Written Landscape

Monster Creation

2006-03-31T13:29:00.000-08:00

Every day or two now, large piles of bodies are discovered in and around Baghdad.
Twenty in an abandoned minivan two weeks ago, all shot execution-style. Thirty a few days later - all beheaded, missing the heads. Most events this last year or two have gone unreported as it's become too dangerous for Western correspondents to work in Iraq anymore.

Apart from just the ghastly nature of these events, I have a few other thoughts on this. First, a civil war is already well in progress.

There are several militias with active death-squads, at least in the four Sunni provinces. When forty people are being killed every day.. In an area with a population of 5+M.. That makes it roughly 80 times as dangerous as the most scary city in the America. The next step will be large internal refugee dislocations as people flee certain neighborhoods for their lives. These will be absorbed by nearby relatives for a while, but when that become impossible, large tent cities will emerge, with all the attending problems - disease, food and water shortages.. Great.

Completely aside from all the tragic deaths, a civil war environment will generate hundreds, or even thousands of people who will become literal monsters. Every life is unimaginably precious. Even when bloodshed cannot be avoided, each killing is a nihilistic act, an extinguishing of a whole world of possibility, full of sorrow, which effects the killer forever. Soldiers are traumatized, but they live within rules. Militia/guerillase who become acclimated to such violence, who are able to execute civilians, are virtually destroyed inside and are unlikely to ever be rehabilitated.

They'll be able to murder people over a parking spot incident, at the drop of a hat. Their lives will become sterile and flat, and only their bloodlust will give it meaning. When and if events calm down, they'll be just incredibly dangerous to have as neighbors.. Like holocaust guards after WWII. This is a rare state for a society to find itself in, one unfamiliar to American civilians since the Civil War.

Condoleeza has publiclyy admitted that they've made 'thousands of tactical errors' in Iraq, but toppling Saddam was still the right decision. Fine. Humility is a virtue, even with stupid people. Now if she had any personal honor after making such a statement she'd resign in disgrace. But she doesn't, or she has whatever condition Rumsfeld has, where she tries to resign but Bush refuses to allow it. In a perfect world, they would all be transported to Baghdad to live out the war in the death-zone, and feel the deep fear that they've visited on millions of others with such easy lack of concern. Playing God wouldn't be such a rush if they were ever forced to live with the consequences.

Professional Talking Heads

2006-03-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

I was furious when I first saw this screen-catch - see below. But after some time to reflect, I can see it's a sign of desperation for Fox news. They've given up the 'middle ground' where independents can watch their news and take them seriously. They're committed partisans and they can't switch horses, but Bush is polling at 37%.. in Red Indiana. The Democrats have some momentum, although they still can't seem to put forward a solid message, other than 'we're not Bush'.. Surely they'll find the way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. To much of America they're the party of plaintive whining. It's their own fault.

Bush has been shown on video three days before Katrina being warned that the levees would break, a week before he said on TV that nobody expected the levees would break. Which once again shows that he'll lie easily and at the drop of a hat. But finally the South is paying attention. It's a minor screw-up on camera which might have fallen into a grey area if he'd just picked competent people to run FEMA in 2001. But Bush has always seen government as a game to amass power, so loyalty has always been the higher priority.

Demanding competence would mean breaking apart the inner circle and submitting to outside professional authority and judgement, something he's always actively avoided. Elevating underqualified people actually makes these appointees more dependent on Bush than if they had their own earned authority - they have less to fall back on and can't rock the boat. So in effect he's surrounded himself with incompetent psychophants for years, and it's finally caught up with him.

The rest of the world must constantly wonder that we've submitted ourselves to this ridiculous buffoon, but he's a lame-duck. Soon he'll be out of office, and without the presidential props and protections behind him and the 'Royal We' he's been able to use in language, he'll live like a the broadside of a barn covered with targets. He'll yet regret winning that 2nd term. He's a fool. It's his own fault for pretending stubbornness is a primary virtue.

Brownie has re-entered the press-fray. The new word is that he was unqualified, but he took his job seriously and was an improvement on his predecessor, the lobbyist-in-office Joe Albaugh. Brownie didn't like playing the scapegoat and as revenge he's coming back and going after the incompetent head of Homeland Security chief Ron Chertow. Good for him. The whole system failed and he shouldn't be the only one to live in infamy for it.

These horrible gasbags will continue to pretend to be experts, no matter what happens. I wonder if they have any shame at all. Sure, a million people may be killed in the next year, but .. think of the upside! And of course the worst of them is Rumsfeld, who ignored intelligence and advice from every direction, and thus who's legacy will be similar to McNamara. If he has any soul at all, will live out his life as a bloodstained, haunted man.

Bush in India, Stolen Elections?, fighter sale

2006-02-24T08:30:00.000-08:00

Quote from Rediff, Feb. 9th.

George W Bush's protocol handlers have notified South Block that the American President's deep belief in his born again faith precludes his visiting Mahatma Gandhi's Samadhi at New Delhi's Raj Ghat -- during his forthcoming visit to India.

When asked -- by reporters on a recent trip aboard Air Force One -- if he will be breaking a decades long tradition of foreign dignitaries visiting India paying respect to the Father of India, Mr Bush, as is his wont, was caught off guard and mumbled something about how the Gospel of Jesus Christ views cremation as a pagan practice.

