inventing the concept of the Friedman Unit as well as being one of its most prominent abusers, Thomas Friedman has decided to stop playing kick the can with Iraq and calls for setting a date for withdrawal:

The sad thing for the American people is that we have no commander in chief anymore, framing our real situation and options. The president’s description on Thursday of the stakes in Iraq was delusional. An Iraqi ally fighting for “freedom” against “extremists”? There are extremists in the Iraqi government, army and police. There is a civil war on top of tribal, neighborhood and jihadist wars, fueled not by a single Iraqi quest for freedom, but by differing quests for “justice,” revenge and, yes, democracy. The only possible self-sustaining outcome in the near term is some form of radical federalism.

{snip}

There is an opportunity now for Democrats, and Americans will be listening — but they need to articulate a concrete endgame policy, and it would have to include at least three components:

First, a detailed blueprint with a fixed withdrawal date tied to a negotiation with Iraqi factions on a federal solution tied to a military redeployment plan to contain the inevitable spillover from Iraq."

Finally.

Of course, it will be three Friedman Units from now before a Democrat is in the White House and before a withdrawal date could be set without fear of a veto.

Zeitgeist

2007-09-15T15:55:00.001-04:00

Play 'em both at the same time for maximum effect. Not quite the same as playing Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard of Oz but definitely causes altered states of consciousness.

Greenspan & Powell: BFF

2007-09-15T11:46:00.001-04:00

Perhaps the two greatest enablers of the macro-misteps of the Bush Era are former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan. Powell enabled the President and the country into a disastrous war; Greenspan did the same with the subprime mess. And now they both want to totally absolve themselves of any responsibility and blame it all on Dubya.

Retch.

From The NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.

Mr. Bush, he writes, was never willing to contain spending or veto bills that drove the country into deeper and deeper deficits, as Congress abandoned rules that required that the cost of tax cuts be offset by savings elsewhere. “The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” writes Mr. Greenspan, a self-described “libertarian Republican.”

That's some libertarianism he practiced, artificially and unwisely keeping the discount rate so low so long as to enable Bush's re-election while not looking after the long-term health of the American economy. Milton Friedman spins in his grave wondering where Paul Volcker is.

Follow the Oil Money

2007-09-14T12:36:00.000-04:00

Why is this man smiling? Could it be because of failure of American policy in Iraq?

From NYTimes, Paul Krugman writes (from behind the firewall):

...oil is pretty much the only thing Iraq has going for it. Two-thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all its government revenue come from the oil sector. Without an agreed system for sharing oil revenues, there is no Iraq, just a collection of armed gangs fighting for control of resources.
Well, the legislation Mr. Bush promised never materialized, and on Wednesday attempts to arrive at a compromise oil law collapsed.

What’s particularly revealing is the cause of the breakdown. Last month the provincial government in Kurdistan, defying the central government, passed its own oil law; last week a Kurdish Web site announced that the provincial government had signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, and that seems to have been the last straw.

Now here’s the thing: Ray L. Hunt, the chief executive and president of Hunt Oil, is a close political ally of Mr. Bush. More than that, Mr. Hunt is a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a key oversight body.

Some commentators have expressed surprise at the fact that a businessman with very close ties to the White House is undermining U.S. policy. But that isn’t all that surprising, given this administration’s history. Remember, Halliburton was still signing business deals with Iran years after Mr. Bush declared Iran a member of the “axis of evil.”

No, what’s interesting about this deal is the fact that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, that the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia. And I suspect that most people in the Bush administration — maybe even Mr. Bush himself — know this, too.

Bonus question: On what relevant corporate board does Mr. Hunt sit?

Sometimes, Words Fail...

2007-09-13T22:07:00.001-04:00

From the Daily Mail:

The 12-week-old macaque - who was abandoned by his mother - was close to death when it was rescued on Neilingding Island, in Goangdong Province.
After being taken to an animal hospital his health began to improve but he seemed spiritless - until he developed a friendship with a white pigeon.
The blossoming relationship helped to revive the macaque who has developed a new lease of life, say staff at the sanctuary.

I wish I had both been there to see it and actually make this incredible photograph.

h/t: Mr. Pink

Ye Olde Deluder Satan

2007-09-13T20:37:00.000-04:00

From the Raleigh News & Observer:

As a lawyer, Mary Easley squared off with bad guys she sent to jail. As North Carolina's first lady, she is picking a fight with Captain Morgan and a buxom robot with a keg of Heineken stashed in her chest.
Easley intends to keep young people from drinking by pummeling the alcohol icons with straight talk. In a program she announced Wednesday, North Carolina teachers will tell middle schoolers that beer brewers are lying to them.
In coming years, middle school students will learn how to unravel the slick alcohol ads that inundate their televisions, computers and magazines. Can that woman really weigh 100 pounds if she is chugging 2,000 calories worth of rum and Coke a day? Will popping the top of a beer bottle really act as a cattle call for gorgeous men?
"We can't control how much they see," Easley said as she rolled out a lesson plan due to start arriving in middle schools by January. "Advertising is endemic in our culture."

Indeedy, advertising is endemic in American culture. More to the point, bullshit artistry is endemic to the United States of a Sucker Born Every Minute. As author and former advertising exec Earl Shorris noted, we are A Nation of Salesmen. I applaud any effort to stem a youngster's path towards alcoholism and I believe the First Lady of North Carolina has it right that middle school is precisely when the intervention will be most efficacious.

My concern is that the program's format calls for demonization of one particular substance and a focus on deconstructing the manipulative practices to peddle demon rum, Heineken, and wine coolers. And that lesson plan is in itself deeply and unnecessarily manipulative. Moreover, the lesson is silent on so many other messages which are manipulative. Like, how many women (or men) consume the 11 rum and Cokes a day, at a 182 calories per drink, necessary to come to the First Lady's hypothetical daily total of 2,000 calories? Moronic messages like that delivered to savvy middle schoolers (and they are savvy) will merely lead them to use Diet Coke as a mixer for the three or four drinks (at a 133 calories per, or 4 x 133 = 532, or 44 fewer calories than a Big Mac) they'll have to drink to get the desired buzz. Does that scare tactic have any traction at all in an nation of overweight youth? What about the abiding, enduring cynicism which will inevitably set in the minds of the students as the sharper ones dissect the manipulation inherent in the anti-alcohol curriculum? Is that psychological scar tissue worth the program's potential benefits?

Why not teach that ALL advertising is manipulative and teach the techniques employed? Why not teach that ALL political messages are manipulative and teach the techniques employed?

The answer is rather simple, of course. Puritanical targets are easy and nonthreatening -- tobacco, booze, and trans-fat are evil but learning how to think and evaluate marketing and political messages for oneself is inheritantly dangerous to the status quo.

And so what could be a broad, powerful unit for students on psychology and Machiavelli, with analytical skills which could be employed for a lifetime, is foregone for pushing what is ultimately state-sponsored propaganda.

This Bud's for you Mrs. Easley.

Apples Not Falling Far From Trees

2007-09-13T18:54:00.000-04:00

Andre has a red flag, Chiang Ching's is blue
They all have hills to fly them on except for Lin Tai Yu
Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in tree-tops shouting out rude names

Whistling tunes - we hide in the dunes by the seaside
Whistling tunes - we piss on the goons in the jungle
It's a knockout

If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers - war without tears
If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers - war without tears
Games without frontiers - war without tears
Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel

Updating the post below, from the Raleigh News & Observer:

A high school's controversial ban on clothing bearing flags stemmed from gang-related fights among students, Sampson County's school superintendent said today.
The Sampson School system on Wednesday lifted the flag ban at Hobbton High School after it came under fire from parents and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others.
The policy had prohibited students from wearing clothing with any kind of flag, including the American flag. As reports circulated by e-mail and on Internet chat rooms, a flurry of protests erupted.
{snip}
In a statement this morning, Superintendent L. Stewart Hobbs Jr. said school officials had imposed the ban because of problems last year with students wearing foreign flags on their clothing.
Students were showing their gang colors through the flags, leading to fights and other disruptions, Hobbs said. So the principal thought it best to ban all flags in light of a previous free speech suit against the Sampson County schools, Hobbs said.

Moment of Clarity

2007-09-12T21:34:00.000-04:00

"Well, yeah. I was just sitting here, eating my muffin, drinking my coffee, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity."

Senator Warner: Are you able to say at this time if we continue what you have laid before the congress here, this strategy. do you feel that that is making America safer?

General Petraeus: Sir, I believe this is indeed the best course of action to achieve our objectives in Iraq.

Warner: Does that make America safer?

General Petraeus: Sir I don't know actually. I have not sat down and sorted in my own mind what I have focused on and what I have been riveted on is how to accomplish the mission of the multinational force Iraq.

Crazy Leftist ACLU Defends Student's Right to Wear Flag

2007-09-12T21:24:00.000-04:00

From the Raleigh News & Observer:

A Sampson County{North Carolina} High School that had come under fire for its ban on T-shirts bearing the American flag has reversed that policy.
In a recorded telephone message to parents and teachers, Superintendent L. Stewart Hobbs, Jr. said that the ban on flags is no longer in effect at Hobbton High School. Future dress code decisions will be made at the district level with approval of the school board.
Gayle Langston of Turkey had sounded the alarm about the policy when her daughter Jessica was told on Friday not to wear her flag shirt again. She wanted to wear her flag shirt on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Langston said.
{snip}
The American Civil Liberties Union also stepped into the fray, penning a letter to district officials decrying the policy.
"..This rule is a violation of the students' right to free speech under the First Amendment to the Constitution -- with regard to American flags, as well as the flags of any other country," said the letter signed by Katherine Lewis Parker, legal director of the group's North Carolina chapter.

Constitution-loving whackos...lock 'em up I say.

"Ass-kissing Little Chickenshit?"

2007-09-12T20:36:00.000-04:00

"Allow me to give you a tiny bit of advice. If you want your own boat someday...the very worst thing you can do is worry about yourself or try to impress me. I can't stand save-asses, and I won't abide kiss-asses."

Earlier this week, The Washington Post informed us that comity between Centcom Admiral Fallon and Surge-Meister General Petraeus was lacking:

The polite discussion in the White House Situation Room a week ago masked a sharper clash over the U.S. venture in Iraq, one that has been building since Fallon, chief of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees Middle East operations, sent a rear admiral to Baghdad this summer to gather information. Soon afterward, officials said, Fallon began developing plans to redefine the U.S. mission and radically draw down troops.

One of those plans, according to a Centcom officer, involved slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010. In an interview, Fallon disputed that description but declined to offer details. Nonetheless, his efforts offended Petraeus's team, which saw them as unwelcome intrusion on their own long-term planning. The profoundly different views of the U.S. role in Iraq only exacerbated the schism between the two men.

"Bad relations?" said a senior civilian official with a laugh. "That's the understatement of the century. . . . If you think Armageddon was a riot, that's one way of looking at it."

The Inter-Press News Service provides another piece of data on the Armageddon hypothesis:

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

More proof that Petraeus is a Democrat.

Sick to My Stomach

2007-09-12T18:22:00.000-04:00

A minister wearing a button stating: "I love the Iraqi people" is:

(a) Denied entrance to the Petraeus Hearing by Capitol Police.
(b) Is gang tackled by six of the cops; they slam the minister, who is not yet under arrest, to the hard floor which...
(c) ...breaks his leg.
(d) The minister is then arrested for "assaulting a police officer." I guess as he was slammed to the floor, his fractured leg grazed another cop.

What was it we were trying to establish in Iraq exactly?

A guy wearing a button promoting love has his leg broken. A minister who was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant in August can't enter a room to witness testimony? I think we've taken the whole Christian Nation thing a bit too far if we're snapping legs of those who preach love. People will start to think we're behaving like the Roman Empire....

Riverbend Leaves Home

2007-09-11T21:00:00.000-04:00

From Riverbend:

Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.

I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before. E. finally came in a month and a half later and insisted we zip up the bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to update its contents constantly.

The decision that we would each take one suitcase was made by my father. He took one look at the box of assorted memories we were beginning to prepare and it was final: Four large identical suitcases were purchased- one for each member of the family and a fifth smaller one was dug out of a closet for the documentation we’d collectively need- graduation certificates, personal identification papers, etc.

{snip}

There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?

{snip}

It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.

We didn’t sleep the night before we had to leave because there seemed to be so many little things to do… It helped that there was no electricity at all- the area generator wasn’t working and ‘national electricity’ was hopeless. There just wasn’t time to sleep.

