Precedent McCain

If, as Emerson said, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then John McCain qualifies as a finalist in the micromind competition.

"You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was"

said he to a reporter on his tour bus somewhere in Iowa. Caught off guard with questions about whether he thought our government should spend any money on providing condoms and instructions for their use in Africa in order to fight the plague of AIDS, he seemed far more concerned with not contradicting the absolutely ridiculous statements he's made in the past than with providing an answer to the question. Mumbling and stumbling about abstinence, he evaded further questions about sex education and prophylaxis in his own country by saying he supports the president and

"people like Dr. Coburn. I’m not very wise on it.”

I don't know whether to forgive him the grammatical solecism, but to support Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, head of Bush's AIDS Advisory Council and his immoral and idiotic program of substituting religious polemics on the virtues of not having sex for medical advice on the prevention of the AIDS epidemic, is absolutely unforgivable. Anyone who puts his religion's dogma above the preservation of human life, has violated not only his Hippocratic oath, but has set himself outside the human race.

Do words like liar, scoundrel, enemy of decency and even evil have any meaning at all any more in the context of the Bush administration? Does John McCain's campaign for the presidency have any discernible theme other than his lack of concern with what evil he supports as long as he can convince enough evil men to support him? The question is not whether to vote for this cringing dog of the demented religious right; the question is how long it takes for America to realize that the real enemy combatants are not in Guantanamo, but in Washington, in Kansas, Oklahoma and cruising through northern Kansas in a bus. How long before everyone recognizes that John McCain doesn't care how many mothers and how many children die as long as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the rest of the pantheon of vermin are happy with him?

Brownback mountain

Certainty is a fool's game, but there are two things I am certain of, foolishly or not.

• Sam Brownback is Gay (just look at the tie.)
• The Religious Right remains morally bankrupt.

With threats to civilization on the increase, with turmoil and instability mounting in places like Pakistan edging us closer to global war; with our justice system in crises, our military in crisis, our health care system in crisis and damn near everything else in this world in crisis, all the drooling dipshits of the religious right can offer us are smug polemics about threats to their artificially constructed system of arbitrary moral absolutes. Sam Brownback, Bigot, Republican, Kansas Senator, moral moron and would-be President thinks the business of America is witch hunting and that it's always open season. When you're the biggest enemy of freedom in America, what else can you do but follow the path of Hitler and find a scapegoat?

Besides the traitorous attempt to distract America from the dangers that face us, these sectarian insurgents would truly love to replace human values with a rigid and arbitrary code traceable not to the results of human actions but to a Deity they invent for the purpose of sanctifying their sick motives; a Deity accessible only through them.

What kind of demented degenerate will take time off the job for which we pay him to go on rapturous, religious rants with no purpose other than to defame harmless people, including people who have volunteered to risk their lives in defense of our country? You're looking at him.
You're hearing from a guy lecturing us on morality from the top of a mountain of money supplied by Jack Abramoff.

Take your perverted opinions and shove them where it's dark and warm Brownback - you know you'd love it.

Do the gloves fit?

In the closed session of a military tribunal, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said, if we're to believe what we're told, "I was the military operational commander for all foreign operations around the world,'' and under Bin Ladin's leadership planned other attacks. The problem is in believing what we're told. There were no media present but more importantly the man has been subjected to interrogation methods which make confessions unreliable at best. I'm no stranger to pain, but if you hold my head under water day after day for a year or so, I might tell you I shot Lincoln just to get it to stop.

He may well be guilty of all he's confessed to and more, but his confession is tainted by torture and his trial will be tainted by secrecy and by the fact that he will be tried by the Bush administration, not by an international tribunal. I tend to believe he is really guilty and that he probably will get a reasonably fair trial, but in the eyes of the world - a world who has no trust or faith in us or our conduct, we may be getting too much like the people we claim superiority to.

I am sure Bush will try to parlay this confession into a justification for everything he has done and I wouldn't doubt that he will regain a few supporters, but al Qaeda isn't the kind of organization that can't replace him instantly and his trial and probable removal from the world will do nothing to diminish their movement.

Onward Christian Soldiers

If all the outrages of the Bush administration were lined up end to end like the Great Wall of China, I think you'd be able to see a long dirty line from the moon.

It seems to be harder to see from the earth, thanks to many factors, like the haze of public indifference, the smokescreen of patriotic propaganda, the fog of bias and the opaque, pandering disfunctionality of the media, but a few people have started to notice Bush's other army, his private army of Christian soldiers, an army that prospers wildly as Bush's efforts surge - or at least the owners of that army prosper - big time.

I'm talking about Blackwater, of course; the worlds most powerful mercenary army, according to Jeremy Scahill's new book to be released March 21st. According to the blurb, Blackwater is

"the powerful private army that the U.S. government has made its Praetorian Guard for the 'global war on terror.' Blackwater has the world's largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and 20,000 contractors at the ready. Run by a multimillionaire Christian conservative who bankrolls President Bush and his allies, its forces are capable of overthrowing governments, and yet most people have never heard of Blackwater."