Of course all educated people know that Hinduism is a Pagan, polytheistic religion much older than Christianity ... with 1,000 million followers in the world's largest democracy, one which we might want to stay friendly with. So Bush has a Two-fer! He deftly insults their George Washington and their religious practice as unholy in one quick shot. What a wonderful guy.

**************************
I think it's at least possible that the 2004 election was stolen, but it's unknowable.
This certainly makes for an interesting story. I'm surprised this reached the AP wire and the LA Times.. With Bush polling in the 40's this may yet have traction. If it does, let's see about getting Alito booted. Bush's supporters, however, will surely fight like sceaming banshees for their dark prince. Interesting times ahead. Hopefully.. Maybe.

Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Fla. Vote
By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press ,February 23 2006

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- An examination of Palm Beach County's electronic voting machine records from the 2004 election found possible tampering and tens of thousands of malfunctions and errors, a watchdog group said Thursday. Bev Harris, founder of BlackBoxVoting.org, said the findings call into question the outcome of the presidential race. But county officials and the maker of the electronic voting machines strongly disputed that and took issue with the findings.

Voting problems would have had to have been widespread across the state to make a difference. President Bush won Florida -- and its 27 electoral votes -- by 381,000 votes in 2004. Overall, he defeated John Kerry by 286 to 252 electoral votes, with 270 needed for victory.

BlackBoxVoting.org, which describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit citizens group, said it found 70,000 instances in Palm Beach County of cards getting stuck in the paperless ATM-like machines and that the computers logged about 100,000 errors, including memory failures. Also, the hard drives crashed on some of the machines made by Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems, some machines apparently had to be rebooted over and over, and 1,475 re-calibrations were performed on Election Day on more than 4,300 units, Harris said.

Re-calibrations are done when a machine is malfunctioning, she said. "I actually think there's enough votes in play in Florida that it's anybody's guess who actually won the presidential race," Harris added. "But with that said, there's no way to tell who the votes should have gone to." Palm Beach County and other parts of the country switched to electronic equipment after the turbulent 2000 presidential election, when the county's butterfly ballot confused some voters and led them to cast their votes for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

The Supreme Court halted a recount after 36 days and handed a 537-vote victory to Bush. Palm Beach County election officials said the BlackBoxVoting.com findings are flawed, and they blamed most of the errors on voters not following proper procedures.
"Their results are noteworthy for consideration, but in a majority of instances they can be explained," said Arthur Anderson, the county's elections supervisor. "All of these circumstances are valid reasons for concern, but they do not on face value substantiate that the machines are not reliable." Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer disputed the findings, saying the company's machines worked properly.

Sequoia's machines are used in five Florida counties and in 21 states. "There was a fine election in November 2004," Shafer said. She said many of the errors in the computer logs could have resulted from voters improperly inserting their user cards into the machines. The remaining errors would not affect the vote results because each unit has a backup system, she said. Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, which oversees elections, said she was not aware of the report and had no comment.

Harris said one machine showed that 112 votes were cast on Oct. 16, two days before the start of early voting, a possible sign of tampering. She said the group found evidence of tampering on more than 30 machines in the county. However, Harris said it was impossible to determine what information was altered or if votes were shifted among candidates.

I can think of no honest, sincere argument in defense of paperless untracable voting machines. Anyone who puts one forward is either a fool or a closet-fascist or royalist who doesn't believe in Democracy. This would perhaps be a first for America, but democracy is inherently unstable and stranger things have happened in history.

I expect that large-scale tampering would (or will) eventually break down, because it would require the dozens or hundreds of people who participated to keep a world-changing, radioactive secret..forever. And humanity is a weak vessel for such things.

*******************
Air Force Plans to Sell F-22As to Allies
(I.E. Our collective Organism Buys, New Improved Teeth and sells extras to it's friends)
The airforce is working on plans to sell the F-22 Raptor to Japan. They need to do this for economies of scale in manufacturing so the US can keep the Lockheed pipeline active. This action will then bring the F-22 directly into China's sphere, both there and in South Korean bases.. So China will redouble efforts to build a comparable fighter.. which will then lead Congress to order more F-22's..

The insane, eternal cycle continues. Each plane costs $100M each. That's 1,800+ kids' full college education. Each. Terrific.

This isn't an American issue per say, - it's just part of the human condition which plays out everywhere. The Lockheed employees have to pay the mortgage and the Chinese would probably build those fighters anyway. But I wish we could for once open our eyes and not go down this road.

Aliens have not visited.

2006-02-21T14:36:00.000-08:00

If aliens existed, they must be so different that earthly resources are of no value to them. Or they have plenty of resources of their own and don't need to invade.

Both possibilities are unlikely, so I don't think they've visited despite all the science fiction and imaginative fantasy over the years. The reason: There's only one type of DNA code. If aliens ever arrived I would expect them to have brought in their own biological language. And then we'd have two or more genetic-models in competition on earth. But there's only one code. There's also no sharp point where evolution jumps to something completely new and different.. So evidence shows that there's only one evolutionary story on earth these last 2+ billion years.
If they came, they would have stayed.

