Look who's coming for dinner!

I know it’s fashionable to assert that there is no scientific basis for “race” and indeed you can define race in a way that makes it true, but the idea is a political one and designed to stifle discussions of population genetics in the same way as discussions and scientific investigations of human gender differences has been stifled in the interest of promoting gender equality and attempting to avoid discrimination. It’s the politics of “you can’t handle the truth” and it’s the argument that says, don’t believe your eyes, believe what we tell you. Sometimes the only way this can be discussed is through humor as when Stephen Colbert declares “I don’t see race” when of course, we can’t avoid it.

We see family resemblance because families tend to have more similar inherited features than they share with the total world population. Likewise populations that have been isolated for a great deal of time share an extended family resemblance. Recognizing this has nothing to do with racism which is about postulating that these relatively minor things constitute some sort of hierarchy in the abilities, worth and human rights of various populations.

Of course the criteria by which some people assign an individual to one race or another is subjective and not very scientific; there is a great deal of genetic variation amongst people we commonly and erroneously lump into one group and that’s because we can only see genetic variations that determine external morphology. There is a great deal below the surface and that gets to the point of all this. It’s possible that there are two unrecognized and invisible races of mankind and the only way we can tell them apart is to see whether they can taste things like a bitter synthetic compound called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC. Some can detect it and some can’t and to those that do, like me, it tastes absolutely awful.

This has been known for 75 years but recently, the gene responsible for making me hate Brussels sprouts was isolated. An article in Science Daily postulates that this gene once served to keep our hirsute ancestors from eating poisonous fruits and vegetables: like Brussels sprouts, spinach and all that other foul smelling, evil tasting green stuff my mother tried in vain to get me to eat. Like many lethal plants, these dreadful items are rich in bitter alkaloids and many alkaloids are deadly. It’s a truly sad thing that I cannot hold these facts up to my mother as vindication: to prove that it was a token of my ability and not of my obstinacy that ruined so many dinners.

Now I don’t want to insinuate that we of the taster race are superior to those who lack the ability, but then we do have an ability that they lack – who knows what else they lack? And look at what those people eat! Would you really want one moving in next door and cooking their nauseating foods or want your daughter to bring one home for dinner?

Daytona

"What the hell just happened?" Was my first reaction. I'm still not sure, but the officials, after several explanations tell me that it was a win for Kevin Harvick in his Chevrolet, at an average of 149.335 mph. Typical of American racing coverage however, I observed this morning that article after article mentioned the confusing ending and the name of the winning driver all at length, but with no mention of the car. I can't imagine a horse race that mentioned only the name of the Jockey, but that's NASCAR reportage and that's America's disinterest in technology and engineering.

I've been in love with racing for a long time and although, as a boy, I knew the names and biographies of men like Sterling Moss and Juan Fangio, my infatuation was with the technology as much as the skills and the teamwork that are racing. My infatuation was and still is more with sports car endurance racing, as unlike these hand made, purpose built NASCAR machines, the cars bear some relationship to and some components with what you can buy at the dealer and drive home in. Not coincidently, American engineering has been a dominant force. Races that take 12 to 24 hours sometimes do justify the journalistic "oooooh the engineering" rhetoric that in other events and in general is meaningless. "Oooooh the money" seems to apply better to the rolling billboards of NASCAR.

The term "stock car" is as much of an anachronism as I am; these tube frame, hand built machines with the painted-on headlights don't roll off an assembly line and the rules make them all very similar in order to level the playing field, but it's big business and growing in popularity every year. With on board cameras and HDTV, I have to admit it's fun to watch -- the hype, the blatant merchandising and the encroachments of foreign manufacturers into a genre that started with moonshiners, shade tree mechanics and souped up cars notwithstanding. As I've said often enough, I'm as annoyed by Toyota's presence (even if they did place 22nd) as much as I would be by a potential World Series win by Venezuela or the Japanese are by a foreign Sumo champion, but getting past the emotional chauvinism, perhaps what we're seeing here is the Americanization of Japanese cars and to me that's far better than seeing Ford's and Chevy's consumer offerings looking like toys for iPodpeople whose other car is a skateboard. In some strange way, maybe a Toyota win would be an American win.

Call me Ishmael

Seems like every damned thing the US government has done or tried to do since the Johnson administration has been sold as a war on something - poverty, crime, drugs, terrorism and of course Mexicans. The good thing about describing an attempt as a war is that where there is a war, there must be an enemy and an enemy is someone you can treat without much restraint or interference from the law and free from concern for common decency, much less the vaunted "Judeo-Christian" ethics our laws are supposed (by the least decent of us) to be based on.

Another thing about wars is that you get to simplify reality by talking about victory and defeat and that's why our national experiment in sobriety could be ended without talk about honor or demoralizing the police or cutting and running. It didn't work, it made things worse so we shut it down. Because it wasn't a "war on booze" we had nothing to lose.

We've made a big mistake in treating the problem of illegal immigration like a war. If it were like other crimes consisting of doing something like driving without a license or doing business without a permit, authorities could simply examine records and make arrests and treat offenders according to due process and the basic ideas about human decency and respect for human life that I like to think most people have. But that's not the way we do it in our nation under Bush because we tell ourselves we are not dealing with people who have broken the law and usually out of desperation. We tell ourselves we're dealing with criminals - with the enemy.

That's the sort of thinking that allows what happened last December 12th in Greeley Colorado to happen and what allows us to not care in the same way people didn't care when Jews and Gypsies and Homosexuals and others were loaded into boxcars by jackbooted bastards in Europe. The jackbooted, helmeted, body armored and heavily armed bastards in this case surrounded a meat packing plant run by Swift and in brutal fashion rounded up, beat down and carted away people who couldn't on the spot prove citizenship. Anyone not able to instantly obey commands screamed in English by space-suited aliens were maced. No one was read their rights, because in a war they don't have the human rights we claim are common to all humanity.

Had this not been a war and simply an arrest of people without a license to work; had this been a nation with a sense of morals, they would not have dragged away husbands and wives without concern that they had minor children and infants left alone at home. No phone calls were allowed - they were the Enemy and were herded off to be held in undisclosed places and incommunicado before deportation. People might have human rights, but enemies don't. On that same day says an article in The Nation, "more than 1,000 ICE agents simultaneously raided five other Swift factories in Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Utah and Minnesota. By the end of the day, nearly 1,300 immigrant workers had been taken into custody--about 265 of them from Greeley."

You can bet that the executives from Swift were not beaten, gassed, thrown to the ground, heaved into trucks and driven out to desert camps without access to lawyers or phone calls to family. You can bet that their children won't be left alone to wander the streets or die on the floor of some trailer or be abused or sold in the absence of their parents and families.

"Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff boasted that the combined raids amounted to the largest workplace enforcement action in history. ICE Assistant Secretary Julie Myers would later claim that Operation Wagon Train, as the raids were dubbed, dealt a major blow in the "war against illegal immigration."

Raw Story tells us today that Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department has ". . . has implemented a secretive new prison program segregating "high-security-risk" Muslim and Middle Eastern prisoners and tightly restricting their communications with the outside world in apparent violation of federal law. Apparently Raw Story has forgotten that under George W. Bush's Reich, the Justice Department is the law. To be sure, they've tried it before, public comment was sought under the law and the courts have shut it down, but since at first they didn't succeed, they simply did it again in secret - they instituted a special program for prisoners who fit a profile.

At Terre Haute Federal Correctional Institution in Indiana, if you're Muslim, suspected of being a Muslim or someone deemed sufficiently suspicious of being one even if not convicted of a crime but merely being held as "witnesses, detainees, or otherwise," you're going to be monitored on the phone, in person, in your letters and when having a visitor. You're only allowed to speak or write English. Your contact with the outside world may be limited to three monitored minutes a month if the Warden doesn't like your beard.

Bandied about the internet is something being called Godwin's law which says that the longer an internet thread continues, the more likely that Hitler will be brought up. Why wait? I will say right now that the US is becoming more Nazified every day that George Bush and his miserable subhuman bastards conduct their war on decency.

Remembering the example of a very few real Christians who stood up to Hitler by wearing yellow stars, the challenge to me is to change my name to Ishmael and brush up on the Spanish. Allahu Akbar - amigos!