Bush has shown little tolerance for the restraints that remain on presidential authority with regard to what he may do with the Armed forces yet he has no restraints, it seems, regarding this private SS, this elite corps whose mercenaries get paid far more than the soldiers we're told we're not supporting when we question the administration. I don't think any of our GI's are making the $350 per day that Bush's private army is said to be earning.

I have no idea if or how much out troops were demoralized when mercenaries were paid to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer when he was head of the US occupation of Iraq, or whether they were demoralized that Blackwater was paid nearly a thousand dollars a day for each man they supplied to do various duties normally performed by the National Guard and police in New Orleans after Katrina. I do have an idea how much the taxpayer was soaked for it: over $33 million for New Orleans alone and this while our wounded were being neglected by the VA and FEMA thrashed about like stranded fish at low tide, wasting more millions. I wonder how they feel about Blackwater. Maybe we shouldn't tell them. It might be demoralizing.

I find it demoralizing that in this country, in this time we can have a private army of such power and magnitude that is loyal only to the highest bidder and restrained by no law or treaty when operating abroad; demoralizing that we have a president I can't trust not to use that power as he sees fit and with disregard to the Constitution or the will of the governed. Can that government Blackwater is supposed to be capable of overthrowing be our own?

A lot of dirt under the rug

I don't remember whether it came before or after relaxing arsenic standards for drinking water, but one of George W. Bush's first executive orders was to arrogate unto himself and former presidents and vice presidents the power to hide the evidence of their misdeeds. Presidential records might seem to be the property of the folks who pay presidents to work for them, but the party that used to say they would run the country like a business has no intention of letting the public know what they do and for reasons even the less skeptical are starting to see. To quote from Orwell's 1984, "Ignorance is strength." He stays strong as long as we stay ignorant.

At first I thought the idea was to protect his father from information about the Iran-Contra affair, but it's obvious he was doing what past leaders from the Caesars to the Communists did: making sure history was on his side by writing it.

One of the few glimmers of hope coming from our new Congress is a bill co-sponsored by chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA.) The Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007 is being debated in the house as I write this.

“There are those who would like to rewrite history, and to the extent we can keep that from happening, I think this bill goes a long way ” Says Waxman. He's right, and we have a long way to go.

Updates and more information at The Gavel

Adoramus te

They lower their voices

If they think I’m listening.

But I know about God

He smells Like that damp basement

In our neighbor’s house

I'm afraid of

And I don’t know why

Or the preacher’s robes

When I have to shake his hand

And I don’t want to

Or that new family

Down the block

With funny names and kids

We shouldn’t play with.

(They go to a different school)

Or the two old guys

In the green house

We’re not supposed to talk to

Even though they’re nice.

Every night at dinner

We pray together

For god to bless us

And not be angry

Professional courtesy

Yes sir, the new generation simply has no respect. Once upon a time, an attorney could swim and surf safely in Florida waters, but no more. These young sharks today don't care who they go after.

29-year-old assistant Palm Beach County state attorney Adam McMichael was surfing off Hutchinson Island Sunday when a shark chomped down on his arm and dragged him under the water, which in my opinion constitutes prima facie evidence of mens rea.

Choosing a quick punch in the gills over a formal writ of Replevin, McMichael managed to regain his property, to wit - his arm and though seriously wounded, he was rescued by another surfer.
In my day this never would have happened. Professional courtesy would have been respected. I blame it on Rap music.

Oh, don't ask why

Oh don't ask why, oh don't ask why

-Berthold Brecht -

One of the things that annoys me about morality mongers is the idiosyncratic definition of the immoral act. My personal viewpoint is pragmatic. I place deeds on the measuring stick of morality according to the results; according to the effects of the acts and that because I see morality in human terms. Something is immoral because it produces an injustice. If it doesn't, it isn't.

I think we all have a natural sense that something might be immoral because to do something, to say something, might harm someone else who doesn't merit the harm, but it is the business of religion to subvert it, twist it and control it. This is where sin comes in and this is where religion makes us immoral. Nietzsche once said that anything done out of love is beyond good and evil, but of course he was a refugee from Christianity and hence a sinner. Sin is not dependent on pragmatic concerns; it consists of doing something you're told not to do, or more accurately something that someone tells you an invisible entity who cannot be addressed directly once told someone else who wrote it down. Even to question it is a sin. The gods of the Bible tell us to kill. I think it's immoral and evil, but it's not a sin.

So when General Peter Pace, whose military expertise I'm not in a position to judge, tells us as so many of my parochial school friends have done, that homosexuality is "just wrong" or "just immoral" I have to assume that his sense of right and wrong has been surgically removed and replaced with blind obedience to blind authority. He can no longer distinguish between morals and sin.