{snip}

I cried as we left- in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried… the uncle cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye and wondering if you’re ever going to see these people again. My uncle tightened the shawl I’d thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to ‘keep it on until you get to the border’. The aunt rushed out behind us as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the ground, which is a tradition- its to wish the travelers a safe return… eventually.

The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.

A lot of heartbreak.....

Study Confirms Dicks and Pussies' Brains Operate Differently

2007-09-11T07:07:00.000-04:00

From the L.A. Times

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

{snip}

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday
decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

{snip}

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

{snip}

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

{snip}

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to
block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Parker & Stone, of course, came to the same conclusion in their own research, presenting the findings in a more graphical, memorable fashion:

Gary Johnston: We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!

September When It Comes

2007-09-10T21:09:00.000-04:00

Johnny Cash (February 26, 1932 - September 12, 2003)

I always thought it was eerie that Cash, in the spring before he passed, sang this duet with daughter Roseanne, in different studios, across the country from each other, practically foretelling the month of his death.

The Man in Black was one of our greatest poets; here's a video I put together of him singing his soul out as usual. In the end, his voice faltered a bit but his honesty remained unflinching.

A toast to J.R. Cash...and Roseanne who so ably carries the torch...

What Would Jesus Drive?

2007-09-10T18:15:00.000-04:00

This vid's made the rounds but I still find it irresistible.

Twelve disciples don’t fit in a Pacer,
A gun rack don’t fit no Subaru,
So if you’re a truck buyer be like your messiah-er,
Only Ford pickups will do..

Alex the Counting Parrot (1976 - 2007)

2007-09-10T17:56:00.001-04:00

I was unfamiliar with Alex and his talents which included the ability to add, distinguish colors and shapes, and may have been the only critter other than man to grasp the concept of zero. Noam Chomsky had his doubts about Alex's purported abilities which means my blog-buddy Chap will soon be adopting an African Grey.

You can listen to an NPR interview with Alex's former owner/trainer Dr. Irene Pepperberg or watch the video below.

According to Pepperberg who is a faculty member at Brandeis University, Alex was able to identify 50 different objects, seven colors and shapes, and quantities of up to six. Alex also understood the concept of bigger and smaller and same and different. Pepperberg says they were in the midst of learning basic mathematics skills.

"This was a very amazing creature," she says.

Alex also had the emotional level of a 2-year-old child, Pepperberg says. After repeating some learning trials dozens of times, Alex would become tired and throw objects off the trays with his beak. When visiting the veterinarian, Alex would go back in his cage and slam the door.

How would Alex say goodbye? Pepperberg says that she imagines it would sound something like what Alex would say to her every night before going to bed: "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow."

Amazing critter.

Can Technology Save Us?

2007-09-10T12:47:00.000-04:00

We have an old joke here in the South:

"What do a tornado and a divorce have in common?"

"Someone's gonna lose a trailer."

Congress is attempting to make that truism less lethal:

A bill to require all new manufactured homes to come equipped with emergency weather radios is gaining traction in Congress, pushed by a campaign promise to an Indiana woman whose 2-year-old son was killed by a tornado in 2005.

{snip}

People living in mobile homes face 10 times the risk for fatalities by being hit by a tornado than those living in permanent homes, NOAA said.

Biology Fer Dems

2007-09-10T12:40:00.000-04:00

From Harper's

Charley Kitty

2007-09-04T23:24:00.000-04:00

Operation Fluffy Bunny

2007-08-22T18:03:00.000-04:00

Daily Show correspondent and former Marine Rob Riggle was relieved from doing to the usual Daily Show thing of standing in front of the green screen with the background dubbed in and was instead dispatched to Baghdad this week.

How does one do humor from a war zone on a highly contentious topic? Spotlight the insipid prose of elected officials who avail themselves of the Pentagon's dog and pony shows and let the troops perform a reality check, then conclude with a hilarious homage to Forrest Gump.

Philip K. Dick

2007-08-17T15:24:00.001-04:00

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."

From an outstanding New Yorker essay on Philip K. Dick:

Although “Blade Runner,” with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life.

{snip}

That’s probably why Dick’s reputation as a serious writer, like Poe’s, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren’t read as they were written. And his paint-by-numbers prose is ideally suited for the movies. The last monologue in “Blade Runner” (“All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die”), improvised by Rutger Hauer on the set that day, has a pathos that the book achieves only in design, intellectually, because the movie speech is spoken by a recognizable person, dressed up as a robot, where Dick’s characters tend to be robots dressed up as people.

Rude Pundit on the "Petraeus" Report

2007-08-16T14:25:00.001-04:00

Lot on the internets today about the so-called Petraeus Report which has become the latest in a maddening series of Bush Administration disillusions. Turns out, it won't be, nor was it ever going to be, the Petraeus Report; it was always going to be the Cheney report, though they might let the intrepid General git on down to the Office Max to select the pretty report cover of his choice for it.

Rude Pundit tells it like it is:

The "Petraeus Report" and More Smoke and Mirrors:
Often, watching the Bush administration in action is a little like watching a magician opening for strippers named Bodacious Ta-tas Lorraine or Lady Kitty Cockswallow at a no-cover bar at a Boise truck stop in the 1960s. The magician, maybe named "the Great Ballini" or something equally clever, isn't very good, his card forces a little too forced, his coins and hankies too obviously tucked away, his sleight of hand clumsy, his hidden compartments clunky. But, still and all, to half-drunk truck drivers wanting feathered boobies and sequined cooters thrust in their faces on a cold Idaho night on the road, it's distracting as long as you don't pay too much attention. The problem, of course, is that once you know the tricks, the magic dissipates and all you've got is a loser desperately trying to entertain you with dirty-puns and a suit that needed to be cleaned last month.

So, while there's been an uproar over how the Petraeus report is not the Petraeus report, but actually the White House report, well, the idea that General Petraeus was ever going to write the report is just so many ripped dollar bills magically mended with a wave of the hand. According to the actual legislation, "The President, having consulted with the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Commander, Multi-National Forces-Iraq, the United States Ambassador to Iraq, and the Commander of U.S. Central Command, will prepare the report and submit the report to Congress" and "The President shall submit a second report to the Congress, not later than September 15, 2007" and "Prior to the submission of the President's second report on September 15, 2007, and at a time to be agreed upon by the leadership of the Congress and the Administration, the United States Ambassador to Iraq and the Commander, Multi-National Forces Iraq will be made available to testify in open and closed sessions before the relevant committees of the Congress."

So, while everyone and his Cheney was talking about the great and mighty "General Petraeus's report" or some such shit, that was just spin, spin that the Democrats got tricked into using. And while Democrats were right to balk at the idea that Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker would give only closed-door testimony, well, fuck, read the goddamn bill. Remember: the Bush White House parses every letter of every word to see how to manipulate things in their favor, or they just issue a signing statement that says, in so many words, "Kiss my chicken-fried ass."

Political Maps

2007-08-16T13:02:00.000-04:00

From Blast Off:

Read Blast Off's analysis here.

Mr. Pink: Sounds of Silence vs. Bratz Culture

2007-08-16T12:55:00.000-04:00

From the files of Mr. Pink:

My daughter spent the night with a friend. They are both 12.

This friend has a TV in her room. She watches TV until 11:30pm.

They went shopping at the local thrift store. Her friend does this every day (because it's a cheap 'high').

In between and during the shopping and TV time is snack time.

There's no reading; no reflection time; no conversation.

Just day after day after day filled with mindless distractions and consumption. (And, not needy consumption, but 'whore-iffic' consumption). This is surprising to me given the religious background of the parents, and the desire to keep their daughter chaste until married. BUT, the MOTHERS want to keep their daughters competitive, and they think Bratz™ -wear is the way to go.

Frankly, I don't see how all the 'expert' teachers public schools hire and policy changes public schools implement will make us competitive in the global markets. Public schools can't make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Kids who attend private schools have parents who value education (which is why they work).

I've come to the conclusion that many (most?) parents don't really care if their children get an 'education.' They might care about crappy grades, but they aren't interested in raising enlightened, curious. scholars. They WANT babysitters instead of teachers at school. And, that's exactly why we have them. Because a real teacher would say, "Turn off the TV; take your kid to library instead of shopping; talk to your kid; read a newspaper with your kid, etc." And, that's NOT what parents want to do. They don't consider that their 'job description.' They don't think of education and learning as something which can be found EVERYwhere and ANYwhere. They view it as an 8:00 to 3:00 minimum wage job. You clock out at 3:00pm, and you're done for the day.

The best teachers in the world can't compete with that. We keep talking about 'improving education,' but without parents truly valuing education, it's meaningless. The advertisers have won. "And, the people bowed and prayed... to the neon god they made."

"And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

"Fools", said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed
In the wells of silence

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls"
And whispered in the sounds of silence."

--Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence, written in the aftermath of the assassination of JFK in 1963.

Scary Picture

2007-08-16T02:57:00.001-04:00

Arctic Ice Pack, 1979 & 2003, from NASA.

Hat tip: First-Draft.

Suicide is ....

2007-08-16T02:37:00.000-04:00

Through early morning fog I see

visions of the things to be

the pains that are withheld for me

I realize and I can see...

From the Washington Post:

Army soldiers committed suicide last year at the highest rate in 26 years, and more than a quarter did so while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new military report.
The report, obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its scheduled release Thursday, found there were 99 confirmed suicides among active duty soldiers during 2006, up from 88 the previous year and the highest number since the 102 suicides in 1991 at the time of the Persian Gulf War.
The suicide rate for the Army has fluctuated over the past 26 years, from last year's high of 17.3 per 100,000 to a low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001.
Last year, "Iraq was the most common deployment location for both (suicides) and attempts," the report said.
{snip}
The increases for 2006 came as Army officials worked to set up a number of new and stronger programs for providing mental health care to a force strained by the longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the global counterterrorism war entering its sixth year.
Failed personal relationships, legal and financial problems and the stress of their jobs were factors motivating the soldiers to commit suicide, according to the report.
"In addition, there was a significant relationship between suicide attempts and number of days deployed" in Iraq, Afghanistan or nearby countries where troops are participating in the war effort, it said. The same pattern seemed to hold true for those who not only attempted, but succeeded in killing themselves.
There also "was limited evidence to support the view that multiple ... deployments are a risk factor for suicide behaviors," it said.

There are good reasons the Brits have had "harmony guidelines" for over a decade.

How many servicemen and women will be afflicted by PTSD for the rest of their lives and will the nation truly look after them?

The sword of time will pierce our skins

It doesn't hurt when it begins

But as it works its way on in

The pain grows stronger...watch it grin...

The Hanson Cannon...uh...Canon

2007-08-16T00:24:00.000-04:00

Classics professor, military historian, and über-hawk pundit Victor Davis Hanson has a big problem with the education the kids are currently getting in our universities. Let's take his argument in small pieces:

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history?

Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too?
Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Agreed. When it comes to the knowledge of traditional humanities content, Americans suck. But this isn't new. A country with pragmatism as its de facto national religion in service to relatively unrestrained capitalism, has historically given short shrift to the humanities -- there isn't any money in it nor does it serve the purpose of our other national religion, evangelical Protestantism which don't need none of that Catholic book learnin' to have a personal relationship with the Almighty.

Hanson continues:

Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Yes, such courses are out there and they're on the margins of the margins. Take a look at the top ten majors and ask yourself how much time these kids are going to spend in those classes. Maybe the Psych majors and they aren't going to study Latin or philosophy anyway unless it's required. Disagree? Go find a psych major and inquire yourself.

Of the top ten, only #7, English, is in the humanities -- so maybe some of those kids might be diverted from traditional humanities classes into Gay Penguins 101. All the other majors are vocational if one accepts that Poli Sci is de facto pre-law.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

Will the college professor who is not teaching deductively (I think Hanson really means to say didactically) please step forward. Although Hanson finds this to be a fault unique to the cultural left, in my experience, it isn't. Most PhDs have come to hold a certain position which they believe to be correct and they tend to not be shy preaching it. It's the nature of academe to case-build and to copiously impart data favorable to one's conclusions and to limit and/or disparage data which does not. Rare is the academic inoculated from this all-too-human trait.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

Second, traditional education taught a method of inductive inquiry. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, logic, and rhetoric were tools to be used by a student, drawing on an accumulated storehouse of information, to present well-reasoned opinions—the ideology of which was largely irrelevant to professors and the university.