As it goes at Daytona, so goes the nation

Let me say right up from that I'm a bigot in matters of national origin - at least when it comes to cars. The idea of Toyota competing fairly on the NASCAR circuit gives me as much heartburn as anything else the Japanese auto industry has forced upon us, like the idea that trucks are better sports cars than sports cars are, that 4 wheel drive cars handle better, that there is no penalty for substituting complex valve trains and very high RPMs for displacement. That narrow cars with small engines are the product of a more noble sort of engineering rather than a necessity forced upon Japanese manufacturers by a punitive tax structure and narrow roads, is a lie that can only be atoned for by a massive and humiliating loss at the track.

Besides, bigotry doesn't have to make sense, does it? Anyway, Toyota's NASCAR debut is something my bad dreams are made of and the announcement that Michael Waltrip, scheduled to run one of those buzz bombs at Daytona this Sunday has lost his crew chief and team director because officials found that the engine's fuel system had been illegally tampered with in an attempt to make a few more horses, has put a nasty little sneer on my GM loving, Toyota hating face.

The problem with American engines in this kind of racing is that they make way too much power and in the interest of not making every Sunday a bloody Sunday at the race track, they are required to use things like restrictor plates and approved fuels to keep the horsepower down. Any aficionado of NHRA drag racing has seen vehicles with big American V8's turning out thousands of horsepower and exceeding 300 mph in about 3 seconds. You would have to do more than add some mysterious substance to the fuel to do that with Mom's multi valve Camry, glue on plastic wings notwithstanding.

We're talking about American pride and self-respect here and just think about how our troops will be demoralized if something Japanese makes a good showing, whether they cheat or not. It would be like finding "Honda" in huge neon lights on the Washington monument or finding sushi on the menu at Denny's. We might as well just disassemble the country and sell it for parts on eBay.

I can't forget that we are talking about one of the companies that decimated the domestic industry by convincing us that buzzy little engines were what the hip kids all drive, that "Tokyo Drifting" counts more than winning LeMans, that you shouldn't buy a Viper because that '62 Buick was sort of a pig.

Now that all of a sudden they have discovered that there is after all, no substitute for displacement, I'm not amused. I am quite amused that companies that I see as having thrived on disinformation, misrepresentation and deceit sometimes get caught at it and I will be amused beyond measure to see them lose -- cheering for America as I sit on my Italian Couch with the Persian pillows, drinking Jamaican beer, wearing a Hawaiian shirt made in China and watching the Daytona 500 on my Japanese television.

When is black Black?

The Daily Curmudgeon wrote yesterday about the electability of Barak Obama and rightly mentioned that a hidden streak of bigotry would make his success unlikely -- and that of course, is because he is a black man, or at least his father was a black man and an African. Of course that streak of bigotry doesn't always reside behind a white face and the discussion of whether Obama is really black or African or half white or half black or African-American or an American of partial black African descent has, in my opinion at least a trace of that odor that clings to Senator Biden's now famous condescending evaluation. "He ain't like them other colored boys, is he?" is how one blogger on The Reaction heard it.

The debate amongst many people however, isn't whether Senator Obama is or isn't like some stereotype, but whether he can be further pidgeon-holed or categorized or deconstructed or reconstructed, obstructed, embraced or dismissed according to some arcane formula found deep in a forest of nuance and innuendo I dare not enter. Much about Obama's ability to understand the experience of Americans who descend from those once enslaved in the continental United States (but not elsewhere) depends, it seems, on these fine distinctions: as though his dark complexion had not exposed him to the prejudice and stereotyping by a society that in most cases doesn't care where great great great grandpa came from as long as you look black. Is it any different than saying that a black man couldn't represent a white society well?

To my way of thinking, the insistence by some African American writers that only a man whose ancestry is politically correct can represent or hope to find support from African Americans, is as demeaning as any white senator's suggestion that a black man who has confidence, poise, a command of English, a brilliant mind and a superior education somehow doesn't represent them either.

It smells funny in those woods; it smells like prejudice, but perhaps a trace of it clings to us all, even though some of us wish the Senator from Illinois could be judged on his record, his ability and his character and not what some people would make of his ancestry.

The Wasteland

Waste: verb, wast·ed, wast·ing

1. to consume, spend, or employ uselessly or without adequate return; use to no avail or profit; squander.
2. to destroy or consume gradually; wear away
3. to be consumed, spent, or employed uselessly or without giving full value or being fully utilized or appreciated.

Dictionary.com has over 30 definitions, as if anyone really needed to look up such a word.

Barak Obama may be learning that illusions are more important than reality, that words carry meaning unrelated to their denotations or connotations and that disturbing the illusions upon which people build their lives and sanity will cost a candidate dearly. Obama is going to have to learn doublethink if he wants to win and he's going to have to temper the directness of speech that may be his cardinal virtue.

He has had to apologize repeatedly and abjectly for stating what I believe is the uncontrovertable truth: the lives of thousands of Americans who marched off to protect their country from a manufactured danger and to advance the interests of certain industries and corporations and individuals have been wasted. Regardless of any real or imaginary benefit we have brought to the wasteland of Iraq or might in future bring; giving one's life or limbs to topple a foreign government and to replace it with something worse is a waste. Only someone who thinks the lives of our troops have no value might argue otherwise. Yet here we have America, wallowing in the notion that killing one's first born is noble if the death allows a sham election and a corrupt, malignant government involved in a bloody religious holocaust.

I do sympathize with the families who cannot face the fact that their husbands or wives or children were sacrificed on the altar of Mammon because of the imperial ambitions of an ignorant president and the martial spirit of a delusional public, but lives were wasted. The nation was neither protected or advanced and the world has been destabilized and endangered. Their lives were wasted -- wasted amidst the waving of flags and the posting of yellow ribbons and the assault on people of conscience and the sick fantasy that somehow this is the 1940's and American troops are on the side of the angels, their deaths a glorious sacrifice.

To arms!

As if to illustrate my point yesterday about the complexity of the international arms trade; the many under the table and through the back door ways arms are paid for and find their way from the major suppliers like China and the United States to end users both legitimate and illegitimate, CNN ran a story this morning. It seems a large shipment of arms originating in China and Russia and destined for Libya by way of Italy and Malta was interrupted by Italian police. That the story did not run under the headline "China supplying terrorist Libya with arms" has more to do with the fact that The Bush Administration is not playing "pin the evidence on the donkey"in this case as it so often has done.

According to the BBC, world governments spend more than $700 billion on their armed forces every year and official annual arms sales total $30 billion. That leaves well more than half a trillion dollars worth of arms in the category of "unofficial" and puts countless weapons in the hands of terrorists and criminals and enables genocide and mayhem in Africa and elsewhere.

Needless to say, it isn't just the Russian Bear or the Chinese dragon selling weapons and washing their claws of responsibility; the USA sells more arms than the next six arms distributing nations combined. The US supplied weapons to Iran to use against Iraq and to Iraq to use against Iran and it's likely that some of these are being used against us as are weapons made in countries we don't care to blame at the moment. Someone as cynical as I am might be tempted to say that we are in no position to preach and in no position to blame other nations whose weapons show up in embarrassing places.

I am still not sure that Iranian weapons are being found in Iraq in quantity, but if they are, I am even less sure that we can use this as evidence that the government of Iran is involved in supplying Iraqi militias. That General Peter Pace shares this opinion is not being widely covered in the press and this suggests that the ability of the White House war mongers to shield their deceptions from contrary evidence remains in place. Even so, I think we can all feel the resistance building.

I doubt, therefore I think.

How many times do we have to get fooled before we really ought to say "shame on us?" I really don't know where the line is, but I'm sure we're over it. Whether or not the Boston Massacre was exaggerated, whether the Maine sank by itself or the second Gulf of Tonkin incident ever happened we do have a history sufficient to have made us suspicious even before the ready-to-launch in 15 minutes WMD's or the non-existent uranium ore. Even before the aluminum tubes and fake al Qaeda connection or the mobile chemical weapons labs that turned out to be English weather balloon stations -- we should have asked more questions before George launched his attack on Iraq four years ago and we certainly have reason to be suspicious of the claims that Iran is supplying advanced weapons to Iraqi Shiites - weapons that CNN claimed this morning, are able to destroy an M-1 Abrams tank, something I had been led to believe that nobody had.