"My upbringing is such that I believe there are certain things, certain types of conduct, that are immoral. ... I believe that homosexual acts between individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts,"

Oh, don't ask why. You're entitled to your opinion General, but I wish you'd keep it to yourself. You see, I don't give a shit about your upbringing or all the things it may have taught you are "just immoral." I certainly don't recall you, our government or your godforsaken Church being appointed to condone or not to condone the acts of anyone that do not harm anyone else; harm the innocent the way your smug, altar boy bigotry harms innocent people.

More at The Reaction

Ratz's ass - Blowin' in the Wind

Skepticism is bad, said the late Holy Father. Skepticism is an ill wind that blows things away. Of course I won't have the opportunity to ask Joe Ratzinger whether it was an ill wind of skepticism that blew him away from the Hitler Jugend and into the Church, but I'm sure that Benedictus isn't a man who would submit to rules of logic or consistency of argument when it might damage the structured surrender of cognition he calls the Church. He's an admitted skeptic anyway, when it comes to allowing the flock to listen to Dylan. “There was reason to be skeptical, and I was,” Pope Benedict writes in his upcoming book about his association with John Paul: “Indeed, in a certain sense I still am today.”

But the Pope wasn't referring to Hitler, he was talking about Bob Dylan. Writing in his memoir; John Paul II, My Beloved Predecessor to be published next week, Pope Benedict XVI relates his reluctance to allow Dylan to sing before a 1997 youth event. He opposed letting this "false prophet" sing and although that song was not part of the program, John Paul II cited Blowin' in the Wind and assured the audience of 300,000 that the real answer ( don't be a skeptic, he's always right ) is in "the wind of the Spirit" that leads one to reject honest thought in favor of belief in what the Pope says that God says.

The song of course has a message about the insensitivity of man toward his fellows and the suffering caused by war. You'd hardly expect The Bavarian Pope to allow such heresy - not that the message is in any way unchristian - it's just that it didn't come from an approved vendor and it isn't being used to sell submission or a strawman Jesus who promotes war, persecution tyranny of thought and military aggression. Besides, Pope Benedict says that Rock music is the work of Satan and apparently even if it has a message of compassion, peace and love. No word on his opinion of Wagner and no hint that he is aware that Blowin' in the Wind isn't Rock music.

But I know there is some kind of wind blowing - I can smell it.

The lie's the thing.

Imagine going to a pharmacy to get your prescription for antibiotics filled. Imagine that the pharmacist is a devotee of Refafu and gives you powdered rat's anus instead - because of his "faith."

Imagine going to your tax preparer who tells you you don't owe anything when you really do - because his politics deny the taxing authority of the government.

Imagine being given bad legal advice because your lawyer gets paid to do that by someone you're suing.

Imagine making a bank deposit at a branch that has nothing to do with First National and you never see your money again.

Imagine being sold tofu at the butcher shop because it's owned by PETA.

It's only a matter of time. Imagine you've been raped and you're pregnant or that you've been told your baby will be born without a brain. You go to the Yellow Pages and look up an abortion clinic. You find you're at a clinic, supported by your taxes that is owned by anti-abortion religious fanatics who give you fake and fraudulent pamphlets telling you birth control is evil and potentially fatal, that abortion causes breast cancer, that 8 week fetuses have brains that think and feel pain and that an egg cell is a "baby." It's already happening. The Liars for Jesus are doing this and you're paying for it.

Imagine that a prominent scientist is interviewed about an important heath threat but his words are cut and pasted so that they deny the threat. It's already happening and the Liars for Oilgreed are doing it.

It is beginning to seem to me that Orwell had it wrong. Big Brother is doing an increasingly bad job of bamboozling us. He's fooling fewer of the people less of the time with his propaganda and rigged elections, but Big Oil and Big Jesus and Big business in general are doing it better every day. Stings, scams and frauds are becoming standard procedures, even with organizations that pretend to be all about truth and ethics and morality; the lie's the thing.

How dare you call me articulate?

To call George Bush a delusional incompetent or Karl Rove a miserable bastard could be taken as being insensitive to their feelings. To call the junior Senator from Illinois a brilliant orator is, as we are told, insensitive to his feelings and insensitive to the feelings of a "Community" that we are simultaneously told he belongs to and does not belong to. Nobody seems to care what Mr. Obama actually thinks.

Words, you see, have to be interpreted in a strictly racist way in order to avoid the appearance of racism. People must be stereotyped, pigeonholed and treated as groups so that people of a racist mind won't call those who are not, racists.

We're all supposed to be "sensitive" and because this is America, we need to carry it to ridiculous and self-defeating extremes. Because this is America, we can no longer depend on words meaning what they mean - they can only be interpreted by the political priests who represent "communities" and because this is America, anyone objecting to anything becomes a "community" even if its a community of one. So what do you do to point out that Barak Obamaindispensable talents for a Statesman, you don't say anything; you ignore the man, lest some ad hoc "community" put words in your mouth. Best not to be impressed by his intelligence and capability, because the inquisition will assume some heresy no matter how sincere the compliment. Is there a sneakier way to enforce bad stereotypes than to suppress open admiration?