So aliens I guess the unspoken premise of the UFO meme out there is that the Greys or whoever are treating the earth like a zoo.. This seems unlikely and in any case, in the long run it's unsustainable. Assuming the same rules of life out there as exist right here - i.e. - constant searching for growth, Darwinian competition, destruction and absorption of the weak by the strong, etc. Columbus and the Americans did not go to the new world to have a look around and sight-see. After discovery pressure for invasion came from every direction in European society, just as it would in an 'Alien society' counterpart.

Given physical law and the natural order of things, which are universal, there is no other scenario I can comprehend in which they would exist, but choose to stay away.

Life doesn't work that way. It seems more likely that nobody has visited at all. Logic points against any contact. Maybe interstellar flight truly is beyond the sumit of evolutionary biology, here and elsewhere. We might indeed just be too small to ever make the jump.

Of course aliens are usually a tool in cinema and fiction for different psychological facets of human experience.

These include:
1) A stand-in for God / Higher Power among scientific/secular types like myself.

2) A way to give a three-steps-removed perspective on human events and foibles from an outsider's point of view.

3) A way to explore monsters/demons, politics & social situations in our imagination which do not correspond to earthly Nature. - I.E. - to wipe the earthly slate clean and allow the writer and reader to fiddle with parameters of a story which would be inflexible in more down-to-earth fiction.

4) As a way to speculate about the future of science and it's impact on humanity, a field which the Aliens will developed in some curious and unexpected direction.

Our curiousity is endless. What we're interested are basically a group of questions about convergent evolution, both biological and technological. I.E. - How are we the same, how do we differ, and why?

Most of science believes that, like Dolphins and sharks and long-extinct ichtheosaurs, or wolves vs. Tasmanian Tigers, or Birds vs. Pterosaurs, or modern trees vs. prehistoric fern-trees, we may be substantially similar in many details, a subject of endless sci-fi speculation. There is only one way to build a car - with four wheels. Five is too many, three is not enough.

Similarly there may be only one way for intelligence to evolve - through a quadruped, standing upright and developing brainpower to add functionality to it's freed for-limbs.. There are embryonic developmental-reasons why all advanced earthly lifeorms all are designed through bilateral mirror-symnetry, that is, two eyes, opposing arms, legs, ears, etc.

And then a vast variety of other questions come to mind. Do they sleep? Do they have religion? Do they have crime/war/poverty/ morality/ mortality/gender & individuality & politics? What does their music sound like? How do their social structures work? Are they hive-minds? Do they have castes? What do they look like? Do they want our women? - (probably not).

Although an alien planet would is almost infinitely distant, the physical rules should still apply. And of course, our brain and psyche has evolved in certain ways to meet our needs. Are they down the same path, or not? Have they taken control of their own evolution, as humanity is likely to do in the next 200+ years? How's that worked out?

They don't really answer spiritual questions, though. If they created us, the next question is .. who created them? And then who created the creators, etc. It's the standard infinite-regression problem, which religious folks refuse to recognize, but which Darwinism has proven to be the only logical answer.

Cheney at the trigger

2006-02-16T08:13:00.000-08:00

Darth Cheney had a hunting accident and apparently shot his friend over the weekend. On the one hand it's sad, but it does pierce his fake air of infallibility, and it also shows Cheney's reaction, which is to be secretive and deceptive in the details until finally smoked out of his fortress by an unusually rabid press. The fourth-estate's dominant skill-set of focusing in on personality-driven car chases/crashes and infotainment has for once served them well here.

I'm sure it was an accident, and Cheney was likely waiting to see whether his friend would die from his injuries. Let's see him take the heat. He will..briefly, then his supporters will jump to Cheney's defense, as his feelings are being hurt by all these pestering reporters. On one radio show one said 'why do I have to know this'? i.e. - I'm a sheep and I want to be led by the nose.. And then the news cycle will close and will then re-focus on the world's largest garden tomato or someone who taught a squirrel to waterski.

The old guy's alive and well, and he's also a shmuck. When someone apologizes for being shot and wounded.. it isn't about politics - this is a deep bow to royalty.

His subserviance is total. He's probably pleased that he gets to save Cheney's hide this way & get closer to the inner circle.

He's the victim but he refuses to play the part, leaving nothing to write about. The story will fade away quickly.

Congress Is No More. And the Google shakedown.

2006-02-14T06:32:00.001-08:00

I listened to parts of Gonzales's hearings before the Senate last week and it struck me as the most brazen political power-grab I've ever heard in my life. Forget the Democrats who rail and moan at the sky every day to little effect, the drama here was on the Republican side.

They were like loyal ranch dogs who had happily watched the cowboys turn bulls into steers for years now leaving the Democrats a bunch of whiny eunichs, but which have suddenly finding their master's staring right down at them with the clippers in their hands..

There was a chill in the room. They'd played a faustian bargain, and now it was time to play the piper. Their last five years of smooth sailing has given birth to a genuine monster. Finally their eyes are open but it might just be too late.

Bush will again say he's the de-facto emperor because of the War President BS.. despite the fact that there's no draft and no clearly defined enemy that could be defeated to resolve the conflict. It's an endless war.. The whole thing sounds like a the cliff notes summary to Orwell's 1984.