This is the meat of Hanson's case and the weakest. What Hanson is arguing is that if we stuck to the traditional Western canon both in terms of content (Shakespeare, Aristotle, St. Augustine) and skills (Aristotelian logic and rhetoric as opposed to Hegelian dialectics or, God forbid, deconstructionism) then the kids would be able to give a "better" answer to the "Is the war in Iraq the "greatest mistake" in our history?" question. In other words, they would give Hanson's answer of an emphatic "NO!" In other words, program the kid with the right history, philosophy, and syllogistic constructs and he won't end up in the squishy liberal traitor camp. Deductivism Hanson-style, yeah, baby!

But why is it so important to study the Western canon? Get your boots on, it's gonna get deep:

If few Americans know of prior abject disasters during the winter of 1776, the summer of 1864, or January 1942, then why wouldn’t Iraq really be the worst mistake in our history?

Huh? I consider myself to be a pretty decent student of American history, especially the periods Hanson cites and I'll be damned if I'm aware of any "disasters" associated with those specific frames. Of course, that's not what the disingenuous Professor Hanson is really trying to say. They were all low points in terms of morale of the eventual winning side in an American war but no scholar would ever denote nor conflate them as disasters.

On the other hand, informed people did make cases that certain decisions made by General Washington and the Continental Congress might not have been the best as those parties never enjoyed more than a 35% level of support of the American population. Lincoln's presidency teetered during the entire summer of 1864 and would have likely been lost to McClellan had Sherman not taken Atlanta. And FDR was subjected to a full-blown GOP-led congressional investigation as he struggled to get the country on a war footing on three continents and two oceans.

But those political obstacles were not mistakes any more than potholes are car wrecks. Contemporaneous critics certainly found plenty of mistakes to harp on in all three cases but criticism of policy and actions is not the same as a country experiencing self-doubt and low morale. And as a student of history, of the classics, Hanson knows better. He knows that the self-doubt and low morale need not be fatal to the polity suffering them. The strong country with a leadership steeped in the humanities sees low points as opportunities for reflection, for creativity, for the development and application of new strategies and policies.

But to gloss over the obstacles, to anesthetize the nation's geopolitical woes with jingoism, to distract the body politic with incessant fear mongering over jihadists, to marginalize those of us who are patriots but who strongly disagree with the path the country took in March of 2003 indicates inherent weaknesses in solely relying upon Hanson's stunted version of the Western canon. Reliance on Hanson's version of the canon only would ensure the quagmire in Iraq continues unabated because it does not allow for the possibility that a mistake was made, regardless where it lays in the pantheon of American missteps. Furthermore, Hanson's dysfunctional fetish for a militarily dominant, imperial Western Civilization with the United States as its phalanx , with the mission to bend the rest of the planet to its will, is indeed a strong argument for the broadening of the canon and to receive it as tool for shaping the future, not to defend the privileged tribe in the manner which Hanson would have us inculcate our youth.

Russian National Screw Day

2007-08-16T00:13:00.001-04:00

"This is all for Mother Russia darling."

From the Denver Post:

Moscow - A Russian region of Ulyanovsk has found a novel way to fight the nation's birth-rate crisis: It has declared Sept. 12 the Day of Conception and for the third year running is giving couples time off from work to procreate.
The hope is for a brood of babies exactly nine months later on Russia's national day. Couples who "give birth to a patriot" during the June 12 festivities win money, cars, refrigerators and other prizes.
Ulyanovsk, about 550 miles east of Moscow, has held similar contests since 2005. Since then, the number of competitors, and the number of babies born to them, has been on the rise.
Russia, with one-seventh of Earth's land surface, has just 141.4 million citizens, making it one of the most sparsely settled countries in the world. With a low birth rate and a high death rate, the population has been shrinking since the early 1990s.

So, if the Russkies do what they's supposed to, according to my biology textbook which says human gestation is 280 days, and this handy calendar calculator, the maternity wards in parts of Putinland are gonna be quite busy come June 18, 2008.

So to all the Russian readers of Mountain Philosopher, I say Поздравляю вас с днем рождения!

Doghouse Riley vs. Paglia

2007-08-15T12:49:00.000-04:00

Amazing piece of writing by a guy who knows his cinema vs a chick enslaved by cliché.

I KNEW I was going to regret it, but The Editors had so much fun at Camille Paglia's expense that I clicked on the link, like I expected it might have wiped the smug off her caricature or somethin'. And the title was "Art Movies: R.I.P. Long before Bergman and Antonioni died, the mystical art-house film experience faded to black." And I was fucking stuck reading it. Nothing forces me to link to it, though, and I'm sure you can find your way there if you simply have to.
On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s.

Well, it's a touching tribute. With any luck, cold douching will replace Taps.

Is there some container somewhere for that "my narcissistic generation of the 60s" bit, or have we discovered the Universal Solvent? Leaving aside the atrocious phrasemaking, is it perhaps time now, after an intervening four generations' respective Decades, to ask ourselves whether her generation of the 1960s was a particularly narcissistic one? Have you noticed a pronounced lack of self-absorption in those born in the 1970s, say? Is it possible that this supposed narcissism is an artifact of life lived in the Global Village, or buried under a constant barrage of Advertising and manufactured acquisitiveness and consumerism run amok? Or an artifact of our reaching a critical mass of people paid to say stupid shit? Or is it just an artifact of looking at people as though they're defined by what somebody said in a magazine somewhere?

It's one thing to use The Sixties as shorthand for the commonly accepted laundry list of poorly-understood and facilely-connected major events that occurred within its Gregorian borders (or within the popular imagining of those borders). It's another to hold a loaded metaphor to everyone else's head and deprive them of loose change. Camille Paglia watched European films while in her twenties. Wow. It was The Sixties. Wow again. She saw them in art houses in the company of friends. Totally unexpected. I'd have guessed "on DVD, while playing Tetris™".

You owe it to yourself to go read the whole thing.

The Architect Has Left the Building

2007-08-14T10:47:00.000-04:00

If you're wondering how Rove got his start, then you can watch this little movie. History produces some eerie harmonies, as one of the creepiest political advisors in American history started out with CREEP and was interviewed early on by Mr. Liberal Media himself.

Article 223.556mm

2007-08-13T21:07:00.001-04:00

"War is cruelty and you cannot refine it."
-- William Tecumseh Sherman

You and your fellow Navy SEALS make a decision that may well have cost three SEAL lives by letting Afghani civilians who happened upon your position to go in peace, most likely passing on your position to the Taliban. Thirty-six hours later, twice-wounded, as a lone survivor, you are presented with another opportunity to make a similar decision. What do you do?

Marcus Luttrell's story is moving and reveals the daily Hobson's Choices American forces face in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From NPR's Morning Edition:

In June 2005, Marcus Luttrell and three of his fellow Navy SEALs set off on a mission in the mountains of Afghanistan. They were ambushed by the Taliban, leaving him as the only survivor among the American special operations team.
Luttrell, who has since retired from the military, recounts the ordeal in a memoir, Lone Survivor, co-written by Patrick Robinson.

The book has received much attention this summer, in part because of the decisions the SEALs made. They're the kind of decisions that lie at the heart of the war on terrorism: Who do you target — and who you do kill — when the enemy doesn't wear a uniform?

"War's not black and white," Luttrell tells Steve Inskeep. "You can sit there and put it on paper, like, 'This is what has to be done in this certain situation.' But when you get up there on that mountain, or when you're in a battlefield, it doesn't work that way. And sometimes stuff has to be done so you can preserve the life of your men."

Luttrell faced at least two decisions with lives at stake, including his own. The first decision came after the SEALs moved into the Afghan mountains. That's when they were discovered by Afghans who might betray their presence.

The SEALs were looking down from a mountainside, waiting for an enemy leader who was suspected to be in the village below.

They soon encountered three males and about 100 goats. The SEALs interrogated the herders, but "couldn't get anything out of them," Luttrell says. "And then, we just had that uneasy feeling. A lot of times, you can talk to villagers and they're really forthcoming with information, and sometimes they're not."

The SEALs discussed their options — tie up the herders and take them along, tie them up and leave them, or to kill them. In the end, the Americans decided to turn the herders loose.

Luttrell says he's still not sure if they made the right call.

In the book, Luttrell raises questions about the rules of war — and whether Americans should be following them. He writes:

Faced with the murderous cutthroats of the Taliban, we are not fighting under the rules of Geneva IV Article 4. We are fighting under the rules of Article 223.556mm — that's the caliber and bullet gauge of our M4 rifle.

"Sometimes, it's hard to fight an enemy when ... they're following a different set of rules. They're not following any rules, actually, in some regards. And when we go out there to deal with it, it's tough."

"There's a lot of smart people in the military. We're not as dumb as everybody thinks, and we know how to do our job really well. If you're going to send us in there for war, then that's what you do. You just send us in there and let us do what we need to do. We'll get done and we'll get home, and it'll be over.

You can listen to the interview with Team Leader Luttrell here, or read an excerpt from the book here.

God Please Forgive Us

2007-08-12T23:45:00.000-04:00

From the Dallas Morning News

An Arlington church volunteered to host a funeral Thursday, then reneged on the invitation when it became clear the dead man's homosexuality would be identified in the service.
The event placed High Point Church in the cross hairs of an issue many conservative Christian organizations are discussing: how to take a hard-line theological position on homosexuality while showing compassion toward gay people and their families.
But the dispute between High Point Church and the friends and family of Cecil Sinclair has left confusion and hard feelings on both sides.
Mr. Sinclair, 46, died Monday. He was a native of Fort Worth, a Navy veteran who served in Desert Storm helping rescuers find downed pilots, and a singer in the Turtle Creek Chorale, said his mother, Eva Bowers. He did not belong to a church.
His brother, Lee, is an employee and member of High Point, a nondenominational mega-congregation led by the Rev. Gary Simons. Mr. Simons is the brother-in-law of Joel Osteen, nationally known pastor of Houston's Lakewood Church.
{snip}
Both the family and church officials agree that the church volunteered to host a memorial service, feed 100 guests and create a multimedia presentation of photos from Mr. Sinclair's life.
But the photos that the family selected alerted church officials that there might be a problem with the service, Mr. Simons said.
"Some of those photos had very strong homosexual images of kissing and hugging," he said. "My ministry associates were taken aback."
And then, he said, the family asked to have its own people officiate the service. "We had no control over the format of the memorial," Mr. Simons said.
{snip}
Nobody from the church called her or Mr. Sinclair's partner, Paul Wagner, to discuss possible changes to the service, Ms. Bowers said.
"We could have reached a compromise," she said. "That was never attempted."
At least some theological questions could have been worked out, she said. For instance, the family was willing to allow the church to issue an "altar call" asking people to accept Jesus at the end of the service.
{snip}
"Can you hold the event and condone the sin and compromise our principles?" he {Simons} said. "We can't."
The issue was not so much that Mr. Sinclair was, from the church's perspective, an unrepentant sinner, he said. It's that it was clear from the photos that his friends and family wanted that part of his life to be a significant part of the service.
The pastor said that he could imagine a similar situation involving a different sin. Perhaps a mother who is a member of the church loses a son who is a thief or murderer, Mr. Simons said. The church would surely volunteer to hold a service, he said.
"But I don't think the mother would submit photos of her son murdering someone," he said. "That's a red light going off."
{snip}
After the church decided it would not host the funeral service, it offered to pay for another facility, Mr. Simons said. The family declined and found a local funeral home to hold the event Thursday night.Even so, the church sent over food and the video – minus the images church officials found to be offensive.
"Some of our people will be there at the memorial service," Mr. Simons said. "We tried to do the very best of our ability to express the love of Christ."

I think Pastor Simons struck out on three counts:

(1) His and his congregation's continued heavy reliance on one passage in the New Testament attributed to Paul which appears to condemn homosexuality (read the link to find out what Paul was really up to.)

(2) Even if the pastor wishes to throw out the above argument, the comparison of homosexuality to murder is as odious as it is uninformed. Furthermore, it is precisely that kind of statement which serves to validate violence towards homosexuals. Not exactly what Jesus would do.

(3) The selectivity of which sins can be forgiven and which apparently cannot. To which I would refer the good pastor and his congregation to the following parable which, like everything else Jesus said, had no caveat nor condemnation for homosexuals:

The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?"
Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.
"Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him. Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay the debt.
"The servant fell on his knees before him. 'Be patient with me,' he begged, 'and I will pay back everything.' The servant's master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go. "But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him and began to choke him. 'Pay back what you owe me!' he demanded.
"His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, 'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
"But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and went and told their master everything that had happened.
"Then the master called the servant in. 'You wicked servant,' he said, 'I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?' In anger his master turned him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.
"This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart." (Matthew 18:21-35)

Coffee-Powered Steam Engine

2007-08-12T19:09:00.001-04:00

Too cool!