It does not take one of these to blow up a Humvee anyway and as far as I know no tanks have been destroyed in Iraq by a mortar round, but I could be wrong. One thing I am not wrong about is that the international arms market is sufficiently devious and shady and tortuous to make it just possible that these arms, whose presence and prevalence we are to take as true on the word of the Bush junta, weren't purchased over the counter at Ahmed's Arms in Tehran or ordered through a direct connection with the Iranian government. They might have arrived in Iraq, if indeed they actually did, after passing through many private hands on several continents and having left no paper trail and without the manufacturer having a clue or care about where they went. In fact that may be the most usual course when arms are supplied to revolutionaries, insurgents and embargoed governments. Arms dealers don't go to heaven.

I remember in the first, pre-mission-accomplished stages of Bush War II, when we were attempting to shift attention and blame and anger toward the allegedly testicularly challenged and perfidious French, by claiming that night vision optics were showing up in Iraq. Although that was hilarious for several reasons, amongst which was the enormous stock of US weapons and materials the US had supplied Iraq with not long before, but night vision goggles are available from nearly any camping or outdoor supply house by mail order. I have a Russian night vision scope and I assure you that there is no truth in the story that I am being supplied by the Putin government. I bought the thing from a US camping equipment dealer and I can buy Romanian or Chinese or Czech or Israeli or US made surplus equipment without the governments who manufacture them being particularly liable for what I might do with them or who I might pass them on to.

So maybe they are and maybe they aren't supplying Shiite insurgents and militias with sophisticated explosives. Maybe the homemade mines that are killing our troops use explosives we allowed them to have by not guarding the warehouses full of the stuff after the invasion or maybe it's all Iranian, but if some of us aren't motivated by blind faith in a proven liar and demonstrated incompetent to launch another war without further evidence, I think it's a wee bit understandable and I'm damned tired of having my patriotism called into question if I have my doubts.

Update:

The Impolitic offers more serious doubts as to the reality of the Iranian Weapons claim.

Update II

General Peter Pace offers more serious doubts that Iran is supplying weapons.

QSL?

I had to laugh and for several reasons when I read the CNN article about High School Students using their Instant messaging babble in school assignments. You'd think that the idea of condensed writing was new, but all that's really new is its use by untrained teens using phone connections. "Techno-spellings" as CNN erroneously calls the practice -- contractions such as B4 for before or u for you , do serve a purpose since typing a message on a silly little keyboard is tedious and slow, but there's nothing technological about knowing how to use a telephone and nothing "techno" about shorthand.

The practice of using standard abbreviations and codes, unbeknownst to the journalism majors at CNN and most adolescents, was in widespread use amongst telegraphers over 150 years ago and for all I know, semaphore users long before that. In fact the protocols were so extreme in the interest of keeping throughput high, that a layman simply wouldn't understand what was actually sent over the wires or later over the air even if they did know the morse code. Certain numbers or letters would stand for phrases and some of these, like 88 for "love and kisses," or QRN for electrical noise of natural origin, or QSL? for "can you hear me now?" still survive in Amateur radio.

What's new is the idea that the practice of wireless digital text messaging is new - it's older than I am. What's new is miniaturization and commercialization and a system designed so that people with no technical knowledge can work it. Nonetheless, jargon has always been with us and always will be and as long as it irritates English teachers, I'm all for it.

A good CW or Morse code operator ( here I co with the real techno-talk) can far outstrip the speed of a good text messager and it was demonstrated on the Tonight Show a while back. Although code is no longer a requirement for an Amateur license, many hams who still use it can send all day at 30 words per minute and some are much faster, but even those using voice communications or digital text use a jargon far more opaque and far less likely to be used with your cell phone or to accidentally find its way into that Sophomore "what I did last Summer" essay or book report.

Here's a snippet from a typical text conversation you might read using one of the many digital modes, like PSK31 that hams have been using for years: K9*** DE N4** QSL tnx fer return. yr RST559 QSB/QRM. My QTH FL FL grid EL97wb. FB QSO om 73 and hope to wk u agn on PSK. N4**. K

Not very new. Not very suitable for communications between mall rats and certainly not for an essay on Moby Dick, but fast, free and capable of spanning the globe instantly. If you can annoy your teachers with it, so much the better.

A dog's life

I once saw dog skins displayed for sale in a Xian market; a sad sight as much for my suspicions of the mistreatment of the animals as for the actual sight of their hides hanging in the smoggy wind. I've been infuriated at video of crated dogs being thrown violently onto oriental concrete floors from the back of trucks, man's best friends whimpering at the pain. I love dogs as much and maybe more than anyone, but because I'm a human and a bit of a hypocrite, I don't suffer as much when people hunt raccoons or weasels for their skins or bludgeon cattle for their hides.

There seems to be a distinction, although a hypocritical one perhaps, between raccoon fur and the fur of the Asiatic Raccoon dog, although both are quite intelligent and both share the "cuteness" factor which after all is the most important indicator of how we decide whether an animal is a friend or food. When the Humane Society finds that some fur being sold under designer labels as raccoon or rabbit is actually dog, we are offended. Some of what is labeled as fake fur, they say, turns out to be raccoon dog as well and there is a push to put the raccoon dog on a list of forbidden fur. I have no idea if that animal is endangered. I have no idea whether this is an animal you would want or could have as a pet. I have no idea whether it is more attractive or cuddly than a raccoon, but dog is the magic word that puts it in a different category from something you might set a trap for or would call an exterminator in a panic if you found one in your attic. Our hierarchy of sympathy for animals is not objective.

Don't get me wrong, I have strong feelings about humane treatment of animals. It's human to be humane after all and although animals have little inhibition about ripping other animals to pieces and eating them, there is hypocrisy in everything human. I know that pigs are intelligent animals, but I do like the bacon and bratwurst that comes from killing them. I feel terrible eating lamb and I won't eat rabbit unless I'm in danger of starvation ( which I'm not) because they're cute. I try not to eat mammals at all, in fact, and I have gone so far as to chase a wayward mouse, several lizards and any number of insects out the door rather than to kill them, but I draw my ethical lines in a different place than PETA or those who refuse all animal products for either moral or other reasons known only to Californians.

As I said, all that is human is hypocritical and those eating their organic vegetables fertilized by fish and bone meal, or manure from cattle fed on ground up parts of other cattle also have to explain why bugs and vermin and parasites are not worthy of their compassion, why the wildlife and habitat destroyed by their developments and their agriculture and their waste products doesn't outweigh their sentimental sympathy for raccoon dogs and why that leather upholstery in your BMW is more morally supportable than a hamburger. There really is no way to live the doctrine of Ahimsa, no way to survive without participating in the destruction of life and much of that life, from tapeworm to tiger, would be quite happy to consume you, given the chance. The lion that lays down with the lamb would die, as would the lambs in time, and miserably too, if there were nothing to keep their numbers down. Utopia would be a dead world.

That middle class American fantasy of a wind-powered, pollution free pure land : an escapist fantasy paradise full of organically grown, low energy, cruelty free, natural fiber where everything is artisanal or Tuscan or organic, or at least has a pretentious Euro-style name. Where everyone is very thin and very well dressed and very middle class and perpetually healthy and totally in tune with the latest wisdom about crystals and nutrition and fung sui and the pandas and baby seals and raccoon dogs frolic care free in the sun, is just that -- an escapist delusion; a tiny, temporary thing that could only exist as a bubble supported by the suffering and exploitation of others.

In the world of the immediate future; in a world of tens of billions struggling to eat, despoiling the land and sea and air in the process, there may no longer be any way to eliminate factory farms or animal suffering or to implement organic farming on anything but a tiny scale. Does it matter if we decrease our individual energy use by 20% while the population doubles? There may be no way to save most of the animals, there may be no way to save us or even to approach that fantasy of the simple, pure, pre-industrial but high tech, tastefully dressed in organic cotton life of sipping $6 organic soy milk Tuscan Lattes with artesanal Madagascar cinnamon sticks hand picked by joyful virgins in a tropical paradise. Life pushes the limits and the limit of our life is squalor, privation, disease and suffering as our numbers inevitably continue to grow.