And of course Arlen Specter allowed Gonzales to testify without being sworn in, so he could lie all day without any repercussions. That's how beaten down and pathetic these men have become - they don't even want to take the risk that brazen lying might become a political football for the opposition - as if the truth mattered at all... They're a bunch of career politicians who have nothing to fall back on. Their jobs are their lives. Their leadership don't respect them, but they can't rock the boat... And although much of the hearing was very contentious, everyone knows this is a talking shop. The lack of an oath for Gonzales' testimony confirms it - this was all an ass-covering excersize for the media from start to finish.

And of course they're still giving Bush the benefit of the doubt on the real purpose of spying. I would be surprised - but not very, to find out in 2010 that it was all to gather info on Howard Dean and the congressional democrats, among others. These guys are profoundly untrustworthy. We've never needed a Woodward and Bernstein more than we do today.

Oh, won't you please, please
give us some authority?

I expect there is significant but unsuccessful back-room pressure to have Gonzales fired. And the senate may yet gain a more solid footing as Bush's lame-duck status grows and they try to flee the White-House's sinking ship. Time will tell.

** You need 51% to rule ** if you have 51% of the party, you control the party - so you effectively need 26% to rule. **
(Attributed to Hitler in the 1930's).
Bush's general approval #'s hover at 38+%.

****************************

Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2006 10:31 a.m. EST
Google Rankles GOP
Google Inc. has few friends in the Republican Party – and that could have
consequences for the Internet powerhouse.
"Republicans can’t seem to forgive what they see as Google’s leftward tilt,” Business Week reports. In the 2004 election cycle, Google employees gave Democrats 99 percent of their campaign contributions, and the company has hired as its first lobbyist Alan Davidson, a Democrat.
Google has also taken positions on two issues that rankle many in the GOP: resisting subpoenas to help track child pornographers, and acceding to the censorship demands of China’s communist government.
Google is also infamous among Web searchers for a word search feature that demeans President George W. Bush. If a Google user types the word "failure" into the search box and hits Google's "I Feel Lucky" tab, the president's White House bio page opens.
To mend fences with the GOP, Davidson is trying to hire an in-house Republican lobbyist, but so far no one has been willing to come aboard.
Google could "get a first taste of potential repercussions from its GOP problem” when it is grilled about its China policy at a hearing of the House Global Human Rights Subcommittee this week, according to Business Week.
It is "astounding” that Google would cooperate with China "just to make a buck,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Chris Smith, R-N.J.
As for the company’s reluctance to cozy up to the GOP, "Washington has a record in dealing with big, arrogant, growing companies,” reports Business Week, which goes on to warn: Remember Microsoft, whose dismissive attitude toward Washington helped fuel an antitrust case.

I'm sure it's written by a base-level hack journalist who was just casting around for something to feed his seething, hateful constituency, but it could be taken up by the party and become a real blackmail/shakedown.

It's flawed on several levels.
As for the kowtow to China, I'm not surprised by Google's subserviance on this. Google has a pile of money but it's not a sovereign nation and doesn't have a military. Their options were very limited. It actually seems kind of pathetic that the congress expects US companies to play this risky, losing bluffing game to enforce our foreign policy, especially considering how poorly the Bushies have done these last five years.

That is to say.. we have no foreign policy vs. China. We're at their mercy on almost all trade issues. The five richest people in America are the owners of WalMart which is 80% a conduit for importing consumer products directly to America (and the rest of the world)..from a nation with no democracy or unionization, making much of it's industry into de-facto slave-labor. There's no easy answer to this. Google wants and needs to make money, and that means going East.

The second part here is how Microsoft is an example of what can happen when palms aren't greased. This is garbage. First there's the ugly premise - that laws are enforced differently depending on who companies are contributing to. I.E. - government shakedown is the norm. That's illegal and unethical, but I would hardly expect Newsmax to even notice such a fundamental lapse.

But every other part of this statement is also false as well. Microsoft was able to stretch out it's anti-trust issues for over a decade until all of the rulings against it were rendered moot. This is an example of a company successfully breaking the system by spending perhaps $100M of its $100B+ fortune, less than 0.1% of it's wealth, on foot-dragging lawyers. The anti-trust people in government were all Democrats anyway. The current GOP is Lassaiz-faire at best, kleptocracy at worst, although I expect they'd pretend otherwise to pursue their supposed enemies if the occasion warranted it.

Right now Microsoft's larger obstacle is the EU, which has an actual anti-trust division with teeth, and Linux, which was an grassroots repulsion away from Microsoft's heavy-handedness, which occured in industry with no government support at all.

The third peculiar part is about Google's lack of cooperation with the administration's request for search stats. This has nothing to do whatsoever with child-exploitation. It has to do with keeping the camel's nose out from the circus tent. -that is, once the nose is in, the camel will inevitably follow. Google is not an arm of the government and sees a need for separation from authority as a necessary barrier to maintain trust with the public.

To take this stand and lump them in with protectors of child-traffickers is a telling manipulation. Apparently your either with the (_blank_) terrorists/rapists/monsters or you're against them. There is no in-between. And if there was, the wingnuts fringe would knowingly lie about it and browbeat Google into submission with hash rhetoric. It's worked on every other issue. It's their chief M.O. If you start with a bold, simple lie, the adversary is confused and starts its defense from a deep hole. - The Cheney Principle.

But Google has a lot of money, and it won't be easily beaten down. They have no anti-trust pendulum over their heads that I know of.. What will the Bushies do? Put out a pro-Bushy search engine?