Carl Rove, of all people, should know better than to put his foot in his mouth and there is probably something "ulterior" about everything he says, but I can't disagree that Obama is articulate. I may delight in everything unpleasant that happens to Rove, but I'm sick to death of the crepuscular and rebarbate semantics. If nothing we say can be taken to mean what it means anymore, if nothing can be understood without implanting an ulterior motive chosen by the listener; if everything must be deconstructed and reconstructed as a contradiction, then language is useless and there is no point to being articulate and no point to free speech.

Return of the Newt

Now let's make it clear - Newt Gingrich is not a hypocrite for having flung excrement at Bill Clinton: whooping and hopping like a zoo chimpanzee whose cage had been rattled, even though he was himself having an illicit sexual affair at the time. Not a hypocrite at all, said he to Focus on the Family, a self-congratulatory Christianist radical group. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards." Pandering to the Godbothers is of course not just a way to render one's sins nugatory, but a signal that Newt intends to run for President.

Whatever the relative standards of morality and decency demanded by Newt or by God, both seem to be entirely situational and subject to constant reinterpretation as befits the sales goals of the moment, but by my standards Newt is a hypocrite whose hypocrisy is rather too indelible to be washed away as easily as he would wish. "Clinton was punished for perjury" claims Newton although he was neither punished nor a perjurer. "you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials" but you can apparently accept tax evasion and you can accept sinners throwing stones at sinners and bearing false witness against the innocent as long as you clear it through God's own laundry, Focus on the Family.

Irrespective of his honesty in denying a sexual relationship, the question was irrelevant to the charges against President Clinton and of course not only were the charges not proved, they were heavily dependent upon fiction, bought and paid for by those who are lecturing us about ethics, morals and family values.

Gingrich apparently retains a good deal of popularity amongst the Republicans, at least the segment of that party that has become used to running things, and I believe we're seeing the launch of his trial balloon. Whether there is enough hot air available to float it, laden as it is with ego and freighted with enough ethical baggage to weigh down the Hindenburg, remains to be seen.

Fear and Loathing in South America

"The future will be better tomorrow"

-Dan Quayle-

Sadly, he was wrong, but to be fair, Dan Quayle never did say he wished he had studied Latin so he could talk to Latin Americans during his trip to check the progress of our War on Drugs in South America. But the history of official Presidential and Vice-Presidential journeys to the south will soon have another chapter to amuse us. The pending Bush visit to South America triggers a lot of deja vu visions. Nixon's 1958 Vice Presidential visit was a harrowing one. His car was pelted with rocks and invective in Venezuela by what was portrayed at the time as a "pro Communist" mob. I suspect that US support for yet another brutal and corrupt "anti-communist" dictator, Marcos Jimenez is a more complete motivational description, but then, as now, things are described in accordance with the prevailing mythology.

Of course Nixon was still a dozen years from escalating Imperialism by assassinating the duly elected President of Chile and American Presidents have been supporting brutality in desultory fashion ever since. If Bush doesn't remember, perhaps he will be reminded that we are not widely seen anywhere as promoters of peace and liberty.

"I dont see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."

-Henry Kissinger, 1970-

That sort of says it all. US intervention in Latin America, from political meddling to murdering; from invasion to the overthrow of democracies, is a long-standing tradition less likely to be forgotten by South Americans than North Americans. Bush, however does have the opportunity to disassociate himself with the past, even if the smoky odor of our intervention in Iraq clings to him.

"Mr. Bush should emphasize U.S. support for governments with a strong social agenda -- giving the poor a political voice and devising programs specifically aimed at reducing poverty." Says today's Miami Herald. "Mr. Bush needs to shape and articulate the argument over economic policies and respect for personal and political liberties in a forceful manner."

What he needs to do of course, and what he can do are sets less than congruent. Articulation is not his strong suit and respect for personal liberties has been replaced by a police state mentality, to say nothing of the fear of and anger towards Spanish speaking foreigners in the US. Perhaps George will return home wishing he had studied history more closely.

So long Scooter

Any hope Scooter Libby had about scooting out of the charges are gone - he has been found guilty of 4 out of 5 felony charges, which include Obstruction of Justice and Perjury. Still, this observer feels unsatisfied that the full extent of the misdeeds surrounding this case remains hidden.

A final solution

Any story about anyone with a vaguely Spanish name in my local paper is invariably received with comments like "Illegal - Illegal!" and "Deport the illegals!" Sometimes the suggestions are much more violent. Witnesses to crimes will sometimes speak to reporters through an interpreter even if they do have some facility with English, but the word "interpreter" will elicit the same calls for deportation and tirades against people who don't speak English fluently.

Last week I watched a TV story about two Florida fishermen whose boat sank some miles off Boynton Beach. They were in the water a long time and one died of a heart attack while boat after boat passed by, waved and disappeared. Why? because they were black and despite the mandate that a boat captain render assistance to those in peril, the presumption was that they were among the Haitian illegals who sometimes show up here, dead and alive. America's children of immigrants hate immigrants and nearly always have. Smile and wave and let the black men drown - lets' catch some fish and snicker about Liberals and the War on Christmas. Cubans of course are different. If they make it to shore, not only do we not drown them or lynch them; they are usually legal and are usually treated as human beings.