Just how many worms are in that can?

People who oppose same sex marriage will usually tell you it's unnatural. Evidence for this is that they don't like it, God doesn't like it, that it doesn't produce children or that homosexuality, like religion, books and rock & Roll does not occur in nature and therefore shouldn't be condoned by man.

In all probability, no one not afflicted with some form of idiocy, such as Fundamentalism or a seat in Congress, would be unable to expose these arguments as unworthy of credence, but the credo so often expressed by religidiots who oppose homosexual relationships because our function is to breed, have argued themselves into a corner.

Enter the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance [stage left of course.] The group , formed after Washington courts upheld a gay marriage ban, has filed an initiative in that State requiring married couples to produce children within three years or have their marriages annulled. Of course they can't have any expectation that it will pass into law, but it will be interesting to see the believers wriggle out an explanation for rejecting it, if in fact they believe that marriage is only justified as a baby producing scheme.

What of infertile couples who adopt children? Shall we annul their contracts? if not, then why not allow Gay adoptive parents? You really can't argue God's will here since God could produce a man from mud (and supposedly did) or impregnate an unmarried virgin (and supposedly did.) So if God wants Adam and Steve to have kids, he can handle it. You got a problem with allowing God some free will Preacher?

That homosexuality is observed in nature can't really be disputed. It can only be denounced as fraud from a position of religious evidence-blindness. If it is observable in animals, it cannot then be written off as unnatural behavior by definition nor denounced as an unnatural choice by religious conviction since animals are not capable of making moral choices: not having eaten a mythological fruit from a metaphorical tree. What occurs in nature is by definition natural.

As to whether God likes it or not, it all depends on your God and his or her (or their) forthrightness in expressing itself and the consequences of her displeasure. Since we can all agree that we have free will, I choose Rafafu, the god of a West Papuan tribe of tree-dwelling cannibals called the Kombai and frankly my dear, Rafafu doesn't give a damn what they do in Washington. If anyone wishes to contradict my Rafafian beliefs, they're welcome to parachute into the jungle and discuss it with the Kombai.

Now since the government is strictly forbidden by the Constitution to tell you who God is or wants or should be dealt with, I'm breathlessly waiting for the State of Washington to admit that their ban is illegal

He's cured!

I read this morning in the Denver Post that "One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is "completely heterosexual." I'm convinced too that such things are possible because I remember a college roommate who after only 4 or 5 hours of consultation with Lysergic Acid Diethylamide was convinced that he was the Easter Bunny, but I'm also convinced that Haggard's conversion won't last much longer than this morning's South Florida cold snap or my buddy Jim's lagomorphic fugue.

Of course the curability of the "Disease" of Homosexuality isn't supported by anything more than the testimony of people of the caliber of Haggard. It's only a belief and one of a nearly infinite series of beliefs engendered by the need to sustain a fundamental belief that you can be absolutely certain of a God and of his likes and dislikes from listening to men like Ted Haggard. But one can believe almost anything for a time and that's evidenced by the line of ambulances one sees picking up people who have nearly killed themselves getting out of wheelchairs or throwing away their crutches at revival meetings. For a few minutes they believed those twisted legs could walk again. Some people may enjoy believing that Ted is no longer interested in methamphetamines or men. Some believe because they are so terrified of themselves. Some people just enjoy believing.

Although I'm one of those who likes to temper belief with the knowledge that it is ultimately elusive, I'm pretty damn sure that Haggard is a fraud -- even to himself -- and that his only real conviction is that he can continue to fool enough people enough of the time to maintain the power and money and authority that he loves so much. Along those lines, Ted recently sent an e-mail to his former New Life Church members saying he and his wife may move to Missouri and seek Master's degrees in psychology. "the Holy Spirit has been convicting and healing me" said Ted who is lucky that a secular court didn't convict him of drug charges. But of course avoiding the consequences of misdeeds through lachrymose ritual and an impressive line of bullshit is the backbone of his profession.

It was of course, the oversight board of the National Association of Evangelicals that suggested, in the interest of healing his "wounds," that Ted move to the Show Me State and go into "secular work." Could it be that they have doubts too?

Loaves and fishes in the world of the Mouse

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

-Matthew 19:21-

But don't try this in Orlando - that would be illegal.

DO NOT LIE OR OTHERWISE BE IN A HORIZONTAL POSITION ON A PARK BENCH ... DO NOT SLEEP OR REMAIN IN ANY BUSHES, SHRUBS OR FOLIAGE ... per city code sec. 18A.09 (a) and (o).

-sign in an Orlando park-

I can't think of any major religion that doesn't stress the duty to feed the homeless, the poor and sick and even a passing familiarity with the sayings of Jesus would be enough to suggest that this country that loves to make up stories about how our laws are based on the Bible and how Christianity or some nebulous "Judeo-Christian values" are the foundation of our nation, has no particular interest in any values that are inconvenient, unsightly or expensive.

American piety is all a sham of course, the business of America is business, not morality and anything that gets in the way of the wealthy becoming more wealthy is not part of our value system -- so don't get any ideas about emulating Jesus and feeding the poor in Orlando - Disney doesn't want to hear about or have to look at the poor and homeless. It's illegal in Orlando to give food to the hungry without a permit and you won't get a permit more than twice a year even if you wear sandals and have a beard and holes in your hands.

BATHING AND/OR SHAVING IN RESTROOM IS PROHIBITED ... per city code 18A.09 (p) ...

Of course if anyone objects to putting up Christian symbols all over the place or redacted copies of the Ten Commandments in schools and courthouses - that's a different story. We will raise holy hell. We're a Christian nation, of course, even if we wouldn't let Jesus walk on the grass much less wash the feet of the poor per city code 18A.09 (p). So our father which art in heaven better not attempt to give you any daily bread unless you can pay for it and if God hands out manna in Lake Eola Park, he's facing a misdemeanor charge.

Act of God

In Lady Lake, Florida, one of the areas hit by tornadoes and severe thunderstorms this week, even well-built structures were blown apart. Many of the residences were far less than well-built and mobile homes, "manufactured" homes and wooden houses were reduced to shreds and tatters. People died, small children amongst them.

Many people have joked that tornadoes are attracted to mobile home parks, but it's pretty obvious that churches are at least as often hit by natural disasters. The Lady Lake Church of God, a steel-reinforced structure designed to withstand winds well over 100 mph is now nothing more than wreckage.

Church buses get into more fatal wrecks than city buses and the pious perish with the impious when planes crash. Mud slides and earthquakes and tsunamis and wildfires and plagues kill the innocent and the wicked, godless and God fearing. God works in ways so mysterious that they are indistinguishable from random events.

People like the Church of God's Rev. Larry Lynn who believe that there is an inscrutable plan behind random natural processes that effect the secular, the holy and the profane with equal frequency, never seem to be able to answer why if they cannot know what God will do, they are yet so certain that they know God's nature and can predict what God will do in all sorts of other circumstances. "God will damn you if you do that -- God can't save you unless you do (or believe) this. God responds to prayer." There's a disconnect. Places where people pray, blow up and burn down. People who pray get blown up, burned up and destroyed by "acts of God" with a frequency that often seems to exceed statistical probability.

Now people like Fallwell or Haggard or Robertson or any of the other phony faith vendors will tell you they can see a plan behind it - someone ( other than Haggard) must have been allowed to be gay or Jewish or Atheist and so several towns with their children and their elderly and their prayerful and their reprobates had to die, but there's no correlation there either, of course. In fact it's the pious Bible Belt that seems to suffer at least as much as if not more than the sinful cities.

So God seems to act at random even though those who presume to speak for him claim to know all his foibles and infatuations. There is a disconnect. If you can't know what God will do by looking at what he does, how can you claim to know what he will do at all? And of course hundreds of Floridians are standing in the wreckage on a drizzly morning thanking God that it was somebody else and not them lying under a beam with a broken neck. You wouldn't want God to think you weren't grateful at his random acts of violence. And then there are the paramedics, the electricians, the radio operators, the police, the doctors, the heavy equipment operators -- they are out there trying to undo what God hath wrought. Whence cometh our help? Are they part of God's plan if they're trying to remedy his acts of destruction?