Only the Newsmax wingnut faction can read this with a straight face.

Obama vs. McCain

2006-02-08T07:32:00.000-08:00

Fierce acrimony between Barak Obama, the newly anointed leader of the Democrats who's radiant charisma lights up the party, and John McCain. Barak wants to use corruption to break the GOP while McCain wants to use his bipartisan appeal to form a coalition to fix the earmark-system, which has turned congress into such a dark place this last five years.

At this point McCain has such wide appeal as the non-reactionary Republican that he will most likely be president in 2008. Far worse things could happen, but I'd rather see a Democrats in office if such a thing is possible. So many in Congress are so corrupt that any GOP-led correction will be half-hearted and will only placate the swing voters into staying in their comfort zone on the wrong side of the aisle, like frogs in hot water negotiating a two-year delay-of-boiling, but leaving the stove burner-knob in the wrong hands.

The super-suave Obama is playing a very high-stakes game. If he loses this gambit and the Bush-Fundy-corruption wing of the GOP consolidates it's position, we will have NO reform and NO Democratic resurgence until 2008 or beyond, all to get on top of McCain for leadership in the Senate.. It may be a losing bet which could severely hurt the country. The chess-piece has been put forward.. Time will tell.

The ominous story which informs all this is that .. a great part of the population in the Red States are not concerned about the Abramoff scandal.. That is to say that nothing Bush can do will ever make them reconsider their support for either him or his successors, who are learning from him now how the government operates.

If rank corruption is more acceptable than voting for Blue then we are truly two nations intertwined in one state - and we may yet drift towards civil war in the next 30 years - one the North would lose, given current population trends. This indifference to truth and it's consequences will be Bush's real legacy. It will either implode the GOP in his absence, as it's unlikely they'll find as bold and strong a liar as W, or with the GOP in control, the American Dream of Greatness, - shining beacon to the rest of the world, etc.. always to some extent an idealistic fantasy-vision, will be be eroded to a state of collapse.

*****
The Air America radio podcasts are no longer available for free.. It was a great service, but they're not a charity, so this was to be expected.

Coretta Scott King

2006-02-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

Coretta Scott King died last month and virtually every famous African American and many dignitaries from around the world are attending the enormous funeral today, with four living presidents it will be far larger than MLK Jr.'s own funeral in 1968. It's hard to tell whether they're deeply moved or just hounds for the spotlight. In any case as the Russians say, it is easy to love the deceased.

It's hard to think of Mrs. King as a proper celebrity, as her only accomplishment was to keep her husband's flame alive for these last forty years. But her passing marks the end of that chapter of the civil rights movement as MLK's stature has grown over time and nobody has stepped into his shoes.

Oprah Winfrey is now the voice of mainstream Black America, and although she is a good and honest broker she's generally apolitical and is mostly dedicated to her light-entertainment empire, thinking mostly in terms of personal improvement and empowerment.

It's amusing to see Bush speaking at this occasion, as MLK would have properly designated him as the adversary to be demonstrated against. But Bush as president is the center of every event he attends and he is completely shameless. Everyone has to be polite and defferential despite disagreements that go down to every fiber of their being. That's what living in an organized society requires.

Of course Bush would claim King's friendship and call them fellow-travellers, but his version of Freedom is 100% Freedom-of-Association, which translates roughly to Freedom from being pestered by people like MLK, the freedom to exclude and ignore.

So a few of the other speakers gave Bush a very harsh reception, sermonizing against him for many hours as he sat in the audience right behind the podium, unable to escape. The right wing blogosphere was irate that their golden boy had been trapped outside of his usual protective bubble of psycophants and that everyone was so impolite, but they should have known better.

It was a political decision for Bush to attend. He was playing statesman and working in a subtle way to claim the MLK legacy for the GOP, and MLK's family and friends were duly able to set the tone for this event and were not going to let their loved one's memory and life's work be coopted and diffused by people who they knew to their enemies in every occasion except for the most shallow level of smalltalk and polite genialities.

The premise that a funeral is not a political event is a sham in any case. Bush played up Reagan's funeral in 2004 to the hilt for electoral advantage (and to my annoyance, as even as I disagreed with Reagan he was vastly better than Bush has turned out to be, and W's attempt to jump on his large old coat-tails was kind of tacky.) If one's life's work and deeply held beliefs cannot be celebrated and spelled out clearly at the funeral, when can it be? MLK's legacy was as a proud Left-Wing agitator on many issues. Bush wasn't welcome. He should have sent his wife and stayed at the Whitehouse.

*********

In other news, huge riots have been going on for days in Lebanon and Tehran and other countries as the radical nutcases are furious over some recent political cartoons which represent Muhammad, a religious verboten. Poor Denmark.. Several embassies have been torched, which is incredible as these cartoons appear pretty innocuous and tepid.

But this was an intentional provocation done in very poor taste. Denmark has a far-right regime in power. They're a lilly-white country with a 3% Muslim minority which feels isolated and under seige. There are always the permenantly furious factions, waiting and hoping for a spark in the powderroom, such that this falls into the gray area where the Danish government should have gently asked the newspaper to excersize restraint.

But Denmark refused to even meet with the Muslim nations united group of 12 ambassadors.. Such arrogance reaps the whirlwind. They had it coming. Anyway, it has escaped no one that brutish violence is their answer to being depicted as brutally violent. A catch-22 if ever there was one.