From Boing Boing:

The revolutionary concept for this hot-air engine was discovered in 1816 by the Scottish minister Robert Stirling and has been updated for today. The principle is as ingenious as it is simple: In a sealed cylinder, heated from the underside, a piston pushes the enclosed air back and forth between the hot and the cold side. The air therefore expands out and compress together every cycle and that movement is converted via a moving piston and crankshaft into rotary motion.
{snip}
Set this fully functional Stirling engine on a cup with boiling hot coffee (Tea or water also works of course) - give the flywheel a small push to the left - and the apparatus begins simply to pump up and down - for up to an hour!

When I've got 21 Euros to blow I'll have a new coffee toy to wow the kiddies!

Dick Cheney 1994

2007-08-12T16:41:00.000-04:00

Before 9/11 gave him the highly questionable inspiration of the "One Percent Doctrine", Dick Cheney seemed rather sane....

Puro Scuro

2007-08-11T14:42:00.001-04:00

Perhaps the best blend I've ever had...

"We have been working on this blend for a very long time. It started with a lucky accident about a year ago. I was working with some premium Sumatras and a combination of Yemen and Ethiopian coffees toward a Mohka-Java blend. But I didn't want it to be all bass note, all deep end. It is the problem with some blends intended for darker roast levels - there is a big "hole" in the cup profile, and that hole is located in the medium/bright range of the cup. I stumbled across a combination of coffees (no, I am keeping this one a secret!) that could do all this, and offer some nice aromatics to a darker roasted blend.
Another key factor: I also wanted a blend that had a darkly sweet finish, not ashy, not carbony. With this blend I wanted to prove that I am not anti-darkroast. The problem is, too many dark roasts are simply burned. Roast this as intended and I think you will find the cup decription and the name to be fitting!
Oh, the name? I wanted to call it Barnabas Blend (from my favorite '60s TV show Dark Shadows) but Puro Scuro has a better ring to it, and says a lot about the cup: Pure Dark, in Italian. So the sole remnant of the Dark Shadows theme is our motif for the coffee, a bat.
Overall, this blend boasts exceptional depth - yes it is one deep cup ... what we call "good coffee to brood by." The blend leaves a lingering, graceful finish on the pallate. The target roast range is from Full City+ with a few snaps of 2nd crack, to a Light French roast. In between those two, is a Vienna roast where this blend excels. My favorite is a roast stopped about 20-30 seconds after the first sound of 2nd crack. (Don't think that roasting it to darker French stage makes it more intense; it is most intense at a Full City+, but don't go lighter becase it has odd baked flavors at the City+ stage).
There is some variability in the cup results based on how long it is rested, how it is brewed and (mostly) because this blend involves a healthy proportion of dry-processed coffees. If you want every batch to be exactly the same, don't buy this coffee. If you like to taste a range of flavors, and enjoy complex shifts in character, then you will enjoy the Puro Scuro. The cup has intense sage and anise herbiness, with lingering dried apricot notes. Alternately, I get intense spiciness in the cup; clove with jasmine hints, over a darker tobaccoy flavor. There is a sweet mollasses note in the aromatics that reemerges in the finish. I think it makes excellent espresso too; a rare but accurately-named "dual-use blend."

This blend of green beans available exclusively from Sweet Marias, is all the reason one needs to get into home roasting.

Snapshot

2007-08-11T00:36:00.001-04:00

From The New York Times "The Caucus" political blogs section under "Popular Tags."

Most interesting blips on this radar screen:

(1) YouTube - viral video's impact on the 2006+ political era beginning with George Allen's "macaca" moment will likely make the history books.

(2) Hillary Clinton's and Iraq's dominance while "terrorism" barely registers

(3) Somebody still has some morbid fascination for Mark Folely.

Moonshine Patriot on teh Debate

2007-08-08T00:05:00.000-04:00

I am hopelessly addicted to the Moonshine Patriot, a blogger with a style like none other on the internets. Moonshine works his magic on the Sunday talk shows and candidate debates. He produces his idiosyncratic transcripts which brilliantly capture the message and the meta-message of every exchange. Moonshine's prose is informed by the current teen and Blackberry-possessor obsession of texting. "Texters" have their own shorthand which Moonshine adopts, but not so it obfuscates, but, rather, illuminates the high school qualities of our political discourse. Moonshine's accounts are so complete that one no longer has to watch the actual exchanges, as Moonshine captures and bottles "teh" essence as he did for tonight's Democratic Debate in Chicago, sponsored by the AFL-CIO and moderated by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann:

Obama: Everyone knows where Al Qaeda is, but how far are we prepared to go - they pull a knife, we pull a gun, they send one our troops the hospital, we send of theirs to the morgue thats teh Chicago Way!!!

[ applause ]

Biden: in Hillary's little city mole people live in aluminum tubes its crazeee!!!! I will debate Rudy and i swear i will yell so loud he'll wish he brought bernie kerik to whisper in his ear thou art immortal!!!

Olbermann: okaaayyyy

Edwards: everyone knows i'm down with organzied labor i'm like Gephardt only with eyebrows and integrity

Keith: interesting

Edwards: look at what happened Saturday at YearlyKos Hillary loves Lobbyists and i say no to that!

Keith: taxpayer funded Steroid Palaces?

Kucinich: i was mayor of KeelberTown and i bought the Elves baseball team they won the chocolate pennant

Olbermann: awesome

Kucinich: sure we should invest it will bring jobs

Obama: that's why i spent your taxes on a football stadium go Bears!

Richardson: AFL-CIO in da house!! Give me money!!

Audience: wooo hooo!!

Bill: Electric grid! Commuter rail! Flying cars!

Olbermann: NAFTA yes or no?

Hillary: this will shock you but i have 12 point plan that addresses this issue too

Olbermann: of course you do

Hillary: i want a Trade Cop, maybe -
[removes sunglasses]

David Caruso

Olbermann: excellent

You can read the rest here.

Socratic Sluggers

2007-08-07T16:47:00.001-04:00

click above for larger image

About 7 weeks left in the season and my sluggers are on top. A fortuitous draft and close to 50 trades have kept me there almost all season. Fantasy baseball teaches you a lot about baseball in general and the dynamics of a particular season. ERAs are still higher than everyone thinks they should be and that's with so many starters only going six innings, seven on a good night. I'm not aware of a killer closer the likes of Gagne and Smoltz from a couple of seasons ago. Finding a consistent first base slugger seems harder than seasons past while finding solid third basemen seems easier. Derek Jeter is a machine, Vladimir Guerrero is maddening with his hot and cold streaks (thankfully I had him in the lineup when he belted two homers last week).

I'll miss the season when it's gone so here's to the last of the regular season and hopefully a captivating series.

Jessica the Hippo

2007-08-05T00:57:00.000-04:00

Incredible critter story!

SCHIP and Premium Cigars

2007-08-05T00:14:00.000-04:00

Ideologically, I find myself somewhat hoist on my own petard...or stoogie.

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) Bill, co-sponsored by Senators Hatch and Kennedy, and which passed the Senate last week by a veto-proof majority but which has yet to pass the House, would extend health insurance to millions of uninsured American children. The bulk of the program's costs would be financed by an additional 61 cent tax on a pack of cigarettes. Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

The bill also calls for HUGE increases on premium cigars which yours truly does relish upon occasion. How much of an increase? The current stoogie federal tax is a 5 cents. The House version of the bill calls for about a one dollar tax. Again, I can live with that 2000% increase.

But the Senate version goes crazy, setting up to a TEN DOLLAR TAX per stick! The formula calls for an approximately 53% tax on the wholesale cost. I typically smoke four to seven dollar cigars. A seven dollar cigar runs about $3.50 wholesale, making it $5.25 before markup, and about ten bucks to me if the retailer is going to maintain his margin and stay in business. The fifteen dollar sticks, and believe me, these are more popular than you might think, will start to go for 24 bucks.

What would this all mean? My tobacconist, who maintains a fantastic brick and mortar operation, along with a thriving Internet business, laid it out for me last night (over good cigars, naturally).

He sees many Mom and Pop stores going under. And he sees devastating hits to the Dominican, Honduran, and Nicaraguan economies where the vast majority of the premium cigars are rolled and where the tobacco for the same is grown.

He and another smoking buddy also foresee a tremendous uptick in the Cuban black market in the US. It was news to me that the prices for good Cuban cigars have dropped tremendously over the past couple of years and that several mail-order places operations in Europe and, I couldn't believe it, Japan (where the best deals are to be found), are shipping guaranteed Cubans with guaranteed delivery. US Customs grabs your smokes? No problemo, we'll ship you another box. And the cost? Ten to 12 bucks a stick for a lot of the top brands. That's half of what the prices were about five years ago when I checked out ordering some from Canada.

Hopefully, the House version or something close to it will prevail. I want kids to have health insurance. But I'd like to occasionally indulge in my guilty pleasure on a teacher's salary. It's either that or back to the pipes. With maybe a slightly altered set of politics.

The War at Home

2007-08-04T23:27:00.000-04:00

JOHN COUTLAKIS - Asheville Citizen-Times

The War in Iraq came home to Asheville last week and it wasn't pretty.

Mark and Deborah Kuhn had been flying an American flag upside down for several weeks. In the middle of July, an Asheville city cop stopped by their house to ask if everything was OK as flying the flag upside down is a distress signal. The Kuhns said they were fine. The officer told them that he had been informed that there was a NC statute forbidding flag desecration, but that as far as he was concerned the law neither applied nor was enforceable. The parties bid each other a good day.

Enter Buncombe County deputy sheriff Brian Scarborough hired full-time just six weeks ago after serving seven months in Iraq as a National Guardsman. Scarborough had been approached by at least one other local Guardsman who was upset by the Kuhn's display, informing Scarborough about the NC statute written in 1917. Scarborough then took it upon himself to enforce the law even though the Kuhn's live within the city limits where law enforcement is usually left to the police department.

The accounts of what happened differ. The Citizen-Times has consistently pushed the deputy's version barely mentioning the Kuhn's account as well as several other eyewitness accounts. Scarborough says he approached the house, presented the Kuhns who were outside with the statute and that they complied immediately, taking down both the flag and the attached signs which were recent additions. After this, the stories diverge.

Scarborough maintains, he asked for ID, the Kuhns refused, started to enter their house, and then slammed the door on his hand, breaking a pane of glass from which he suffered minor lacerations. He forced his way in and then arrested the Kuhns for desecrating the flag, assault on a law enforcement officer, and resisting arrest.

The Kuhns and the neighbors tell a different story.

After observing the deputy's request to remove the flag, he demanded ID. The Kuhns refused on the grounds that Scarborough had no right to demand it, they then went into their home and dead bolted the door. Scarborough began to kick at the door and then broke the glass, reached inside to open the deadbolt and made his arrests.

The neighbors also confirm that other people appearing to be Guardsmen (men in fatigues), had appeared at the Kuhn's residence with some unkind things to say during the previous weeks.

After a tremendous outcry, all charges were dropped but the Kuhns are still pushing for Scarborough's dismissal as well as investigating the option of filing charges for unlawful entry.

Emotions are legitimately running high. Servicemen who have lost buddies and who will continue to lose more are understandably incensed not just over lack of respect of the flag, but lack of respect for their efforts and their sacrifice. Which, in no way, excuses what Deputy Scarborough did if the Kuhns and their neighbor's account is correct. We're stuck with increasing polarization and recrimination.

And sadly, it's only going to get a lot worse, as we inevitably draw down without a clear victory, and scapegoatism becomes more symbolic than substantive.

Trent Lott Counsels Cut and Run

2007-08-03T14:09:00.001-04:00

From TPM

"...when asked if people should leave Washington, D.C., during the month of August, Lott replied that "I think it would be good to leave town in August, and it would probably be good to stay out until September the 12th." By contrast, a former Capitol Hill chief had the temerity to note that, according to U.S. intelligence analysis he'd been privvy to, "Americans tend to be much more oriented toward anniversaries and the jihadists seem to be less so. I've seen over the years where we concentrate on dates and the analysts say, 'Don’t get wrapped up in dates because our terrorist jihadist enemies bide their time.'"

Come back on September 12th for the barbecue and yuckfest as we celebrate outwitting the terrorists with the Mississippi Senator's geopolitical acumen.