Early this morning, reports the Miami Herald, 11 soaking wet and shivering Hispanic immigrants, men women and children, showed up at a Key Biscayne toll booth and were given coffee and blankets. They were allowed to call relatives in Miami and unlike similar water soaked Haitians, or Hispanics from other countries, they were not beaten by police, thrown into trucks and held incommunicado until they were deported. Why? Cuba is a Communist country. We will do anything to help economic refugees from some Communist countries although those from other countries like China, might be held for decades without a hearing, but not Cuba. Cuba is right on our border. Cubans look almost like we (white people) do.

Now I'm not going to lecture about the inherent racism or the random inequities and contradictions of US immigration policies; I'm going to make a suggestion. The US can afford to eat better if we allow migrant labor to pick our crops, cut our lawns, dig our ditches and wash our dishes. Mexico can ease its burden of millions of economically deprived and hopeless people by sending them here and here's the way to make it all palatable to the xenophobic, Budweiser drinking unwashed of America: Mexico should have a successful Communist revolution and nationalize US assets. That would bring manufacturing jobs back to the US and leave the mucky, back-breaking work to immigrants we could now welcome as refugees from Communism. Everybody's happy - up the revolution!

Scarborough unfair

"During almost 15 centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? . . .superstition, bigotry and persecution."

James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance

Joe Scarborough is a riot - not because he has a sense of humor but because he doesn't. I normally Tivo Bill Maher's show on HBO and watch it on Sunday, so my disgust with Scarborough's idiocy du jour is a bit late, but as his pet theme is currently making its way through the American consciousness like some kind of pestilence, it's never too late to comment.

Joe tells us in all smugness that there is a "cottage industry" involved in "annoying Christians" and of course the comment was directed at fellow rationalist Maher who never hesitates to tell us he doesn't believe in the invisible man; Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim. I guess that annoys Christians, or at least those Scarborough identifies as Christians, which he seems to do without any awareness of the vast diversity of Christian beliefs over the millennia. It really annoys him that anyone suspects Jesus did not bodily ascend to heaven and might have the nerve to mention it. It annoys him that anyone disagrees with the peremptory precepts of fundamentalist preachers and he believes others should equally be annoyed at this blatant freedom of speech.

This pleases me no end of course, as Jesus' tolerance notwithstanding, Christianity in its mainstreams has annoyed the hell out of people who dissent, even in small matters, and has done so by killing them, torturing them, persecuting them, excluding them and expelling them. For 1700 years there has been unremitting battle against pagans, heretics, free thinkers, dissenters and adherents of any other religion as well as members of various Christian sects. They continue to annoy people of other beliefs by marginalizing them and attempting to exclude them from public life if they will not acquiesce in the program of Christianist domination rampant in our America of today, constitutional guarantees notwithstanding. Worst of all, the promoters of an evangelical ascendancy sell their aggression as a response to an attack - an attack that consists of not surrendering a basic freedom of religion.

So sorry Joe, I don't believe your crap - not any of it - and I don't believe Jesus did either. I have the right to question, I have the right to disbelieve and I have the right to say so publicly. You don't have the right to be protected from hearing things that question or do not coincide with your beliefs and if you don't like freedom, get the hell out of my country and take the rest of your stupid, sneering, small-minded, superstitious, subhuman tribe to Scarborough Country with you; your cheap hair color and all.

Andrew Coulter?

I wish the media would stop calling Ann Coulter a "conservative commentator." There is nothing conservative about calling everyone who disagrees with her a "faggot" and frankly her vampire hairdo and her skanky black dresses make me suspect that her obsession with gender identity is a cover up. Look at the size of her Adam's Apple!

If as she says, Clinton's randyness is evidence of "latent homosexuality" what then do we make of "Andy" Coulter's apparent cenobitic lifestyle? Is she simply unwilling to reveal her pre-op tranny status or is her status as the Siren of STD better known than I thought? In any event you never see her romantically linked with anyone male or female and how wrong could we be to suspect something like bestiality? Perhaps in place of the sex drive normal humans possess, some accident in utero (or in ovo) prevented its development and replaced it with a quaquaversal hatred for anything good or decent -- or anything at all.

The Impolitic suggests that the neocons need to cull Coulter. I would agree only as far as a literal interpretation of the word goes, although It's possible that destroying her, whether with a stake through the place where a heart normally is found or by exposing her for what she is, would simply make her more dangerous. It's also possible that continuing to link her to the Republicans and the Religious nuts will drag them downward to the same hell Coulter emerged from.

Let's hope.

CIA

Constitution Is Abandoned, of course -- did you think it stood for Central Intelligence Agency?