Since then they've played a sharp and risky game by refusing to talk to certain Danish Imams who incited this madness and have played both sides of the game by supporting a Danish embargo to the Arab foreign press and then telling a different story back at home. The Danes are basically saying that these people are the problem. Which is true.. but they might need these clerical nutcases to talk to their nutcase-followers. Time will tell.

It's now come out that the three worst cartoons of the group were never even published by the Danish paper. They were included later by the Imams during their middle-East tour to provoke uproar. This shows the true nature of this group of leaders - they're a bunch of race-bating jerks. People died in those riots.. They're following the Cheney model of leadership - if you put forward a strong lie, your adversary starts from a defensive position. That's the world we live in. 1984 isn't that far away.

Update:
Two new cartoon contests have sprung up in responst to this kerfuffle.
1) The Iranian newspaper is having a make-fun-of-the-holocaust cartoon contest.
These guys really know how to take the high road.

2) In response to the Iranians, Dimona Comix, an Isreali publishing company, has started it's own anti-Semitic cartoon contest.. showing exactly how these things should be viewed - i.e. with a thick skin and a sense of the ridiculous. A curious development.. But one man's humor is another's overt racism. Only an African American can call himself a nigger (with apologies.)

State of the Union.

2006-02-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

I couldn't watch it. Usually I do pay attention just to get my blood boiling, but it's been boiling for years now and it hasn't do me any good. Bush is a powerful and grand speaker, but it's very manipulative in a subtle but repulsive and disrespectful way. His talk is full of straw-men adversaries and fake olive branches for bipartisanship. And worse, if the past is any guide nothing he says will actually be followed up on the ground.

It's all just worthless, hollow talk, and they've counted for years now on the fact that there's no consistent follow-up in the media and that the press needs access so much that they only have to deal with soft-ball questions. He'll throw red meat to his backers and be treated to thunderous applause and his initiatives will go nowhere despite his control of congress. They need the resources to protect the tax cuts. Bush builds a Potemkin village for the media to swallow, and they oblige him.

This will be less successful in the future as his lame-duck status becomes clearer and people will have less to lose by calling Bullshit on him. Indeed, doing so will soon be a sign of independence.. If only they'd had the stones to do so when there was some real risk to it.

So now he says we're addicted to oil and that science and math teaching are national priorities.. He's ignored these issues for years. This is just a way to coopt the issues away from the pathetic, feeble Democrats, who with the Alito vote have proven that they're the party of defeat and personal job-security, The good ones are hampered by group of shallow sell-outs who are determined to stay in the middle of the road and thus be repeatedly run over. DailyKos has described them as the Vichy-Democrats, which is cruel but alas, might be accurate.

We are all helpless bystanders until this showboating, self-loving smarmy cad implodes and gets off the national stage. And then we will pick up the pieces.

********************

Meanwhile Hamas defeated Fata and won the election in the Territories. So they're legitimate, but they're terrorist killers. Hopefully this puts to bed the fallacy that democracy will make us all stable, happy bedfellows - this was always a shallow premise, but it's been a great soundbite for decades and nobody can publicly stray off the reservation.

But it may all be for the best. Hamas will have to moderate it's views or it won't be able to work in the international community, which imperitive since so much of it's revenues come from various governments, NGO's etc., and perhaps only Hamas has a strong enough hand on the ground so that it can play hardball and reign in all the other militant factions. Hope springs eternal.

The other possibility is it's 100% alignment with Iran and the radical Shias of Lebanon, exchanging the patronage of the world for a much smaller group of benefactors.. Removing the cushion of humanitarian interactions will harden everyone's positions.. It might be a disaster. Time will tell.

Oprah & Aniston

2006-02-01T08:34:00.000-08:00

This is amusing look behind the scenes.. You would think those interviews between celebrities are sincere and friendly with a minor accounting for some self-promotion, and I usually feel sympathy for them as these folks live in the eye of the media hurricane 24/7, which I'm sure can be very tiring. But if this is true, it's tacky, maybe even pathetic for both Aniston and Oprah.

Will Oprah blame Jen? Is it possible that Jennifer Aniston was behind Oprah Winfrey's choosing Frey's book in the first place? Star magazine is reporting that Aniston's high-profile appearance on "Oprah" last fall, post-divorce, was made possible only after Oprah agreed to push "A Million Little Pieces," to which Aniston owns the movie rights. Warner Bros. is now apparently reconsidering the idea of turning the book into a film.
(Star via Lowdown, L.A. Times via Post Chronicle)

Alito to be confirmed.

2006-01-30T15:17:00.000-08:00

They just voted for closure. Alito is now going to be voted on in the full senate and he has the votes to make it through. I don't have any respect for the few democrats that jumped ship. I feel they're dinosaurs from a more congenial time, and they've made their party a feeble and pitiful group, unworthy of serious consideration.

With Alito on the SCOTUS the nature of the country will change over time. Roe vs. Wade will fall within the next two years and I expect that they'll soon cement GOP dystopian ideals in stone. Money will be defined as speech. Anti-trust legislation will be de-fanged. Worker's rights will erode and minority rights and privacy rights will shrink. They've finally accomplished what they've worked these last 20 years to do.