Could it be possible that God is so unknowable that it's a waste of time to include him and his plans in our concept of reality? Could it be possible that we have a pretty good idea that mercy, justice and compassion aren't going to come out of a whirlwind and will not exist at all without us and our efforts?

"Thank God we're OK. That's the main thing." said one resident. Yes, thank God it was some adorable 7 year old and not me. God is good.

"We're going to celebrate, praise the Lord and reaffirm our faith" said Reverend Lynn "There is nothing we can change." Perhaps it's a harmless anodyne to insist that there is a pattern in chaos, a just, merciful and loving reason to squash a terrified child, but we are the only ones who can change anything; heal the injured, house the homeless, feed the hungry. Only we can inject justice, compassion and mercy into a 14 billion year old and near eternal process of chaos contained only by natural law. My faith in man may be shaky at best, but it's worth affirming and re-affirming and if I'm going to praise anybody, let it be those who help and give of themselves.

A night at the opera with Bill

Even if the O'Reilly Factor has many of the melodramatic elements of a soap opera, I have a hard time picturing Bill O'Reilly attending Fidelio or Le nozze de Figaro, so I was a bit taken aback when Lyin' Bill said "I look like that when I go to the opera," when shown a picture of John McCain snoozing during the State of the Union Address.

Body language expert Tonya Reiman was on Tuesday's O'Reilly Factor, probably because Lyin' Bill expected he could elicit some idiot giggles from his idiot audience when analyzing Nancy Pelosi's posture during the speech, but other than the predictably stupid dialog, one statement of O'Reilly's woke me up. "I believe I could have taken his wallet and he wouldn't have noticed in that posture," said Bill.

Is his Freudian slip showing? Of all the things that might have occurred to the man, why did he think of picking his pocket? Why are his first thoughts of theft? I have no idea actually. I just report -- you decide.

Face Rush when you flush

I don’t pretend to know from first-hand experience, but from what I read, it may be that the British, having once been the world’s largest empire and having citizens of such diverse ethnicity and religious persuasions, makes more of an effort to treat British subjects who are Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian and Animist with equal respect than does the United States. Whether or not this is true, they do treat Muslims with more respect than Rush Limbaugh, man’s man and woman’s nightmare, would like them to.

Perhaps Rush’s vision of Great Britain is a nation where there is not only a State Religion, but a State policy of discrimination against all faiths but the Anglican Church, much as King Henry VIII practiced. Although a comparison between the two fat bullies would insult King Henry more than I care to do, it is compelling. but to make a nauseating story short, Rush, his massive and flatulent ass bouncing and flabby appendages waving like some demented pagan Idol, gave another one of his disgusting performances on Wednesday, January 30^th. His free-form, stream of stupidity lecture was about the outrageous act of the British Government in providing toilets for Muslim inmates that complied with a religious practice. They moved some toilets in one prison so that they didn’t require the inmate to face Mecca while using it. What would Jesus think of such outright decency?

Somehow, in the little mind of Limbaugh, this translates into a waste of taxpayer money, although he disregards the Muslim taxpayers of England in saying so – and somehow in the insect brain of Limbaugh, this grants license to Muslims to hijack airplanes with box cutters if the aircraft is on a heading that includes Mecca. I have to wonder about his reaction to a Government that neglected adequately to support his religion with taxpayer money or that forced whatever bizarre form of Christianity he calls his own to act against its moral convictions or religious practices – whatever they might be.

I’m sure that for Rush disciples, freedom of religion and treating others with dignity is for Liberal weenies and if you steal a car, your punishment must include not only deprivation of liberty, not only torture, but complete and unremitting insult to your religion and ethnicity. As for Rush, any God that he believes in would simply forgive his own trespasses, his lies, his blasphemies, his false witness and all for no other reason than because of who he is. Any God that Rush believes in would in fact be Rush.

Cross posted in The Reaction

War's -- war's hard

"We've got a war that we're fighting against extremists, radicals who would do us harm. We're in a major battle in that war in Iraq. And it's -- it's unsettling times when you're at war. War's -- war's hard. War's difficult. It's negative."

If you didn't watch Bush on Fox News' Your World with Neil Cavuto yesterday, it might not have occurred to you that war was "negative" or "unsettling." At least someone like George thinks so and he thinks that you've forgotten that the tens of thousands of lives ruined or lost were supposed to be all about Freedom and that the "radicals" against whom we launched a thousand sorties posed no danger to us at all.

It's unsettling times when you have an executive who awards himself ever more dictatorial powers and more so when the explanations and justifications and rationalizations are twisted in terms of cause and effect and facts shift their shapes like a werewolf under the full moon. It's negative.

So when George of the borrowed trillions calls Democrats big spenders, when he insists that raising Cheney's tax bracket would hurt small business owners, I get unsettling and negative feelings. It's negative to think the man who still sends people to drive through minefields in unarmored vehicles in this fourth year of his war would accuse war critics of not allowing enough funding to do "what it takes to do the jobs that we've -- that I've asked them to do."

And yes, one really could call it unsettling when Bush sneeringly opines that "I don't think the government should be deciding salaries of CEOs or anybody else that works for corporate America" unless of course it's to keep the minimum wage for those who work for corporate America as low as possible.

But yes, it's hard. It's hard living under the expanding dictatorial power of a delusional dimwit and crony of pirates . It's hard not to worry that his "sprint to the finish" won't finish off what used to be a great nation and it's hard not to wish that the parents of this misbegotten miscreant had used the birth control they oppose or the abstinence they advocate for others.

The Gleiwitz incident

False Flag Terrorism is an old and effective way to justify acts of aggression that would be hard to justify otherwise. In our conspiracy loving country, events such as the World Trade Center attack are often given as an example; the premise being that our administration staged it in order to justify a war against Iraq.

Famous examples are the Berlin Reichstag fire in 1933 that gave Hitler reason to demand emergency powers and the completely phony attack on the Gleiwitz radio station used to justify Hitler's invasion of Poland the following day. A corpse wearing a Polish uniform was arranged outside of a radio station in Silesia, anti-German messages were broadcast and the public told that Poland had attacked.

It shouldn't really surprise anyone that there is speculation as to what exactly happened in Karbala on January 20th. The official story that the men, wearing American uniforms, who carried out the kidnapping and murder of American troops were just too good to be Iraqis or even members of al Qaeda is everywhere, but the source is hard to pin down.

Iran involvement suspected blares the headline on CNN. Unnamed sources" say "We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained."

"People are looking at it seriously," says another "official" whose use of the "people say" trope reminds me so much of Fox News' favorite method of launching fabricated rumor. Just who is doing the suspecting here and why should we be convinced that it isn't propaganda?

Anything is possible and of course it is also possible that the perpetrators were Iraqis or others looking to get the US involved in an attack on Iran and "people are saying" that it's entirely possible that US interests directly or indirectly linked to the administration would love to use this as an excuse and were directly involved in facilitating or carrying out this attack.

False flag terrorism or not, this speculative linking of Iran with an increasing number of incidents and unverifiable stories of sudden progress in the making of nuclear weapons, looks a lot like the run up to the fake state of emergency that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. Of course it is possible that Iran is involved, if not in this incident at least in other incidents in Iraq, but we are dependent upon the testimony of proven liars for our information. Does the Bush administration have enough credibility to be able to convince us that we need another war on another front? Does George really care what we think anyway? People are talking.

Ban the ban?

The perception that something needs to be done is the mother of many a bad measure. It's a quote I've seen attributed to Daniel Webster. I can't confirm it, but I believe it.

The mayor of Brazonia Texas, for instance, had heard enough of the "N word" around town and having used it himself as many a southern gentleman would have to admit of, he knew it was wrong to use a hate laden epithet against an entire and diverse class of people. Was it an act of naivete that prompted Mayor Ken Corley, apparently a good and decent man, to decide that Brazonia shouldn't tolerate such meanness of speech and should ban the N?

Of course Brazonia thought otherwise, and I think I do too. I don't like "slippery slope" arguments, but legal precedent is of import and such a thing would make other nasty words easier to ban and other words easier to label as nasty. As one local gentleman of apparent African descent pointed out on CNN this morning: "we use it more than they do." If that is true, then the local authorities would be all over the news the first time they fined an African American for using it. Brazonia would be faced not only with having to selectively enforce the law thus not only creating two classes of citizen with different rights, but creating the need to establish a legal test to determine race - a bad measure regardless of its mother. Would such a law require books from Mark Twain to Malcom X to be removed from the library? Not a good idea if you ask me and not a good idea if you ask a constitutional lawyer.