Khaled el-Masri has a similar name to someone the CIA was looking for and so the German Citizen was grabbed in Macedonia, taken to Afghanistan, beaten and tortured for 5 months and then dumped with a "never mind" which is as close to justice he's ever going to get. A Federal Appeals Court refused to hear his case against the CIA because that would render the CIA responsible for its actions and we can't have that. Next thing you know people would be asking King George to be responsible for his actions!

This is a precedent that essentially makes the CIA a nation unto itself responsible only to itself and answerable only to George, Rex Dei Gratia who is himself responsible only to a "higher Father." Can you imagine a country where you are not allowed to defend yourself because the facts are the property of the government and they can deny you the use of them? Don't bother to imagine - the day is here and the country is the United States of America; the day that justice died.

Prove it!

People with logically or morally or factually untrue arguments often demand proof when facts interfere. Proofs are for mathematicians and teachers of Euclidian geometry; with history we have to rely on a preponderance of evidence. A 99.99999+ probability is not proof and so people like Mel Gibson, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Arthur Butz can insist that Hitler's government didn't deliberately kill all those people because there's a 0.000000000000001% uncertainty about some detail.

The latest spokesman for evil to use such arguments to shrug off responsibility for the other holocaust: the brutal slaughter of millions and millions of civilians by the Imperial Japanese government in the 1930's and 40's is the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe who is seeking to reverse the tardy and horribly inadequate apology issued by that country to the approximately 200,000 women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army. There simply isn't any doubt that events such as the Rape of Nanking or the massive terror bombings or the live burials of hundreds of thousands of Chinese occurred, nor is there any doubt about the satanic prison camps or the testing of biological weapons on large Korean populations to study how quickly they would die. There is no doubt about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, yet the ultra-right revisionist government of Mr. Abe resists letting Japanese students know that any of it happened. Despite endless news reels, photos, documents, testimonies and piles of severed heads: "you can't prove it."

As though such blood curdling denials weren't enough, as though Abe's patriotic drum beating in Japan's schools weren't sufficient refuge for this scoundrel, he apparently feels that the fate of these women, many of whom did not survive incarceration in the Japanese "comfort stations" was their own fault.

"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove coercion"

Ya know the bitches wanted it. Frankly I find no evidence that Abe is worthy to breathe the air of our planet or that his government is worthy of existence, much less our loving support and adulation. This is the country that our administration would love to re-arm, the country that would love to and is working hard to make us an economic and cultural dependency. The rise of Japanese militancy under another right wing, aggressive and unrepentant government is an enormous threat to the world - even if you can't prove it.

Take the Swift Boat to Belgium

Sure I called him a liar and a coward who shoots children in the back and faked injury to get a Purple Heart, but it was just business -- nothing personal.

That's the sort of statement you'd expect from Don Corleone, but when we hear words to that effect are we inclined to think of someone better qualified in terms of his impeccable background and diplomatic skills than anyone else to represent the United States in the important European Union Capitol? What we heard during Tuesday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing was the voice of a partisan without conscience, without any sense of morals or ethics or decency or shame; a Republican, a supporter of George W. Bush.

We no longer live in the day of Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, but John Kerry whose campaign for President was set back by the sleazy lies of Bush supporters at least got to confront Sam Fox, a major financier of the "527" behind the Swift Boat Veterans hoax. Fox weaseled, saying he wasn't aware, that he hates the 527's and couldn't remember who asked him to contribute. "I did it because politically, it's necessary if the other side is doing it," said he, somehow equating lies with truth; equating the failures, misstatements, lies and deceptions of Bush with wholly invented slander and libel against Kerry. All's fair if you get to define fairness.
Of course Fox didn't do much more than hand a $50,000 check to the Swift Boat liars and some find his culpability to be less than 100% but that's a little like saying Al Capone never killed anyone. It's hard to explain why Fox waited until now to contradict the slander he paid for; hard in light of the fact that the campaign still functions and the Swift Boat website still exists.

Barak Obama, the Senator from Illinois, proved capable of trenchant understatement by calling Fox's explanations "Unsatisfying," and indeed it is. Unfortunately we all can demand satisfaction, but we can't expect justice. Under Bush's Reich, we can usually expect criminals, incompetents and their collaborators to be rewarded in proportion to how much they advance the power of Bush and so Fox receives, amongst other rewards a nomination to be an ambassador and not a jail sentence.

We can't expect much outrage either; not while Britney is in and out of rehab and Anna Nicole continues to decompose -- and most of all while the products of Bush's criminal regime make the outrageous seem trifling. Bush can continue to hand out power and prestige and honor to his henchmen like any other Caesar and there seems no way and no will to stop him.

Washington Post blogger, Mary Ann Akers has a more detailed description of the proceedings, for those with strong stomachs.

Rabbit Ears

OK, I think the search is over. I’ve located the most proudly stupid and ignorant magazine article ever to appear in the Mainstream Media – Fox News excepted, of course. The February 19^th issue of Newsweek contains an article called Prick up your Rabbit Ears.