Bush will gain enormous authority through a SCOTUS which will back up his every whim and power-grab and he'll leave a 'Unitary Executive' authority ripe for breakdown into dictatorship. People will laugh at this, but democracies break down into dictatorship all the time. The first examples are Greece and Rome, which were both full of people just as smart and aware and apprehensive as people are today. All that is old is new again.

Maybe the Left will gain traction soon. Otherwise we'll go the way of Spain in the 16th century and spin out of control into some sort of quasi-feudal, stratified, sterile society. We've lost the largest battle of the decade. Right now the mullah's are in the majority. Only time will tell if there will be anything left to salvage, or whether the (Northeast) American ideal can survive in politics or will it become a marginalized joke. Continued population growth in the sunbelt and the failure of Northeastern politicians to gain any traction down south means that the D-democratic ideal has to grow independently down there if it is to stay viable. No more JFK's. We'll need a homegrown Texan LBJ, or it's all over.

S

Abramoff, Ford layoffs, Da Vinci Code.

2006-01-22T15:16:00.000-08:00

The problem with the Abramoff scandal.. is that nobody has been arrested and removed from office yet. It's big in the press and many politics-junkies are following it but until people are forced out of Washington, either by prosecutors or by voters, it exists only in the pundit-sphere and not on the ground.

Will this growing balloon of hot air burst open and do it's damage, or will it just float overhead for a few more news cycles and then drift away? .. Or will the GOP figure out how to isolate their cancer to one or two people and pretend that rest of their twisted golumn-like body is robust and healthy? Right now we have the GOP putting together a lobbying 'reform plan' lead by Rick Santorum, a classic fox-guarding-henhouse scenario. . Wait and see.

Update: There are several photos of Bush and Abramoff together, but the Bushies have taken them down from the web and nobody else has them. I keep waiting to see them come to the surface, but no luck so far. The Left drop the ball again! They couldn't take advantage of good luck even as gifts are handed to them on a silver platter.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Other thoughts.

A bottlenose whale about 18 feet long swam up the Thames to London. Concerned British biologists captured it and intended to take it back to the Ocean in a barge, but it weakened and died en route. Sad story.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Ford announced 25,000+ layoffs, on top of the 25K+ layed off in 2002.. This is a very sad day. It would be shallow of me to say that .. most of those effected were in the red states. I don't wish them ill at all, but I hope that bad events might make them reconsider their political alignments and perhaps help to make the case for change.

As it is, large firms and their union-negotiated health plans support vast numbers of less-advantaged family members in the free-for-all American healthcare landscape, amounting to a major handicap on American companies versus competing manufacturers.

Health is a classic collective interest that is recognized in all other 1st world countries, that either the government provide healthcare (to some extent), and/or pool collective health/accident risks, or that Public institutions would use their pooled bargaining power to negotiate with private providers for lower costs for procedures and pharmaceuticals. The Bush/hard right GOP is ideologically opposed to these ideas.

So now we lose 30K jobs, and the 40K additional secondary industry jobs that will go with them, and the American playing field has once again been shown to be inferior.. Nobody wants American workers under these conditions. We are stuck between low-cost wastelands like China and higher-cost but higher-educated European countries. How much would it take to make change come?

It was no help that the Big Three are still dedicated to making huge, wasteful SUV's, which have always been vulnerable to the inevitable gas price shocks and were thus always a poor longterm business foundation. They delayed looking into hybrids for years out of sheer hubris. They dedicated their budgets to higher-end cars when it was clear that they needed more attention to keeping loyalty at the bottom of the product chain.

And, although quality has vastly improved, they still don't have longterm quality to equal Japan. Sure, there are few problems within the first 60K miles, but the Japanese models were reliable out to 200K miles.

It wouldn't be entirely fair to blame Bush, but he is our leader. He had plenty of warning about the coming storm and he did nothing to prevent it. The Ford workers are leaving a high-end blue-collar environment to find themselves in an empty landscape where manufacturing jobs have dissapeared.. There is only WalMart for them, which is a life of poverty and struggle. I hope to hell things improve.
++++++++++++++
Tom Hanks is starring in the upcoming film of the Da Vinci Code.

I don't have anything against religious movies per say, but this one has no factual basis. It's playing on people's deeply held beliefs and mixing them in with unsubstantiated fictional garbage. I'm not a Christian so my opinion is moot, but if I were I'd be peeved by this invasion of BS, working to capitalize on and then to undermine my beliefs and redirect the faithful away from the message and onto a false trail of events that leads nowhere.

First it's OK with fictional-history bullshit, effectively turning Jesus into something akin the the Mummy or Dracula - just another building block for the production of crap-cinema.

The deeper flaw here is that.. Jesus was a man. It was his message that made him divine - not the flesh. Fixating on the bloodline fetishizes his time on earth and turns him from something truly luminous and radiant in a spiritual sense (if you're a believer), into a commodity for lesser people to fight and scheme over, down through the ages. It demeans the original material to attach it in this way to the body.

So there! Damnit!

New Thoughts.

2006-01-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

Right now the Democratic senators are pondering whether they should filibuster and it appears unlikely. The national press have given them a vote of 'no confidence' and expect them to cave, and so do I. With 45 senators they have a margin of 5 and two of them have already said they'll vote against Alito, but not for a fillibuster, so they're purposely fighting with the gloves on against corrupt counterparts who have cut them out of all the negotiating processes that used to be the standard of courtesy in congress.