It's true that other countries, like Germany have laws against hate speech or antilocution and one can be fined there for that favorite American one fingered wave, but somehow legal bans on merely ugly speech do not seem to me to be what we are about, or pretend to be about.

Ashura thing

"Enlightenment" fills people with rage: for the slave wants something absolute; he understands only the tyrannical, even in morality; he loves as he hates, without subtlety, to the depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness."

Friedrich Nietzsche - Jenseits Gut und Böse

What Nietzsche calls the slave, I simply call the Human and as humans, as social apes, the urge to submit to the Alpha ape whether real or imaginary seems to me to be our ineluctable heritage. We have our religions and dogmas and cults of personality and no matter what the nature of the founding god or literature may be, mankind has always made and always will make his slavish devotion into an excuse for his ego, his aggression and his love of violence. I'm not setting one religion above another and nearly any religion I can think of has at some time or another indulged in torture, witch hunts, heretic burning, territorial aggression, persecution, domination and worse, but reading about and watching footage of the self-mutilating frenzy of those commemorating their perceived loss in a battle nearly 1400 years past, I lose hope for all of us.

One of the worst characteristics of such mythologized events is that devotion to a God who is supposed after all to be kind,loving and merciful, is the need to promote ourselves to be the right hand, the defender and the avenger of God, as though his arms were too short to reach our world. The slave of God becomes the scourge of God and the mercy and justice of God becomes the property of madmen. It has been a long time since 680 of the common era, but The journey from Karbala to car bomb takes but a moment.

If the victory that was the death of the grandson of the Prophet did not settle anything but rather brought on a war that never ends, what can we say of George W. Bush's phantom victory in Iraq?

Temple of Bush

I just can’t read the papers any more. What’s the point of life if you can’t spend Sunday morning by the pool with the paper and a cup of coffee without being enraged, depressed and nauseated before the second bite of that toasted bagel?

The A section of today’s Palm Beach Post hit the recycle bin after the first paragraph of the first front-page article which announced to us that the rising incidence of drive by shootings in the really bad neighborhoods of Palm Beach County result not from gangs and poverty and inadequate enforcement but from cheap (at $750) readily obtainable (after a background check with the sheriff and a three day wait) replicas of AK-47’s that look like real AK-47’s but are not any more “deadly” than grandpa’s hunting rifle. Guns are only “designed to maim and kill” screams the article although somehow, liberalized gun laws have accompanied lower crime rates in nearly every other part of the state. Maybe a shot of Bailey’s would do nicely with that coffee.

So let’s get down to the good old Sunday Comics. I usually turn to Doonesbury to start with, but no, it’s about that half a billion dollars (think about how many scholarships that could provide) that will be wasted on building the George W. Bush Fake Presidential Library. If it were a real presidential library, it would contain the papers of a real president, not just the selected documents deemed likely not to be embarrassing or proof of felonious misuse of presidential powers by someone who got into office using rigged elections. But of course this half billion dollar shrine will be protected from housing dirty laundry since the Bastard Prince signed Executive Order 13233 back in 2001 that allows a president to block the release of anything he wants from the reign of Reagan forward and has successfully kept “activist Judges” from doing anything about it.

Half a billion dollars to build a propaganda shrine; just the sort of thing you’d expect from some European dictator from the middle of the last century. But he’s the decision maker and he’s decided that even though the law once mandated that presidential papers belonged to the American People, the American People were no longer worthy and the presidential “library” is the president’s property and the names of the donors secret and that’s that.

Maybe a valium or two with that coffee wouldn’t hurt and wouldn’t you know, it looks like it’s going to rain. The hell with it. I’m going back to bed until it all blows over.

The end of Cheney?

I've been a fan of The Daily Show since Jon Stewart became the "anchor." Many times it was the only "news" source that would dare address the insanity of American current affairs and would air stories that didn't come straight from the evil - I mean oval office. Lately, American politics has become so disgusting and reportage so close to the borderline that even a parody is more than I can stand and I don't watch it as faithfully as I once did, but I prefer to read than to watch and Comedy Central has a blog.

Listed under Absurd political predictions that do not belong here is a political prediction that is so absurd that it belongs here: Cheney will resign (reasons of health perhaps) to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice. Losing Cheney would be to lose a loser; his approval ratings being on a par with Augusto Pinochet and it would make the GOP seem less of an Old Man's club and create the false perception that the President is actually addressing the crises he caused. Besides, it would Give Bush a VP that he could control completely and his party something unique in 2008 with an incumbent Vice President.

The benefits are too many to list although Comedy Central Insider has been listing them for weeks now and even The New Republic has jumped on the conjecture wagon. I have to admit that it would be a move so brilliantly sinister that I'm beginning to believe in its likelihood.

Pit Bull News

Why are we so polite about describing Fox News? Admittedly I and others have called them liars, whores, assholes, bastards and enemies of all that is true and good, but good and evil are relative terms despite what the religious idiots are selling and any organization in the position of being able to advise and inform tens of millions of people but that chooses to profit through elevating lies, bearing false witness and undermining justice, tolerance and good will between men is beyond ordinary estimations of good and evil. It's time to destroy Rupert Murdock's malignant scheme.

So the racist slimecasters at Fox have no intention of giving up trying to ruin Barak Obama as a candidate; trying to subliminally equate Obama with Osama and with Saddam. from minor idiocies like acting shocked and outraged that he has been said to consume three cigarettes a day, to inventing stories about being a "Madressa" student learning to hate Americans and then attributing the lies to another Democrat they hate - Hillary. It never stops and when the stories are debunked, these seven headed dogs of hell don't hesitate to invent another story: the CNN reporter who found the alleged Madrassa to be an ordinary school must of course be a Madressa trained terrorist sympathizer. It never stops. It never helps to debunk them; it never helps to defeat them in debate. It never helps to treat them with any respect.

It may be satisfying to believe in a God of justice who might some day when it is too late, commit these liars and pirates and terrorists; these enemies of freedom to some blazing tantric hell to have their innards unreeled and their eyes gouged out forever, but we need to be rid of them now.

We need to allow slanderers, liars and libelers to be prosecuted when they attack public personalities with gross negligence, gross malice and no diligence in verifying their stories and sources. There should indeed be a threshold beyond which one may not go without repercussions and if we do nothing, we will not survive as a free society.

Bush Vs. the Bushmen

OK, so I didn't watch the State of the Union Address last night. I'm recovering from the flu and my stomach hasn't felt agreeable for the last week. If you want my opinion of last night's bit of vaudeville, Glenn Greenwald does his usual excellent job of giving my opinions better than I can.

I have enough trouble holding dinner down when watching the President at the best of times, so I set the Tivo to record it and watched one of my favorite shows, No Reservations with restaurateur, chef and raconteur Anthony Bourdain.

Wise choice, it proved to be. Instead of watching Bush, I got to watch Bourdain dining in Namibia with the Bushmen: eating charcoal grilled warthog rectum with baked warthog vomit right from the skull. I feel much better this morning and I don't have that nasty taste in my mouth I usually get from watching our president.

Experto crede

Nobody knows anything; a quote attributed to movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and in the sense he gave it, I agree.  It’s about the cult of expertise and the gullibility of the rest of us.  It’s about truth and marketing and incompatibility.

One of my pet subjects is automobiles and as far as I’m concerned it’s impossible to get a valid opinion from any journalistic or industry source that isn’t mostly advertising and as larded with hyperbole as Kobe beef is with fat.  Advertising does not come free. Journalists know where their paychecks come from and their editors know where their revenue comes from. Journalists mostly write for neophytes and neophytes love to quote journalists and use the jargon they are given to hide the fact that they are neophytes at best and idiots at worst, so you’ll hear that the Yamaguchi 50 is edgy or blingish, has lots of valves or has attitude or is “race car inspired.”  You’ll hear about sound systems but you won’t hear a damn thing about lap times or braking distances or quarter mile ET’s. You’ll hear about how American cars don’t “handle” and “understeer” from people who have no idea what that means and will tell you with a straight face that their family sedan has “neutral” handling which is better.  If the car is a dog, you brag about how many gazillian RPM you need to get useful power out of it and people will eat it up because bigger numbers are better unless they refer to bigger displacement which is better but is sold as worse – understand?  I don’t either, but as I said, nobody knows anything.