Whoever Johnnie L. Roberts might be, his education in communications technology began and ended on February 19^th, 2007 the day after he was born. Although the photo contains a skyline filled with UHF Yagi’s, log periodics and folded dipoles along with an inset of a UHF planar satellite receiving antenna, the only thing the young Mr. Roberts remembers from his 12 second introduction to antenna design is the word “rabbit ears” a nickname of course for the VHF dipole that commonly used to be built into or added on to televisions that weren’t connected to one of the various kinds of outdoor antennae. When UHF stations become common, many were equipped with bowties or loops for off-the-air reception of the new frequencies.

From this he concludes that the concept of an antenna is an “anachronism” although of course with the proliferation of wireless devices, there are more of them per square meter than ever before in history and thousands and thousands of radio and television stations are broadcasting gigawatts worth of programming 24/7. Satellite radio, satellite TV, wireless networks, cordless phones, bluetooth devices, cellphone systems, microwave telephone systems and garage door openers use antennas. My car includes 5 kinds of antenna, our new digital camera has one as does my microwave oven. Even cable TV systems receive the signals they put on cable with antennas of course. It's hard to understand the ignorance behind thinking that all these giant parabolics are “rabbit ears,” and like the ones NASA uses to communicate with spacecraft, and radio astronomers use to listen to the universe are all obsolete and anachronistic in the age of cable. What an idiot!

But antennas are things used “before the age of cable” says he; an age which of course, began in the mid 19^th century, nor has cable made satellite systems with their various sophisticated antennae obsolete – quite the opposite, if you ask me. Nearly everything we do today in the way of communications depends on various antennae designs for different parts of the spectrum and their various uses. But it gets worse; Roberts goes on to tell us that “rabbit ears” have a greater bandwidth than a coaxial cable, which is appalling nonsense -- and this is because digital signals are “plump.”

Why do I get exercised about idiotic misinformation like this? Because whenever there is an article that I know something about, it’s obviously wrong and sometimes so misinformed and erroneous as to be scandalous. What else are they telling us that’s wrong -- maybe everything?

Eating Flipper

I live on Florida's Atlantic coast. It's a fisherman's paradise of marinas and dockside restaurants and if you order Dolphin for dinner, you call it Dolphin and you know you're getting one of the area's most popular fish: Coryphaena hippurus and not Flipper. Order where the locals eat and you may find out where they're biting today, what lure to use and how deep.

One can however, sometimes see the sunburned faces of Northern tourists blanch at the word on the menu and the restaurants that cater to the ictheologically ignorant prefer to use the oddly inappropriate and painfully balbative Hawaiian name Mahi-Mahi to avoid scaring them. Nobody eats, or wants to eat or wants to hear about anyone eating those beautiful mammals: the Bottlenose Dolphins or Tursiops truncatis who follow your boat, leaping from the water for what seems to be the sheer delight of it.

Nobody but the Japanese, of course. Somehow their aesthetic appreciation for nature does not extend below the waterline. Despoilers of the sea on a vast scale, their fisheries are immune to the slightest sentimentality as concerns the wholesale slaughter of whales, dolphins and other marine mammals, threatened, endangered, cuddly or otherwise. In the whaling port of Taiji, about 400 miles south of Tokyo, the waters are as thick and red as Gazpacho with the blood of Dolphins. They are surrounded, driven into lagoons and coves and butchered alive. It's a billion dollar industry, says American environmentalist Richard O'Barry, who has trained the animals in movies such as Flipper.

The defense of the practice rests on tradition and on the needs of the fishermen themselves. Fishermen who despite that advanced and wonderful Japanese economy we're used to having held up to us as an example of our backwardness, might starve if they had to stop. Tradition is never an excuse, nor is profit, but there you have it. Trendy and hip couples from New York eating Mahi-Mahi, proud of wearing only fake fur, their pockets and apartments stuffed with the Japanese gadgets they depend upon to feel hip and superior, their Japanese car parked outside looking oh so trendyuppiehip and environmentally friendly and fashionably anti-American are supporting the bloody slaughter of the animals that swim freely and protected along our coast and in our estuaries; supporting the drift nets that sterilize enormous areas of sea floor habitat, threaten the survival of the species we eat and the food chain that supports them. Buy yourself a Prius, kill a thousand baby seals. Turn on your Toshiba and gorge on what remains of the whales.

So feel good, all ye trendies. Complain about the Kyoto Accord, gripe about American products and go buy yourselves a Honda Accord. Make it blood red.

The Duke

"There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

-John Wayne-

The Picture of John Wayne dressed as a cowboy stands, thanks to Photo Shop, in front of a huge flag, proudly asking us why the hell we have to "press one for English."

A week does not go by and often not a day when I don't get some smirking e-mail about the efforts of the business community to make it easier for native Spanish speaking people to buy things or get information about things or to put money in the bank. Pressing 2 to continue in Spanish seems to have had more of an effect on America's sense of security than anything since Pearl Harbor and people who profess passionate love of flags, John Wayne and the Republic for which they stand often fail to see this sleazy campaign as the direct attack on freedom of speech that it is.