"Curse you Trent Lott. How did you know it was impossible for us to attack after September 11th?"

Russia: "The Arctic is Ours"

2007-08-03T13:23:00.000-04:00

Chilling....who controls the Lomonosov Ridge?

From The Economist

RUSSIA’s foray into the Arctic is an audacious geopolitical adventure, as popular at home as it is troubling for outsiders. At stake are the region’s natural riches, until now frozen both in law and in nature. But global warming is making them look more accessible. They may include 10 billion tonnes of oil and gas deposits, tin, manganese, gold, nickel, lead, platinum and diamonds, plus fish and perhaps even lucrative freight routes. Exploiting them will be technically tricky, and is probably decades away. But as the ice melts, the row is hotting up about who owns what’s underneath it.
{snip}
That would allow the Kremlin to annex a 460,000 square mile wedge of territory, roughly the size of western Europe, between Russia’s northern coastline and the North Pole. Such international maritime-border wrangles normally progress at a snail's pace, and are stupefyingly boring. When Denmark allocated $25m in 2004 to try to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge was connected to Greenland, few noticed or cared.

But the latest Russian expedition is not just collecting geological samples; on Thursday August 2nd it placed the Russian flag (in titanium) on the yellow gravel 4,200 metres below the surface at the site of the North Pole. That was the first manned mission there, mounted by a polar flotilla that no other country could match. A mighty nuclear-powered icebreaker shepherded a research vessel that launched hi-tech mini-submarines capable of pinpoint navigation under the Arctic ice.

{snip}

Even more startling, though, was Russia’s rhetoric. “The Arctic is ours and we should manifest our presence,” said Mr Chilingarov, a charismatic figure whom President Vladimir Putin has named as “presidential envoy” to the Arctic. “This is like placing a flag on the moon” said Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Institute.

{snip}

Canada, punily defended since the end of the cold war, is now planning to spend $7 billion on eight new Arctic patrol vessels. America’s Congress is considering spending $100m to update three ageing polar icebreakers and build two more.

But the biggest change may be in America’s attitude to international law. A small but vocal lobby that objects to international administration of seabed mining has so far blocked the Bush administration’s attempts to have the Convention on the Law of the Sea ratified by Congress. But even the most die-hard American freemarketeer may have to accept that international bureaucrats are a better bet than the Kremlin’s crony capitalists when it comes to getting a fair slice of the polar action.

And why care about who has control of the Arctic?

Under All That Ice, Maybe Oil

Petroleum deposits are already charted along the shallow shelves fringing the Arctic from the North Slope of Alaska to northernmost Europe. But the cylinders of dark, ancient rock extracted from the submerged mountain range, the Lomonosov Ridge, are the first hint that such deposits may lie in the two-mile-deep basins near the top of the world.
The cores provide the first evidence that vast amounts of organic material created by plankton and other life settled on the seabed, experts say. That kind of carbon-rich accumulation is a vital precursor to the formation of oil.

Is it the case that there was just a lull in the Cold War?

Lao Tzu on Geopolitics

2007-08-03T10:16:00.000-04:00

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the Tao,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the Tao,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

Executive Privilege Run Amok

2007-08-03T01:01:00.000-04:00

It's a good thing the Founding Fathers had the forethought to make the Constitution 2-ply. It's amazing that Mr. Rove was able to find a square of the law of the land not yet soiled by the theory of the unitary executive but damn if he didn't find it and use it and put it in a ziplock for this feller to take to a Senate Hearing...

From the NYTimes:

To describe his predicament, Mr. Jennings chose an allusion that must have flown right by those senators not steeped in the works of Homer. “I hope that you can appreciate the difficulty of my situation,” he said. “It makes Odysseus’s voyage between Scylla and Charybdis seem like a pleasure cruise.”

In myth, Scylla was a sea nymph turned monster; Charybdis was a monster in myth, and it churns in real life as a whirlpool in the Strait of Messina, off Sicily. The expression Mr. Jennings used is defined in the dictionary as “between two equally perilous alternatives, neither of which can be passed without encountering and probably falling victim to the other.”

Mr. Jennings’s attempt at Homeric levity did not put the senators in better humor.

Mr. Leahy asked the witness about an e-mail exchange he had with Monica Goodling, the former White House aide who had a role in selecting career Justice Department employees and, by her own admission, sometimes went too far in considering the prospects’ political leanings.

“It is an e-mail,” Mr. Jennings said.

“Mr. Jennings,” the senator said, “I’m not here to play games. I’m trying to be fair to you. Is this an e-mail exchange between you and Monica Goodling?”

“Yes, sir,” Mr. Jennings said.

"Look Senator, I don't have to tell you anything -- it's in the Constitution...I'm PRE-LAW!"

So Bluto...er, Scott can' tell Dean Wormer...er, a Senator what his job description is, smirking at Leahy because Leahy doesn't know Scott's a made guy. He's a DKE like Georgie the cheerleader and he isn't accountable. He can just smirk that privileged (ha-ha, get it?) smirk.

Jennings is a crucial part of the DOJ firing scandal as he was the point man in the swing state of New Mexico for W's 2004 re-election campaign:

From CNN:

Jennings also was asked whether he had sent an e-mail to Monica Goodling, then-counsel to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, about New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was fired late in 2006.
Jennings worked for the president's re-election campaign in New Mexico in 2004.
"Were you in contact in that capacity with Monica Goodling at the Department of Justice?" Durbin, D asked.
Jennings: "No, not that I recall."
Durbin: "Were you aware of any conversations by members of Congress or members of the White House staff with Mr. Iglesias about the conduct of his office in New Mexico?
Jennings: "No, I'm not aware of any conversations that were taking place."
When Jennings was quizzed about whether he had communicated with Goodling via e-mail about New Mexico politics after he had worked in that state, he said he couldn't recall.
Durbin then pulled out an e-mail exchanged between Jennings and Goodling in June 2006, and asked Jennings to explain it. Jennings declined, invoking executive privilege.
According to Gonzales, Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, New Mexico's senior senator, complained to Gonzales about Iglesias in the fall of 2005, saying the U.S. attorney "was in over his head." Iglesias contends Domenici wanted him to push harder on a corruption probe of state Democrats before last November's midterm elections.
Jennings said he began using the RNC e-mail system because it was always available to him. Eventually, he added, it became a kind of "default" e-mail address.

Restoring honor and dignity to the concept of autocracy one nominee, one firing, and one manipulated election at a time.

Did you catch the fact...

2007-08-03T00:44:00.000-04:00

...that the site of the GOP 2008 Convention is in ....Minneapolis? What's the spread on the bridge being rebuilt faster than you can say Mardis Gras?

Iran's Accidental Ally may be...

2007-08-02T23:51:00.000-04:00

some folks who work here...

The Pentagon sold more than a thousand aircraft parts that could be used on F-14 fighter jets — a plane flown only by Iran — after announcing it had halted sales of such surplus, government investigators say.

In a report Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the Defense Department had improved security in its surplus program to prevent improper sales of sensitive items.

But investigators found that roughly 1,400 parts that could be used on F-14 "Tomcat" fighter jets were sold to the public in February. That came after the Pentagon announced it had suspended sales of all parts that could be used on the Tomcat while it reviewed security concerns.

Iran, trying to keep its F-14s able to fly, is aggressively seeking components from the retired U.S. Tomcat fleet.

The Pentagon's surplus sales division — the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service — told investigators the parts were sold because it failed to update an automated control list and remove the aircraft parts before they were listed on its Internet sales site.

As the President is so keen on frequently pointing out, history frequently presents a more favorable portrait of a political figure than his contemporaries did. But the President has converted this historical axiom into some sort of ongoing medieval indulgence allowing him to totally cut himself off from all current negative feedback as it is rendered moot by what history might say.

What history is most likely to record in this amateur historian's opinion is that he destabilized the Middle East without any substantive benefit to his own country nor the region. History will record that he greatly enhanced the power most reactionary elements in Middle Eastern Islam be they Sunni or Shia, be they amorphous organizations such as Al Qaeda or nation-states such as the greatest benefactor of the Bush missteps, Iran.

You say this isn't the President's responsibility? I'm not advocating the punishment but let it be noted that lowly 18th and 19th American sentries were routinely shot for not fulfilling their duty at post because they fell asleep after little sleep for days. What would we be hearing if a Clinton or an Obama were in the White House and this happened?

Community Garden

2007-08-02T20:12:00.001-04:00

From the Macon County News...(all photographs are from the Macon County News)

Vegetables, fruit and a spirit of community are plentiful at the Sylva Community Garden. Tucked behind Mill Street downtown, the observant onlooker can find a bountiful community project in its first year.
Gardeners volunteer to maintain their own 15 by 30 foot plot to grow plants of their choice and are asked to donate about 2/3 of their harvest to the Community Table that serves meals to those in need. This year there are 19 plots in all, 17 of which are individually maintained and one plot of corn. More than 25 people are directly involved with the garden.
{snip}

Karrie Joseph, coordinator, also had a plot last year and said making it into a community garden with individual plots was a natural choice. “Since we both had been gardeners for a long time, we realized that if you divide it up, it’s less work and knowing the way people garden, they know it more as their own,” said Joseph.
“We wanted people to take ownership,” added Boyd. “And we have all different styles of gardening.” Diversity is key when it comes to having so many people gardening in one area, she added.
{snip}
Both Joseph and Boyd agree that it’s more fun the more people are involved. Boyd says the gardeners are constantly learning from each other and sharing ideas, which can be invaluable, especially when it comes to sharing organic ways to fend off pests like the bean beetle or squash borer.
{snip}
Every year is a learning experience. “I like to try new things, like companion planting,” said Boyd, “Every year I try something different against the squash bores,” she adds with a smile.

Gardeners contribute in surprising ways, like Jacob Ebert, who knew there was a need for a shed in the garden. While doing some construction work with a friend, he happened to be working on a site where they were getting rid of a shed. He dismantled it himself, brought it to the garden, and put it up all in the same evening. He then painted it brown and it serves as an area for storing gardening supplies.

{snip}
Introducing a healthy diet is another benefit of involving their children, says Joseph. “They like to eat the fresh vegetables and it’s important because you know it will affect their diet in the future,” she said.
Next year, the gardeners hope to add a bed of roman chamomile that people can lay down and relax in and a sandbox for the kids.
{snip}
The Community Table
The Community Table has been serving hot meals to Jackson County residents since 1999. They serve dinner four nights a week, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. According to their mission, they provide nutritious meals regardless of people’s ability to pay.
Timara McCollum, the Executive Director, began in June and says having “good, fresh, organic” produce helps meet the mission of providing nutritious meals. It means using “less canned food, allowing us to limit the sodium intake and up the vitamins,” said McCollum.
“We try to be as creative as we can,” said McCollum, when it comes to the menus. And if the fresh food can’t be used right away, it is either frozen for future use or given to the clients.
“It’s also another way for the gardeners to get connected,” said McCollum. It’s clear that she views community involvement as an enriching experience in her work.
{snip}
McCollum emphasizes the “Community” in Community Table. Many of the people served by the table are elderly, said McCollum, or people who just need temporary assistance.
“When people come eat with us, they love to talk and many have made friends here,” said McCollum, adding that talking with clients is what she likes most about the job. “It always feels good when it is full.”

I love this creation on so many levels. The gardening is therapeutic, vital, human, and creative. The garden connects people to the Earth and to each other. They are able to come together to provide for others. They create beauty. Go read the whole thing. More pics here.

The Eponymous Dr. Crummie

2007-08-02T12:33:00.000-04:00

God Help the Old North State...please....

The medical professionals who volunteer at the N.C. General Assembly usually treat minor injuries and dispense standard medical advice. Not this week.
One of them handed out copies of his book in which he advocates greater use of the lobotomy -- the controversial surgical procedure in which a doctor removes or detaches the front of a patient's brain.
"We don't hear about the successful lobotomies," writes Dr. Bob Crummie in Chapter 14 of his book, "Dr. Bob's Grocery Store Medicine and Healthy Life Anecdotes."
Crummie, a Rutherfordton physician, served Tuesday as Doctor of the Day at the legislature. His 232-page book, which he distributed for free, has plenty of homespun medical advice, as well as plenty of more-unusual statements.
{snip}
Perhaps his most controversial opinions relate to gays and lesbians.
"There is no such thing as a homosexual. The Gay Movement is a hoax," Crummie writes. "Individuals who act out homosexually are at best very neurotic and at worst psychotic. Most of them are character disorders."
In what he describes as "one of my funniest stories," Crummie tells how he once put a stop to homosexuality at an N.C. prison when, as superintendent, he threatened to give electric shock therapy to anyone caught in the act. With several inmates present, he demonstrated the procedure on one inmate who was severely depressed, he writes.