So I’m not even partly surprised to read on CNN that a poll by a insurance company specializing in insuring collector cars claims that in the future the big deal will be Japanese cars.

Now I’ve been reading the car mags for over 50 years and I’ve yet to hear a description of the car of the future that proved true.  What is held to be of supreme importance in one decade is ignored in the next,  for the last few decades, what is held to be important is what the massive advertisers want you to think is important – low drag coefficients one year, variable valve timing the next, tiny engines today, huge honking V8’s the next, so I’m not inclined to believe a bit of this, but I have to include myself in the group called nobody and nobody knows anything.  You can only glimpse the truth in retrospect and looking back, I can’t think of more than one Japanese car that has collector value today and that one just barely.

We are assured however that, “in the future, Toyota's Scion cars and its FJ Cruiser off-roader might be hot items at car auctions.”  That’s as likely true as those once upon a time predictions that we’d all be driving two seaters with two cylinder, two cycle ceramic engines or maybe Wankels.  The reason collector cars are desirable and expensive is that predicting what people will want 30 years hence is nearly impossible.  

The main ingredients that make cars desirable, said Hagerty Insurance president McKeel Hagerty, are “cool designs and honest performance. Cars that look hot but don't perform won't end up being desirable in the long term,” he said.  Is this why a 1953 Corvette, a disappointing dog on the road is worth many times what my 2006 model is even though it will run 100MPH faster?  Is this why people buy dead-dog slow cars, insist they’re “ultimate” and try to take on Vipers at stoplights?  Nobody knows anything. Will people 20 years from now think “cool design” means a cube with tiny wheels and a fake wing on top?  What about some swoopy things full of curvilinear triangles, a grill like a yellow smiley and lots of fake aero devices; who the hell knows and surely not Haggerty.  He’s trying to predict what the children and grandchildren of today’s collectors will want to spend big bucks on and I think he’s got a better chance at winning the lottery.

It’s a fact that people who buy what they think will be the hot ticket 20 years hence and put it in storage usually lose a lot of money, unless it was something very rare and very expensive in the first place and the people who buy McLarens don’t usually care about turning a profit 30 years hence.  Even collector cars that were hot in the 80’s are going for half or less than their peak prices.  Nobody knows, but here’s a wager:  I will meet you at Pebble Beach  or the Palm Beach International Concours D’Elegance in 2050.  I’ll bring what I have now and you can bring a pristine, skate-board inspired Pokemon Special and bring your title and registration.

Chum

Chum is stinky chunks of bait that one throws overboard to attract fish to the vicinity of your boat and your hooks. That's sort of like what happens when fishy stories like the one Fox and Friends picked up about Barak Obama and the Madrassa. Others, like Headline News' Glenn Beck soon joined the frenzy and I am quite sure that the now debunked story will embark on an internet e-mail tour that will take it around the world for years to come - feeding off the idiots who didn't hear about it or its demise who will forward it to millions of unsuspecting ignoramuses. Like most of these circulating slime bombs, it will begin with pictures of the World Trade Towers or an image of bin Laden with a demonic smile and will pretend to be hot off the press news that has been suppressed by Liberals

Very few of the gullible millions will know or bother to find out that not only was there no source for this "revelation" in the Clinton camp as the slime brokers insisted, but that the Madrassa turned out to be a western style public school. The simple joy of being able to believe that Obama is a brainwashed Islamic extremist will overwhelm the urge to find the truth.

It may be true that humans descend from apes who frequently scavenged their meals from the leavings of predators. Perhaps that would explain the joy with which humans cherish these rotten bits of misinformation and their reluctance to relinquish them in the face of truth, but perhaps there will come a time when the question of repeatedly fooling the public will no longer be about shame on you or shame on me, but shame on anyone who listens to the lying hyenas.

Friends don't let friends watch Fox.

Reasonable and normal

Does ABC really mean All Bull Crap? They report, you decide.

It's hard to go for a day without some story of some professionally pious man being caught molesting children or engaging in some unsavory acts with barnyard animals, yet despite sociopathic frauds like Ted Haggard having been humiliated in front of the country with his Gay prostitution and drug bust, he's out there bragging about evangelicals getting more nookie than other, less sexy cults do.

We may have thought we had seen the last of him, but like a bad case of herpes or a clogged septic tank, Ted is back again. Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals is part of a documentary called Friends of God with the Speaker of the House's daughter Andrea Pelosi, that the New York Times describes as "a road trip into the world of evangelical Christians that includes a drive-through church, a Christian wrestling federation, a stand-up Christian comic, an evangelical Elvis' and more.

Pelosi as quoted by ABC, says "It was interesting for me to say, these are good people. He was a reasonable, normal everyday man. So, it was hard to stomach what had happened."

Yes, I too wonder why there is such a fuss made about the earthshaking hypocrisy that seems to characterize this egotistical, hedonistic gay bashing homosexual with delusions of grandeur who takes the poor, the stupid, the frightened and the ignorant for huge sums of money.

Haggard is already an object of intense disgust for me, with his brand of ignorant, narcissistic, idolatrous and paranoid shamanism, but I'd rather watch one of those National Geographic films about the mating habits of hyenas than be forced to imagine what debauchery Haggard performs in sordid motel rooms while little old ladies pump a fortune into his bank accounts. Pelosi however is beyond my understanding; insisting that the experience made her want to get her two month old involved in Church as soon as possible and thinks we should accommodate this group of thieves, perverts, blasphemers and liars because of their political power.

What a great country we might have if these subhumans had all elected to start Evangelical villages in Guyana where they could dance naked around campfires pounding on Bibles, having lizard sex with each other and left the rest of us the hell alone.

Bloody Sunday

I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away
How long...
How long must we sing this song?
How long? how long...

The Army Times lists a flurry of Iraqi violence Sunday:

* A bomb left in a bag struck a small bus carrying people to work in a predominantly Shiite area in Baghdad, killing seven passengers and wounding 15.

* A parked car bomb also exploded outside a restaurant in eastern Baghdad, killing one person and wounding five, according to police.

* A suicide car bomber targeting an Iraqi army patrol killed one woman and wounded five other people in the northern city of Mosul.

It was a big improvement over Saturday.

Saturday saw a Blackhawk helicopter shot down killing 12 Americans and a raid on Provincial Headquarters in Karbala by a group of Insurgents dressed as Americans, that resulted in the deaths of five American soldiers.

The 2nd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division, consisting of about 3,200 soldiers are now arriving in the Baghdad area and will, according to the official statement “assist Iraqi Security Forces to clear, control and retain key areas of the capital city in order to reduce violence and to set the conditions for a transition to full Iraqi control of security in the city,”

No suggestion as to how a few more troops will be able to influence the balance of power here, but assist is the key word we need to look at. It contains the assumption that Iraqi Security Forces have the manpower, training and will to have any effect whatever and it suggests that the burden will not be directly on the shoulders of US troops who might, one supposes, be there to show them how to clean their weapons after a hard day's patrol. That's two lies in one word.

Throughout the Viet Nam debacle we were told that we were there as advisers and that we were in the process of training the Vietnamese and turning the fight over to them. Call me a cynic, but I think we're being lied to again. It doesn't take a Nostradamus to predict that there will be a series of little schemes used as ploys to demand silence of the public and give hope to the hopeaholics long enough so that the final ignominious collapse of the misbegotten enterprise will occur only after the Texas Tyrant leaves office and can then be blamed on "liberals" by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, William Kristol and Fox News.

Broken bottles under children's feet
Bodies strewn across the dead end street
But I wont heed the battle call
It puts my back up
Puts my back up against the wall

Kristol Nacht

Shameless blowhard William Kristol said on Fox News this morning, that Democratic congress members are

"so irresponsible that they can’t be quiet for six or nine months and say the president has made a decision, we’re not going to change that decision, we’re not going to cut off funds and insist on the troops coming back, so let’s give it a chance to work."