“Women have the right to work wherever they want, as long as they have the dinner ready when you get home”

"My favorite e-mail ever" says the person who sent it to me and he concludes with "Enough said." I don't think enough can be said. I have never been a fan of Marion Morrison, although I have enjoyed a couple of his movies. His support of the Viet Nam war and his attacks on the doubters of its necessity; his McCarthyism and his belief in white supremacy left me with a lasting distaste for his stupid kind of patriotism and bigotry. It may be ironic however that the anti-Mexican rabble rousers chose him as the boy for their poster.

Wayne was married three times: to Josephene Saenz, Esperanza Baur and Pilar Palette. They were all Spanish speaking women. As he was dying, Wayne requested that his headstone bear an epitaph in Spanish: Feo, Fuerte y Formal. No English translation was offered.

“Life is hard; it's harder if you're stupid.”

I have to disagree once more -- life is hardest for those who have to deal with the stupid.

Book of Daniel

New occasions teach new duties,
time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward,
who would keep abreast of truth.

-- James Russell Lowell --



Amidst all the horrible things going on in the world there are still those who see the fate of societies as determined by God's blessing or God's wrath and God's wrath usually stems from people engaging in what they were designed to do, or people looking at people clothed as God clothed them and doing what they have been doing since before they were really people: that's sex, of course, and sex which is not approved of by a group of people who exist for the purpose controlling other people's sex lives and warning them of God's wrath will lead to terrible things.

I only discovered the voice crying in the wilderness called Daniel Mark Cohen through an ad he probably ran himself in the February 19 & 26 issues of The New Republic titled Unhappy Anniversary.

"If the people of the United States collectively endorse a single prayer, one that, universal in its reach, transcends the necessary differences in faith and ethnicity that otherwise divide the nation, that prayer consists of three simple words: "God bless America."

In fact, prayer divides America and that prayer no less than others, but Cohen's assertion that God will no longer bless America since the Roth v. United States decision fifty years ago that had the audacity to determine that what is and what is not pornography is relative to community standards and not the eternal, immutable standards of self-appointed guardians and Biblical blowhards like Cohen. Only a truly magnificent idiot can forget that randy pagan societies have far outlasted empires steeped in sexual repression and have prospered. God seems to bless slavery, genocide, and bloody conquest equally with its absence, and just societies have come and gone in very short order. As the poet said, our standards change and some of those standards now make Cohen uncouth.

Only a truly arrogant idiot can insist on a recieved eternal standard about what parts of what bodies we may look at and at divine retribution for infringing upon it. Cohen is both kinds of idiot and more. He's an idiot that thinks he speaks for God and that God needs a spokesman.

Cohen, in the ad and in his book, insists that pornography is prostitution and part of a "culture of prostitution" mediated by the internet, cable television pornography, and photographic cameras. "And why should God bless America," asks Cohen, "when as a consequence, she insists on the free unregulated distribution via the internet of the most vile sexual images, so that hourly, such pictures reach and indelibly corrupt the otherwise innocent eyes and chaste minds of the country's millions of unsupervised children?"

Interesting that Cohen thinks we should be supervised as adults but that children, with their "chaste minds" need not be. I don't know whether I'm more offended by his contempt for freedom, his psychotic ideas about sex, or his insistence that children have chaste minds. I am of course angered beyond bounds by this voice from the sewer, this vox clamatis cloaco, from whose troglodytic viewpoint the world is covered in shit. I'm angry that his pathetic little God won't bless a sexually free America but isn't irritated by an America that kills children, letting them live in poverty and disease, by a world that looks the other way and feels righteous when they are hacked to bits in Africa and are forced to become killers of other children.

Cohen is too stupid, or too twisted and perverted, to dwell on the total lack of historical correlation between sexual openness and the fate of nations. God doesn't really give a damn from all evidence and from all evidence European countries that do not try to suppress pornography, that allow prostitution, and don't interfere with sex between consenting adults have less rape and murder than the lands of God-fearing, freedom-hating sexual deviates like Mark would force us to emulate.

God bless America? No, says Cohen. God damn Cohen and all miserable bastards like him? Yes, says Fogg.

Cross posted at The Reaction

Body politics

John Brown's body may be moulderin' in the grave, but James Brown's is still waiting for burial. Anna Nicole Smith's remains, of course, are deteriorating in Nassau, but probably less fast than the body parts strewn around the streets of Baghdad nearly every day. Somehow we're becoming numb to it and as we don't have to smell it or see it or face becoming part of it every time we step out the door we're lucky to be able to think of other more fascinating things - like Britney's latest idiocy.

These stories are usually at the top of CNN's most popular list, not the daily grinding up of the men women and children of the war. The troops we support arrive home in boxes and bags; whole and in part. Many come home to a crumbling and inadequate system of veteran's hospitals, inadequate counselling and inadequate preparation for the very different lives they will be forced to lead.

Fortunately we have sports and the antics of celebrities to keep our minds occupied and our dreams free of horror. Cartoonist Pat Oliphant says it all this morning.

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.