Threaten to shock a queer while zapping a man and get yourself put on a pedestal in the NC General Assembly. God help us.

Lousy Customer Service in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools...but maybe a turning point.

2007-08-02T12:09:00.001-04:00

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools just spent $80K on "secret shopper" reviews for their school system. Among their findings:

• 48 -- percent of e-mails answered. (Businesses usually reply to about 80 percent of general inquiries.)
• 31.4 -- percent of those e-mails that actually answered the customers' questions, as opposed, for example, to referring them to the Web site. (75 percent is standard.)
• 12 -- number of minutes a secret shopper waited at an unnamed school, as he cleared his throat and four office workers went on with their tasks.
• 42.5 -- percent of calls transferred.
• 25 -- number of rings from one of those transfers, before the caller hung up.

From what I've seen, schools aren't exactly customer friendly -- the 12 minutes with no help is a bit unusual but even two minutes with people walking right past you and not acknowledging your presence is both rude and weird. Glad to see CMS raising the consciousness on this point and maybe other systems will follow suit. Absolutely necessary to court public favor with better responsiveness if public schools are going to get the type of support they need.

Michael Ware on current situation in Iraq

2007-08-02T11:33:00.000-04:00

Building Sunni militias to go after AQ at the cost of undermining the Iraqi government and other shell games...

La Flor Dominica w/Oscuro Wrapper

2007-08-02T01:41:00.001-04:00

All I can say is yum. Dude at The Cigar Wrapper does a better job with his description:

The wrapper has been titled Oscuro Natural and is a sight to behold: think roasted coffee beans bathed in oil with highlights of burnt sienna. Other cigars are meant to cap off a memorable event---this cigar is the event. It is a means and end in and of itself. It is smoking for smoking's sake. And oh, what smoke it is..

Oak perfume paints the air at first light. The body is full and textured. There are bright notes in the nose of citrus and exotic wood, but this is a cigar to be relished on the palette. Lofty earth and peppers inform caramelized flavors that build and finish in almonds and spiced cocoa. This cigar is crafted for quiet reflection, a cigar composed to "hear the silence."

That's about right. The fuller-bodied, spicier Nicaraguan wrapper is a great compliment to the nicely aged Dominican filler and binder. I found sticks for 6 bucks but you might be forced to pay more. The whole La Flor Dominica line is solid as I've gone thru about half the line in the past year. They have an unusual double-chisel stoogie which one is supposed to double pierce with a punch sounded cooler than it smoked. About a Toro size (5.75 x 52mm).

For me, these are replacing my Punch Chateau L Maduros which I swear have become utterly monochromatic and unremarkable. Or maybe just the fact they were bought out has psyched my taste buds but they don't do it for me anymore.

Peter Galbraith: "The Iraq War is Lost"

2007-08-02T00:35:00.000-04:00

A somber summary of the situation in Iraq by the former US Ambassador to Croatia, Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms, and author of the current The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. Galbraith is sympathetic to the attempt to democratize Iraq but believes we've made too many mistakes of such a severe nature over such a prolonged period that the situation is inoperable. His take on potential upcoming elections is a perfect example of the numerous Hobson's Choices facing the US and the Iraqi people.

.....Provincial elections will make Iraq less governable while the process of constitutional revision could break the country apart....

{snip}

Iraq's Shiite leaders are reluctant to spend reconstruction money in Sunni areas because they believe, not without reason, that such funds support the Sunni side in the civil war. In a speech in late June on the Senate floor Indiana Republican Richard Lugar reported that Iraq's Shiite-led government has gone "out of its way to bottle up money budgeted for Sunni provinces" and that the "strident intervention" of the US embassy was required in order to get food rations delivered to Sunni towns.

Iraq's mainstream Shiite leaders resist holding new provincial elections because they know what such elections are likely to bring. Because the Sunnis boycotted the January 2005 elections, they do not control the northern governorate, or province, of Nineveh, in which there is a Sunni majority, and they are not represented in governorates with mixed populations, such as Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. New elections would, it is argued, give Sunnis a greater voice in the places where they live, and the Shiites say they do not have a problem with this, although just how they would treat the militant Sunnis who would be elected is far from clear. The Kurds reluctantly accept new elections in the Sunni governorates even though it means they will lose control of Nineveh and have a much-reduced presence in Diyala.
The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, al-Hakim's Shiite party, the SIIC, which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the US and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.
Constitutional revision is the most significant benchmark and it could break Iraq apart. Iraq's constitution, approved by 79 percent of voters in an October 2005 referendum, is the product of a Kurdish–Shiite deal: the Kurds supported the establishment of a Shiite-led government in exchange for Shiite support for a confederal arrangement in which Kurdistan and other regions like the one SIIC hopes to set up in the south, are virtually independent.

Since there is no common ground among the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis on any significant constitutional changes in favor of the Sunnis, such changes must come at the expense of the Kurds or Shiites. Since voters in these communities have a veto on any constitutional amendments, they are certain to fail in a referendum. A revised constitution has no chance of being enacted but its failure will exacerbate tensions among Iraq's three groups.

And this is just one big problem....

It's worth the effort to read it all -- more substance than you can get from days of surfing and watching cable news.

If You're Out of Robotussin Surely an Ipod Will Cure It

2007-08-01T18:24:00.000-04:00

The folks in Kansas, fresh from slaying then resurrecting Mr. Darwin, have another wonderful idea: record a teacher's lectures and then convert them to podcasts fer the younguns:

Students who don't have iPods can check one out. The district bought 20 new ones—six at the high school and one at each middle and elementary school.

School officials said they initially are gearing the project around students who struggle with their class work and are at risk of dropping out.

"For now, we're really wanting to target supplementing students' curriculum and helping them understand concepts," said David T. Patterson, assistant principal at Hutchinson High.

Although the elementary and middle schools will be included, district technology director Larry Frederick said high school students will be the main focus "because of the sheer number and age of students."

Teachers will start recording their lectures when the school year starts. The podcasts—digital media files that can be either audio or video—will cover reading and math material to correspond with No Child Left Behind education standards.

The podcasts will be added to computers, televisions and the district's new 80-gigabyte iPods. In all, the equipment for the podcasts, including six computers, cost more than $25,000.
{snip}
Patterson said research also shows that children learn better when information is presented to them in new ways.

"We're really excited about it," he said. "We think it's really going to make a difference for the students."

Uh, no, Mr. Patterson, the material is presented in the same goddamn way it was in class -- teacher talks, maybe the kids talk, and either Billy gets it or not. Mere repetition of a lecture for at-risk kids is unlikely to find much positive mental traction, even if it's re-broadcast over a cool gadget. And podcasting math lessons?? Hmmm. I can just see the kid who has difficulty with abstract material trying to visualize the concepts and solving an equation while listening to Ms. Stevens drone on.

Good news for Apple, bad news for kids.

Billy needs some one on one and has needed that since first grade. But we'll throw an Ipod at him, note the smile, and we'll all feel better.

The Lunacy of No Child Left Behind

2007-08-01T18:11:00.001-04:00

From The New York Times

Several weeks into his first year of teaching math at the High School of Arts and Technology in Manhattan, Austin Lampros received a copy of the school’s grading policy. He took particular note of the stipulation that a student who attended class even once during a semester, who did absolutely nothing else, was to be given 45 points on the 100-point scale, just 20 short of a passing mark.

Austin Lampros quit after a student he had failed was passed.

Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.
That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.
Through the intercession of Ms. Geiger, Miss Fernandez was permitted to retake the final after receiving two days of personal tutoring from another math teacher. Even though her score of 66 still left her with a failing grade for the course as a whole by Mr. Lampros’s calculations, Ms. Geiger gave the student a passing mark, which allowed her to graduate.

Yes, of course, we want all students to graduate. But what does the diploma mean? We are awash in tests which can be and are circumvented by clever administrators who care more about the appearances than reality.

Rouge States

2007-06-28T12:45:00.001-04:00

My letter to Real Clear Politics:

Today you wrote:

Thompson called the current Senate bill "the same deal" as the 1986 reform blamed with making the immigration problem worse. "Secure the border. Nothing else can be dealt with until that is done, and the American people are trying to get that message across." Thompson said not everyone who comes to America illegally is looking for a better life, because some may be from rouge states intending to do harm.

I've had my fears about the Red State crowd as well though I admit I was surprised to find Senator Thompson echoing my concern. Apparently the French have gotten a hold of him.

Helen Thomas puts some heat on Hillary

2007-06-28T11:56:00.001-04:00

Helen lays out the case as to why we're leery of Hillary:

In 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within a certain deadline; the president vetoed the measure. But Clinton then voted against a compromise war-spending bill that tied
funding to progress by Iraq in meeting certain benchmarks.

It doesn't take her long to switch her stance on the war - even in 24 hours. On Tuesday, June 19, Clinton told a union audience that she favored keeping some troops in Iraq "to protect our interests" there after a major pullout. But the following day, she told an activist anti-war gathering that she wants U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq.

On that day, she dazzled the "Take Back America" conference by
declaring: "We're going to end the war in Iraq and finally bring our troops home."

A woman has a right to change her mind. But we're talking about war and peace. After dealing with the conflict, now in its fifth year, Clinton ought to know where she stands.

Yep.

The Helen & Tony show

2007-01-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday:

Q Would the administration agree to a referendum in Iraq to see what the people really want?

MR. SNOW: No.

Q Why?

MR. SNOW: The federal Constitution does not permit for such referenda.

Q Why? We are a conqueror. We should be asking the people, do they really want us there.

MR. SNOW: Helen.

Q Yes, sir.

MR. SNOW: Do you believe -- well, no, you will scold me for asking a question, so I will not. I will phrase my question in the form of an answer.

Q You know, best defense is offense, is that your whole approach?

MR. SNOW: No, my --

Q I'm asking you a very --

MR. SNOW: No, my approach is to -- well, you're asking a simple question that actually has some fairly complex precedents in the terms of the advisability or possibility of a national --

Q You keep saying that they want us there --

MR. SNOW: Helen, Helen, Helen.

Q Put it to a test.

MR. SNOW: Helen, no war is popular. No war is popular.

Q That's not the answer.

MR. SNOW: If you had done -- no, it is -- no, that is an absolutely accurate answer.

Q Nobody wants --

MR. SNOW: If you had asked in 1864 -- I'll go back to the Civil War -- the referendum would have failed and Abraham Lincoln would have failed.

Q How do you know that?

MR. SNOW: Go back and read, just a little history will tell you.

Q Who won the war?

MR. SNOW: You had Republican senators trooping up to the White House telling the President that he needed the cut a separate deal, that he needed to dispatch emissaries to speak with Jefferson Davis and his heirs and assigns.

Q -- the Civil War?

MR. SNOW: Well, I'm just telling you -- I'm trying to make the larger point, and it is getting sort of ludicrous, about the fact that wars are, of course, unpopular, but the important thing to understand is --

Q A referendum is ludicrous?

MR. SNOW: No, no, I'm saying that when we get too deep into historic analogies -- but if you'll permit me to finish an answer, I will let you ask a follow-up question. The point here is that the President understands that a war is unpopular. He also understands that it's necessary. And you can frame questions in a lot of ways -- if you did a referendum to say, will Americans -- do you want to succeed in Iraq; do you want democracy in Iraq; would you like terror on your shores; do you believe that al Qaeda wishes to kill Americans, and if it does, do you want to fight them there or here?

Q Do you want an American military occupation in Iraq. That's the question.

MR. SNOW: Okay, well, you may ask it. Thank you.

What Snow leaves out is Lincoln DID INDEED try to cut a deal, several times. The last offer was to (a) provide the South total amnesty (b) Federal government would compensate slaveholders fair market value for their slaves (c) Federal government would declare war on Cuba in a few years and Jeff Davis would be assigned to lead the Army as a method of national reconciliation, and providing Davis a boost into the presidency.

Davis gave the proposal a thumbs down.

Source: Bruce Chadwick's The Two American Presidents (which has been found to have some problems)

Christmas Kitty

2006-12-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

Genna and I got our tree up....and Mr. Allen approved of his new fragrant, Frazier Fur shelter.