I'm interested to know what Kristol thinks the responsibility of the Congress is and why that responsibility necessitates silence in the face of continued Administrative irresponsibility and dishonesty. He's not stupid enough to think that adding 7000 combat troops and about another 13000 support troops will stop our inadequate vehicles from being blown to bits on a daily basis and he's not so stupid to believe that we need to wait nine months in silence before we decide that perhaps we need a few thousand more which will of course result in the necessity of another nine months of waiting and on infinitum. Kristol remembers Viet Nam and Kristol is not a complete idiot so what are we to assume about his honesty and loyalty to the best interests of his country but that he favors totalitarian, militaristic rule and hates the functions of government necessary to open, transparent, honest and democratic government.

Oh, hell why don't I just come out and call him the lying son of a bitch and enemy of freedom that he is? And why don't we line the Fox News Nazis and the bastard who owns them up against the same wall?

We don't talk to evildoers

Did the Warpresident create the Iranian impasse in order to justify another war? According to the BBC, aides to the former Secretary of State Colin Powell say that back in 2003, Iran offered to make essentially the concessions Bush is demanding. In exchange for ending its hostility and support of terrorism we were asked to end sanctions, and to disband the Iranian rebel group the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq. Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, an anti-Iranian insurgency, was allowed by Saddam Hussein to base itself in Iraq before the American invasion.

Powell's State Department apparently recommended that we go along with the deal, which might well have ended Iranian supported insurgencies in Iraq and Iranian funded militants like Hezbullah elsewhere, but predictably Dick Cheney's White House shot it down. The world might have been a little better today, a war in Lebanon averted and Iraq closer to becoming a functioning country, but we seem poised for an all out war with Iran and this story, if true, raises questions.

If the invasion of Iraq was conceived as a gateway to a war with Iran, one could see why peace would be anathema, why persuading Iran to make it's nuclear program transparent and its militancy cease would be a stumbling block for the Halliburton Crusade. If Cheney actually believes that we are fighting the devil, are at war with "evildoers" and that negotiation is heresy, one can conclude that the problem in Washington is not incompetence but delusion - and of course they could simply be a bunch of bumbling, stupid, greedy, power intoxicated and incompetent fools. I report, you decide.

Condi supports child abuse

"My Fox guys, I love every single one of them." So said our gap-toothed Secretary of State last week, thinking the mike was off. Every single one would include perforce Slimy Bill O' Reilly and slimy Bill thinks it makes for good ratings to tell you St Louis kidnapping victim Shawn Hornbeck wasn't really kidnapped by Michael J. Devlin, the guy who seems to have a history of kidnapping and perhaps murder - he was just skipping school.

"The question is why didn't he escape when he could have? There are all kinds of theories about that…"

"Theories:" these are the vague things people like Bill invoke to make the preposterous seem possible and the demonstrable seem doubtful, but whether O'Reilly is deranged or just a whore is a less important question than why someone with as much power to destabilize the world as does George's favorite retainer would support, much less "love" him. O'Reilly may make excuses for a child molester for profit, out of irrational hatred of everything good and decent or for other reasons of his own. He's only an ugly and malignant nobody. I can only speculate as to Rice's reasons for backing such a man, but then I can only speculate about her reasons for backing Bush, whose mouthpiece she is.

But if she loves and supports someone who supports a kidnapper of young boys she has something to answer for and if Condi is a conduit for the opinions of Bush, perhaps he too loves and supports a man who apologizes for child molesters.

There are many theories about that, but the search for traces of honesty, decency, logical consistency or intelligence in George Bush and his familiars is best left to dishonest, indecent, deranged and stupid people like O'Reilly and the Fox Boys - and of course the bitter, aging and angry women who love every single one of them.

Little Victory

Perhaps it's not entirely true that the Bush administration can get away with selective obedience to the law. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is reported to have written to the the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee announcing that after more than a year of asserting that the authority of the president absolved him from the requirement to seek judicial approval before listening in to the telephone calls of Americans, Bush will now comply.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat from Texas states that "It proves that this surveillance has always been possible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and that there was never a good reason to evade the law,"

Whether this proposed cessation of persecution of the American people results from some Pauline epiphany or from the realization that the new congress might have the power to make Bush face some consequences I don't know, but a step is a step. Who knows what might come next?

Still I have to agree with Glenn Greenwald that to celebrate the idea that the government has given a fuzzy promise to begin to obey one of the laws it has been flaunting is a sad state of affairs.

One way or another

“One way or another I'm gonna find yaI'm gonna getcha getcha getcha getcha”

-Blondie-

Whether or not the Warpresident will attack Iran within the next few months, it matters that much of the world and probably much of the Islamic world, believes it. Despite the indications that Bush is aware that regional and world stability is not disturbed with impunity, he continues to brandish his weapons. It matters that Bush seems to believe that threats are the better part of international relations and that you can effect positive long term change in the world by blowing things up and threatening to blow things up.  

Will Bush gamble that a “régime change” in Iran will make things easier in Iraq? Will destroying Iran’s infrastructure and its oil production capacity make for an America loving, western secular democracy that will stop sponsoring insurgents and guerilla warfare?  If you reply that nobody is that stupid, I will beg to take exception.

It’s been demonstrated that the US had the ability to project our power into Baghdad, neutralize its military and topple the government. It may still be possible for the US to use massive air power to make Iran into a smoking ruin, but it’s also been demonstrated that whatever the word victory means when Bush uses it, it does not result from anything Bush has done or seems to contemplate doing.

Whether the Buildup of naval power in the Persian Gulf is a bluff, a precaution or preparation for another attack; if it is only a paranoid fantasy in a frightened world, it serves to further the image of the United States as a nation run amok.  George has made it clear that his crusade does not depend on the will of the nation he is supposed to represent and by attacking Iran or provoking an attack on our navy by Iran he might perhaps feel he can make it more difficult for Congress to cut him off – and perhaps he can emulate Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin deception.  His actions make it more likely that we will suffer another attack on our soil and if such a thing happens we can be certain that he will use it to crush his adversaries at home as well as to make an adversary of the world.

Talk softly and forget about that stick

It’s just possible that Bush’s biggest fear is that a movement toward Democracy or simply against tyranny will flower in the Middle East. After all, the countries we favor most are not democratic and some are monarchies so absolute that the kingdom that spawned the American experiment seems liberal in comparison.  Bush the elder went to war to preserve monarchy in Kuwait and has done nothing to promote the liberalization of that country since. Jordan is a monarchy and it would be hard to describe Saudi Arabia in terms that might suggest democracy or a move in that direction – yet Bush the lesser doesn’t seem to have been lecturing them on the subject, much less invading them.

And then there’s Egypt.  Whether or not a transition to something more closely resembling true Democracy, with tolerance for opposition and guarantees of liberty and justice for all, is possible without risk of war and chaos, I am not qualified to speculate about, but I will venture to say that even by our own weakened standards, Egypt is a brutal and repressive place.

The New York Times today, talks about corruption, cronyism, torture and political repression in Egypt. The polite conduct of Condoleezza Rice’s current visit to Egypt seems to illustrate that the US no longer wishes to be seen pushing Egypt to address such abuses. Amidst the chaos in the Middle East and the hatred of the US following Bush’s adventure in nation building (or oilfield grabbing if you prefer,) the preference for stability and avoidance of open hostility have strongly tempered messianic zeal.  While we openly support a variety of brutal and undemocratic régimes, according to the Times “The United States is so unpopular in the region now, many here say, that its support is enough to undermine a government’s legitimacy with its public.”

That we are no longer pushing for Democracy, if indeed we ever really were, can be seen as a strategy of avoiding further instability, but by non longer pushing for democracy in the interest of stability, we may be seen as supporting the kind of tyranny we were hated for supporting in the first place.

“The former pressure was an illusion and the lack of any pressure now will push the crisis between the people and their rulers to the edge,” said Ibrahim Eissa, the editor of Al Dustoor, a weekly newspaper of Egyptian opposition, and will increase the perception “that the United States is supporting democracy when it is in strict alliance with the oppressive regimes,”

Perhaps it’s not just in Iraq that any possible outcome is hard to describe as “winning” and victory is irrelevant.