Peter Kurth's Crank Call: Black Fridays, Cyber Mondays, and Big Pricks

2006-11-27T17:14:00.000-05:00

So here it is, the week after Thanksgiving, way up in the hills of Vermont (well, Charlotte). We’ve “seen some sunshine” recently, as the meteorologists say, but it’s been the kind of fleeting, “almost” sunshine you can easily miss if you’re doing something else. In Vermont, at the end of November, you often have to rush outside to see the sun, which, as far as I’m concerned, exceeds the limits of sun-worship.

So, we’d better face the facts: Winter’s on the way. The light is getting dimmer. There’s an indescribable feeling in the air – a combination of huge relief that Thanksgiving is over and utter dread that Christmas is coming. Once again, Americans are marching to the tune of “Ready, Set, Shop!” According to Monday’s Los Angeles Times, “Holiday shoppers came out early and spent big across the nation this weekend,” shelling out “an average of $360.15” per person, “18.9% more than last year,” while mere hundreds died in Iraq. Or, as blogger Jason Miller put it on Thomas Paine’s Corner, commenting on Thanksgiving week’s notorious “Black Friday,” “The unwavering disciples [of American capitalism] charged into the fray to avoid the unthinkably tragic fate of dying without having the most toys.”

Amen. And “Black Friday” isn’t even “Cyber Monday,” when American workers, loosening the goose fat from their middles, were projected to spend something like $32 billion on the Web in a single day, once they got back to the office and saw what a huge waste of time it was for them to be there when there’s so much shopping to be done. The Times reports that, as of Monday, “shoppers were encouraged by deals on big-ticket electronics, including DVD players, high-definition televisions and new video game consoles.”

All these “consoles,” I’m afraid, are why the Islamo-fascists hate us so much. Consoles and cars and cell phones and diamonds -- lots of diamonds. I’ve seen more ads for diamonds on TV lately than I have in the last twenty years. They seem to pop up automatically between commercials for Wendy's and all those soothing cartoon butterflies telling you what a wonderful night’s sleep you’re going to have if you only “ask your doctor” and don’t mind the nausea, headache, dizziness, grogginess, indigestion, diarrhea and “certain rare but fatal side-effects” that go along with it. But the truth can no longer be doubted by any reasonable mind: Ours is an “ideology of freedom” and theirs is an “ideology of hate” -- even though everyone the LAT managed to interview at the malls on Saturday wished to hell “the holidays” were over already. “I just can’t take another minute of this!” was the general refrain.

Well, as my mother used to say when I was growing up, “Oh, Christmas!” -- it was one of her more frequent and reliable outbursts of frustration. She’s developed a few stronger ones since, “but that’s because of George W. Bush,” as she’s prepared to swear on oath. My mother is the kind of person who actually calls the White House and tells the operators what she thinks. Frequently, they hang up on her, being underpaid customer-service representatives with a lot of shopping to do, but when that happens she just calls them back and gets another one. Once she called the White House to say that the president’s penis was “big enough already” and that he didn’t need to bomb Iraq to make it any bigger. She even offered to “change his diaper” if they’d only send him back to Crawford. Now, she thinks that the best way for the U.S. to get out of Iraq is to withdraw our troops immediately and make amends to the Iraqi people by sending them “the most expensive Christmas gift we have to offer -- the whole Bush dynasty."

“What could possibly go wrong?” my mother asks. “Why, it’d be a cakewalk!” Certainly, if the media promoted the Bushes as heavily as they promote Christmas – well, come to think of it, they do. Since the recent elections, a pure disaster for the clan, we’ve had more Bush-family news than you can shake a stick at. First, the Iraq Study Group, under the leadership of James A. Baker, the Bushes’ famous “consigliere,” is stepping in on 41’s behalf to rescue 43’s presidency. Next, 41 himself was in the Middle East, whining and pleading and practically bursting into tears because a lot of people in Abu Dhabi think his son’s a liar and a creep.

"My son is an honest man!” 41 exclaimed. "He is working hard for peace! This son is not going to back away!” And then, irrelevantly, “How come everybody wants to come to the United States if the United States is so bad?”

Meantime, little Barbara – or was it Jenna? – had her purse snatched in Argentina, right under the noses of her security detail. She lost her driver’s license (not a bad thing, from what I hear) and all her credit cards, but I’m sure there are plenty more where those came from. Finally, sister Doro, “the best-kept secret in America,” as her mother says, has “burst out of the shadows” with a book, My Father, My President, which chronicles in weepy and revoltingly sentimental tones “the life and times” of 41, but seems reluctant to name or even mention 43, whom the Washington Post reports is currently sulking in his tent, “fuming,” “venting” and “in a funk” over his dwindling power.

By the sound of her interviews, the “twice-married” Doro – and there I was thinking it had to be “one man, one woman!” – couldn’t write a grocery list by herself, but if we’re publishing phony, fraudulent memoirs, we might as well publish them all. I’m sure there are lots of people who’d rather pay $8000 on Ebay for a copy of O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It than find Doro’s little tome under their tree this year. Well, that’s the price of monarchy, I guess, and the Iraqis are welcome to it. But at least we haven’t had to watch a Republican campaign commercial for – what is it now? – nearly four weeks.

Peter Kurth's Crank Call: What's the Mommy Party Done for Us Lately?

2006-11-15T14:05:00.000-05:00

{Mountain Philosopher's note: Peter Kurth is a friend of a friend, which makes him....well, brilliant. See his bio over there on the right for more info. I'm thrilled that he's agreed to let me post his bi-weekly column, Crank Call, which also appears in the Vermont alternative weekly, Seven Days.}

“Oh frabjous day!” as Lewis Carroll wrote in one of the Alice books. It’s all so wonderful you could scream, or do somersaults, or anything you want. Such as head a “mega-church” in Colorado Springs and have sleazy gay sex at the same time, and buy crystal meth and throw it down the toilet -- right! -- if that’s what makes you happy. At the moment, I don’t care what your fetish is, just knowing that for once, at last, the people of these states knew what they were doing and threw the bums out.

I’m talking about last week’s elections, of course. What else is anyone talking about? I still have no hope for the future, but, God, it was nice to see! We aren’t brain-dead, after all, are we? Are we?

I hope not. Because, frankly, the only thing the Democratic “sweep to Congress” has proved so far is that we’ve got a long way to go to undo the damage the Bush administration has wrought over the last six years. And this column isn’t titled “Crank Call” for nothing -- I’m already tired of Nancy Pelosi and her gavel. Sure, it’s nice to see “a woman” third in line to the throne, after Baby and Cheney, but Bush wasn’t entirely wrong when he asked, in his last-minute stomp through parts of the country you’ve never heard of, “What’s their plan?”

The fact that Bush doesn’t and never did have “a plan” beyond corporate fascism isn’t, right now, the issue. The fact that this trust-funded weasel wouldn’t know “a plan” if it burned a cigarette mark on his arm at a “Skull and Bones” initiation isn’t, right now, the issue. Even the fact that Rumsfeld has finally been booted out in favor of a soulless CIA spook isn’t, right now, the issue. The issue is: Where are we going, and how? Even Maureen Dowd of The New York Times is a bit concerned about this.

“This will be known as the year macho politics failed,” says Dowd, who is known to have some issues about the difference between men and women, “mainly because it was macho politics by marshmallow men." In other words, it would have been OK if they weren't marshmallows. Maureen is the daughter of a New York cop, and Gloriosky! does she know about men: "Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability. They were ready to trade in the deadbeat Daddy party for the sheltering Mommy party.”

By “Mommy” Ms. Dowd means “Speaker-elect Pelosi,” and, I suppose, the dreaded Hillary Clinton. But what would happen if there were an election where Mommy and Daddy didn’t enter into it – where it was simply assumed that anyone of voting age was capable of making his or her own decisions?

In Vermont, of course, we all knew that Rich Tarrant would lose – no conversation there. But did we really know what we were voting for? “Anything But Bush,” I suppose, which is a good slogan, and which should be branded on the back of every car and truck that otherwise says “Support Our Troops!”

And now what? “Moderation?” “Bipartisanship?” “Consensus?” All those things that the Bush administration has so far shown such an amazing capacity to observe! Are we supposed to believe that "Mommy" can fix this? Why do I feel that I’m about to open a box of “Lucky Charms” – speaking of marshmallows -- with those awful bits of “freeze-dried” junk sucking up space where the cereal ought to be? My brother, Robert Kurth, put it very well recently in a letter to The Poughkeepsie Journal:

Prepare yourselves for a torrent of news and opinion about a "new direction" in Iraq. Be prepared, too, for unvarnished accounts from our military that the level of violence there is much higher than we have been told heretofore. … I pray that an honest and thorough assessment of the occupation of Iraq can improve the situation for American soldiers and Iraqis alike. I support a Congressional resolution that the United States disavows any intention of permanent military bases and of any claim to Iraqi oil.

But I refuse to accept that the only way forward must be balanced and bipartisan. This arrogant and incompetent administration has earned much more than just "a thumpin'" at the polls. They have earned subpoenas, prosecution and jail time. The sooner the better. Happy Holidays.

To this I can’t add much, except to say that if you don’t believe the Kurth brothers, you can consult the “national” pundits, who are already beginning to worry that Ding-Dong’s “thumpin’” won’t amount to a hill of beans so long as the idea of the “unitary executive” is allowed to stand; so long as the “Patriot Act” is in force; so long as this administration – or any administration -- is allowed to wiretap and spy on Americans without warrant; so long as “the President” can determine, at his whim and will, who and what are “enemy combatants” and can have them arrested and imprisoned without right to counsel or, for that matter, any evidence that he or she has broken the law.

You can have all the “Mommys” you want, Maureen – all the “Madame Speakers” in the world -- but if these and other outrages aren’t removed, it won’t make a spickin’ lit of difference. That expression the Kurth brothers get from their father, a gen-yoo-ine Texan, now a converted Muslim, who can’t go to his mosque in Fredericksburg, Virginia – gallant, gallant Virginia, which swang the Senate for the Democrats! – without knowing that he and his whole family are under the watch of the Feds.

Prove us wrong, voters. Prove us wrong.

Assassinations, Coups, and a Blood-Drenched Desert

2006-11-02T17:30:00.000-05:00

Last week, NY Post columnist Ralph Peters unambiguously called for the assassination of Muqtada al-Sadar -- the headline, in typical NY Post subtlety, demanded KILL MUQTADA NOW. Chap tipped me to this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column by Jack Kelly which seconds Peters' motion:

So why is the Moqtada al-Sadr still alive?
When Coalition Provisional Authority chairman Paul Bremer issued an arrest warrant for al Sadr in April of 2004, we were dissuaded from serving it by Iraqi politicians and clerics who claimed they could "control" him. Now he's controlling them.
Whenever we've attempted to apply a political "solution" to what is essentially a military problem, bad things have happened. An example is when we broke off the first battle of Fallujah in May of 2004 at the insistence of those Sunni leaders (more or less) supporting the government. This handed al-Qaida a major (though fortunately only a temporary) victory.
We hesitate to act decisively against Mr. Sadr in order to preserve the facade of Iraqi democracy and sovereignty, even though Mr. Maliki's hapless government wouldn't last a week if U.S. troops withdrew.
To maintain this fiction, we won't take actions Mr. Maliki doesn't approve of. But he depends upon the 28 votes Mr. Sadr controls in the Iraqi parliament in order to maintain his tenuous grasp on power. Prodding from the United States has so far been insufficient to get him to give them up. Mr. Maliki has declared which side he's on, and it isn't ours.
If we act against Mr. Sadr, there will be an uprising. It will be bloody. But continued inaction pretty much guarantees slow motion defeat.

And then yesterday, Peters calls for yet another well-placed bullet:

Our greatest setback in Iraq may be that country's undoing: It has proven impossible to develop an honest, nonpartisan police establishment anywhere in the country's Arab provinces. The police aren't feared by criminals, but by law-abiding citizens.
The secret police are back, in the form of death squads. And the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki looks perfectly happy with the situation.
American advisers risk their lives in the struggle to build Iraqi police units committed to doing their duty. We've equipped them, trained them and led from the front.
In gratitude, Iraq's police have ambushed our troops, fielded death squads less restrained than those under Saddam, stolen everything they could steal in preparation for a future civil war - and, apparently, funneled U.S.-provided arms to militias, insurgents and terrorists.
Our efforts to develop good cops have failed (garbage in, garbage out). We need to stop wasting our efforts. Shielded by government ministers and parliamentarians, the police are so out of control that there's no longer any hope of weeding out the bad guys. Instead, the bad guys are weeding out the good guys: Honest cops get killed. By other cops.
The situation's desperate. We need to revamp our strategy (to the extent that we have one). For all its shortcomings, the Iraqi army has been a far greater success than the police - whether we're speaking of cops on the beat or paramilitary commandos.
It's time to abandon the cops. Let the anti-American elements in the Maliki government have them. Don't continue to strengthen our enemies. Concentrate on developing and expanding the army.
Why? Here's where the truth gets still uglier. As dearly as we believe in democracy, Iraq's Arabs are proving that they're incapable of the political, social and moral maturity necessary to run an elected government.
Casting ballots alone doesn't make a democracy. The government has to function. And to protect all of its citizens.
In the coming months, we may find that the only hope of restoring order is a military government. It sounds repellent, but a U.S.-backed coup may be the only alternative to endless anarchy.

OK. One at a time here. Kelly concedes that the assassination of al-Sadr will result in a bloody uprising, a noxious tonic that only goes down when confronted with the alternative of a "slow motion defeat." I'll posit that Kelly's crystal ball isn't any better than mine. And my crystal ball tells me that the assassination of al-Sadr will merely speed up our defeat.

Wouldn't our assassination of a leading Shiite cleric royally inflame the broader Iraqi Shia community, even those that think that al-Sadr is a kook, if they see the assassination as a proxy action on the behalf of the Sunnis? At the moment, we're mostly fighting Sunni insurgents - do we want to add another significant front with a mere 138,000 pairs of boots with almost nothing in reserve? Nowhere do Kelly nor Peters acknowledge the fact the Army and Marines are dealing with both physical exhaustion and significant degradation of their hardware. Do we truly have the manpower and equipment to deal with a new significant offensive? The situation would, quite likely, certainly leapfrog to total chaos, American casualties would skyrocket, and the remaining home front support for the war would evaporate and Congress would pull the plug.

In the post below, I mentioned that Maliki might want to read up on what happened to Vietnam's Diem. Looks like Ralph Peters was thinking the same thing with his open call for a coup. That "solution" looks like a disaster to me.

Any replacement government won't have the veneer of being indigenous. Peters is quite correct to call bullshit on the Bush Administration's fairy tale that purple thumbs alone make a democracy but glosses over the reality they do at least provide some cover. "Military government?" What does that mean? We off a Shiite who's tight with Iran, who enjoys at least some fair measure of popularity in the Shia community. We off a moderate Shiite AND off the radical Shiite (al-Sadr) and we have a rather unified Shia Iraq wanting to kill every American they see. What do we really replace Maliki with? What faction within the existing Iraqi military will have a significantly different outlook and vision than Maliki? Killing Maliki and replacing him with a body without the imprimatur of the "consent of the governed" will make that government an obvious puppet and a terminal inflammatory target.

And where does a Maliki coup leave the neocon foreign policy base for Bush? Maliki is Zalmay Khalilzad's (American ambassador to Iraq) guy. Given Khalizad's history, he's probably got the stomach for a coup but his credibility within Iraq disappears. The one American who seems to have his head screwed on straight from the perspective of the Iraqis turns his back while murder went down... I can't see it. And what of Kristol, Frum, Perle, and the others who will see the last vestige of their fantasy of democracy in Iraq crushed in the wake of such a coup? Most Americans aren't in thrall to the neocon vision as they may have been in 2002 and 2003 but as prominent talking heads, the neocons still provide significant media cover for American blood-letting in Iraq. They have nothing left to support if a democratic Iraq is permanently put on hold. Their collective desertion of Bush would weaken him even further and would likely speed demands for a withdrawal.

We have no clearly good choices. Peters and Kelly are right about one thing -- what we're doing isn't working and appears to be fatally leading towards defeat. The new Congress and Senate will have a difficult choice laid before them: take a chance on a new, more muscular, and at least in the short-term, far bloodier policy with no clear guarantee for victory OR a phased withdrawal which absolutely guarantees no victory and most likely results in the Democrats being labeled as national security wimps for another generation. Will Senator Clinton want to continue to cultivate her aura of toughness and say "no thanks." What will Senator Obama say -- quite possibly his moment of truth is imminent.

The importance of the impending Baker plan now stands in sharp relief. Because if we discard that path, my guess is that the Congress, Senate, and the President will opt for far more blood than we have seen thus far. I fear that in the not-to-distant future, we may well wax nostalgic for a month where "only" 105 American servicemen and women fell in Iraq.

Who "Lost" Iraq?

2006-11-02T16:46:00.000-05:00

Heather Hurlburt, of Democracy Arsenal, takes on Ralph Peters:

Who "Lost" Iraq?

As much as I cheer every time another prominent cheerleader for the Iraq war leaves the ship, I kind of wish conservative military commentator Ralph Peters had stayed where he was.

Today he fires an impressive and dismaying salvo on the topic in USA TODAY. He describes the invasion as "noble," but incompetently done. But then comes this:
...for all our errors, we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy. They preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption. It appears that the cynics were right: Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it. And people get the government they deserve.

For us, Iraq's impending failure is an embarrassment. For the Iraqis — and other Arabs — it's a disaster the dimensions of which they do not yet comprehend. They're gleeful at the prospect of America's humiliation. But it's their tragedy, not ours.
That's not "the soft bigotry of low expectations." That's just bigotry. Does what happened in the American South after the Civil War prove that the South "can't support democracy as we know it?" No. Latin America has a number of rather solid democracies today that looked quite dubious 20 years ago. Israel didn't spring from 1948 a fully-formed democracy, to choose a Middle Eastern example.

What did all those places have that Iraq hasn't had? Years -- decades, in fact -- of relative peace, strong external support and internal cohesion. (Obviously, Israel had less of the first and more of the last.) Institutions that developed internally and indigenously. Functioning economies and national institutions.

Ms. Hurlburt does like this one provocative line of Peters:

"And contrary to the prophets of doom, the United States wouldn't be weakened by our withdrawal, should it come to that. Iraq was never our Vietnam. It's al-Qaeda's Vietnam. They're the ones who can't leave and who can't win."

I can't make complete sense of this Peter's sentiment. Short term, I agree, we wouldn't be weakend immediately after a withdrawal -- our forces would be able to catch a much-needed breath. Longer term, well, I think that's a far tougher case to make. If the nascent civil war goes into full tilt boogie mode and other countries -- Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran -- are drawn into the conflict, then it seems that we won't be able to merely stand on the sidelines. The national security implications, our stalwart posture of defending Israel, economic/petroleum concerns, not to mention a devastating humanitarian crisis as thousands of refugees seek to flee, will compel the United States to rejoin the Iraqi theater. For me, the penultimate question is whether those concerns are best dealt with now or later. And for me, the obvious answer is, painful as it will be, it is better to attempt to fix it now rather than let step aside with a likely deterioration of the situation. Of course, the ultimate question is how to deal with the situation now which minimizes further loss of life be it American or Iraqi.

I was struck by two of the comments at the USA TODAY site where the Peter's column appeared. The first one:

"It is absurd to blame the Iraqis for the mess made by those of you who supported this criminal enterprise of a war based on a 'pack of lies' and a corruption and incompetence that is stunning in its scale and depravity.

Iraq is worse than Vietnam. We had Vietnam in our rear view mirror so all of you should have known better. You let yourselves be swept up in the thrill of propaganda and now perhaps 650,000 or more Iraqis are dead because of it along with more than 2800 US forces...."

And the second one:

"What we are seeing here is two wars. One is the war between insurgents and our forces; it will stop if the insurgents are defeated or if we leave. The other is the war between Shia and Sunni, between this tribe and that tribe.

The second war is purely Iraqi, it is neither our fault nor our responsibility. It would have occurred regardless of whether Saddam had been removed by us, by a random act of nature, or by his own countrymen. Minus the despot, the bloodshed that followed was a certainty, as it was in Yugoslavia after the death of Tito a couple of decades ago. Ultimately the underlying cause of the Middle East's woes is population overshoot of the resource base in a region that is little more than barren desert. There is of course a lesson for us in that point as well..."

CentCom Power Point: Sliding Towards Chaos

2006-11-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 — A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict.

A one-page slide shown at the Oct. 18 briefing provides a rare glimpse into how the military command that oversees the war is trying to track its trajectory, particularly in terms of sectarian fighting.

The slide includes a color-coded bar chart that is used to illustrate an “Index of Civil Conflict.” It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

An intelligence summary at the bottom of the slide reads “urban areas experiencing ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns to consolidate control” and “violence at all-time high, spreading geographically.” According to a Central Command official, the index on civil strife has been a staple of internal command briefings for most of this year. The analysis was prepared by the command’s intelligence directorate, which is overseen by Brig. Gen. John M. Custer.

So yesterday Prime Minister Maliki essentially orders the US forces out of Sadr City which in turn means that, at least temporarily, we have to stop looking for our missing soldier. Muqtada al-Sadr gets stronger and we get....well, certainly not stronger nor better positioned. The Shiite militias become stronger, more entrenched into what passes for a central government, forcing the Sunni insurgency to take more and more desperate steps. And our guys are caught in some truly nasty crossfire. And the plan is .......?

Maliki might just want to read up on what happened to this feller over here on the right -- I'm a thinkin' their fates will be shared.

Turn Your Swords into.....Espresso Machines

2006-11-01T09:33:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite books is Donovan Webster's Aftermath which chronicles the after affects of war. The opening chapter discusses the work of the French demineurs -- men whose occupation is to scour the countryside of France searching for unexploded ordnance -- from World War One. They collect tons of the stuff and store it. Then, a couple times a year, they take the stuff to a beach, wait for the tide to go out, and then dig a hole with a backhoe. They ease the ordnance along with fresh explosives into the sand pit, sandwiching the shells that contain the dread mustard gas in the middle. They cover the hole, wait for the tide to come back in and then blow it all up. I guess the most mind boggling thing is that so much ordnance is around almost 90 years after it was dropped.

A fellow in Ethiopia, the birth place of coffee, has found a more ingenious use for the exploded mortar shells which litter the Ethiopian country side.

From the BBC with a hat tip to BoingBoing:

In his workshop in Mekele, just 120 km from Ethiopia's border with Eritrea, Azmeraw Zeleke is turning burnt-out shells into cylinders used in coffee machines.
Most of the shells are left over from the 1998-2000 war between the two countries.
{snip}

He uses old mortar shells, which stand about one metre high, to make his coffee machines.
He cuts off the pointed ends, seals them and puts holes into the aluminium cylinder. The cylinder channels the water, coffee and milk.
{snip}
Coffee is a major export from Ethiopia and plays a big role in life.
After meals, the traditional coffee ceremony allows family and friends to get together to share news and discuss the issues of the day.
{snip}

Cafe owner Haile Abraha bought one of Mr Azmeraw's machines a few months ago.
"I had one other imported machine but this one is much better. It is relatively cheap. The price is fair. The machine is good and it makes good coffee."

But Mr Azmeraw says it can be difficult to convince people to buy because of the mortar shell.

"These shells have all been used. We all need peace and we don't want war but once these shells have been used, we should use our skills to do something with them.

"Sometimes I think about the fact they were used for war but I want to change them to do something good. They could be a symbol of war but I am doing something good out of the bad."
Since he started production five or six years ago, Mr Azmeraw has sold hundreds of machines - he cannot remember exactly how many.
Each one costs about $1,300. Most of them have been sold to people in the Mekele area.

Project Valour

2006-10-30T07:47:00.000-05:00

"Project Valour-IT, in memory of SFC William V. Ziegenfuss, provides voice-controlled laptop computers to wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at home or in military hospitals. Operating laptops by speaking into a microphone, our wounded heroes are able to send and receive messages from friends and loved ones, surf the 'Net, and communicate with buddies still in the field without having to press a key or move a mouse. The experience of CPT Charles "Chuck" Ziegenfuss, a partner in the project who suffered severe hand wounds while serving in Iraq, illustrates how important this voice-controlled software can be to a wounded servicemember's recovery."

Enrevanche writes: "These folks are good at what they do. They've got the cost down for the complete rig to $800 - that'll buy a laptop setup for a wounded vet. But unfortunately, demand for these units is outstripping supply right now, and there's a fund drive on."

It doesn't matter what you think about the war, enabling another person's ability to communicate with his friends and family, especially for a person who has sacrificed his body for his fellows, is the essence of being humane. If you can, please donate to this worthy cause.

Click here to go donate. Or use the DONATE button in the upper right hand corner of this blog if you want to credit this blog. The counter is pretty cool -- it did immediately update after I donated using PayPal. And checking email, you will receive a receipt for your friends at the IRS.