I'm thinking one thing. 'Stockholm Syndrome'.
What do these senators think this sort of polite quasi-opposition gains them? These are the tactics of appeasement and failure. The Congress under the Bush GOP has devolved into a parliament with no substantive bipartisan tendencies and the democrats must vote together as a block or they are worse than useless. One can make a good argument that they're not a legitimate opposition party if they continue to splinter and allow themselves to be pushed around and marginalized this way.

Part of this might be that they're intimidated by the GOP, which talks right past them, puts words in their mouths and turns them into straw-men and monsters for the Rush Limbaugh crowd. They've been threatened with the Nuclear Option where the GOP would remove the filibuster. It's a major threat, but they're already losing on every vote. Alito will be on the court for decades, which is unacceptable. They have nothing real to lose and should make a stand.

As it is they've done a curious job of taking a congress with a <40% approval rating, with a huge Republican corruption scandal exploding across the aisle, and failed to exploit it. They're charisma as a group is so lukewarm that even their fervent supporters are continually looking around for new leaders.

I did not support Dean in 2004 as I thought he was too new to politics and possibly too abrasive, but I may have been wrong. Dean had fire in the belly and lacked the complacence of years working on the inside. Basically, the message of a politician isn't about the details, it's about hope, and to a lesser extent, fear. Kerry failed to articulate anything except that he wasn't Bush and thus imploded on the launchpad.

Until there is someone who can talk in the language of the South, who can figure out how to pin the Bush group down on their mealy-mouthed corruption and manipulation, we are lost. Many of the Democrats are either too independent-minded, or they're half-hearted in their opposition, that the party would be better off casting them loose. We Need New Blood. Now.

Ariel Sharon, etc.

2006-01-13T14:07:00.000-08:00

Regardless of whether he lives, Sharon's recent stroke has taken him out of Israeli politics. It's curious that the whole world sees him as a fallen peacemaker after so many years of him playing the hard-right villian. Palestinians have for decades seen him as one of their greatest antagonists and as a major war criminal, and many were quoted recently as saying this was far too peaceful an end for him. He was a very hard, tough man.

But he did uproot those abominable Gaza settlements and there is nobody else with his stature on the playing field. His competitor in Likud, Netenyahu, doesn't want peace. He's a power-hungry ogre of a man and the electorate is leery of him. But who else is there? Right now no politician on either side of the conflict has enough broad support to be to negotiate, sign and maintain a peace agreement. So is looks like all that is old is new again.

Just before his stroke Sharon split away from the Likud to form a more centrist party. Hopefully this new entity will hold together and keep the far right factions out of the government. Otherwise the better parts of Sharon's legacy will be short-lived. He was very fat and very old. I guess this was inevitable.

In other news, the race is on in the House to see who will replace Tom Delay. The question is whether the new leader will be a Delay-acolyte, or will the more honest faction of the GOP take the reins.

Right now it's between Roy Blunt, Delay's right-hand-man, and John Boehner, a more moderate voice. If Blunt succeeds the Abramoff debacle will have failed to help the country. We will only have a new cockswain as team GOP rows us toward the waterfall. Or a new head wolf as the GOP pack works around the carcass of the Federal government. Etc.

Blunt will probably win. The House has few moderates. It's bad to the bone and members will surely want their gravy train K-street mechanism to continue. This is a many-headed serpent and one scandal, no matter how large, is unlikely to change the direction of the party. The ship has a lot of momentum and it will take years and at least one election cycle to turn course.

I expect they're only irked that they got caught by someone with authority to indict and that the media has broken off its leash and has run with the story. Now of course they say they had no idea all the lobbyist moneys were bribes. The whole process is corrupt, but the GOP house will pretend that this is a single incident, put on a brave face and face the heat, and then go back to the trough as soon as the camera lights turn away.

Where are the democrats? Where Where Where?

Poker Adventure.

2006-01-13T07:41:00.000-08:00

Sharon gave me a class at Cambridge Center for Adult Education for 8 Wednesdays in Texas Hold-Em, the poker variation that currently has enjoyed a revival and several popular cable shows with various celebrities. It's an enjoyable social fad which she thought I would enjoy.

I arrived at their classroom complex in an old wooden mansion in Harvard Square a couple of minutes late and met with the group of seven and our leader, who were already going through brief introductions. India, our instructor, is a slight, high-strung vibrant 60-year old redhead who seemed to have dedicated herself to poker for perhaps a decade, with stories about trips to Foxwoods and a good sense of jargon and folklore.

She enjoyed the teaching process and looked at us collectively as a plant she would tend to until if flourished. A recent lifestyle column on poker from the WSJ had featured her class, which brought a little spotlight to the class and a good vibe. We sat together in the 2nd floor master's bedroom/classroom around an antique oval dinner table with quiet attention and interest. Across the hallway a knitting class was being held.

First she passed around a worksheet with a list of SAT-style poker lingo questions to see our level of familiarity, which for me was virtually nil. Only one person in the class had ever played cards for money. The rest of us, a varied collection of guys in our 30's - 40's, were there on a lark. The next step was to walk through the range of hands and how to 'read the board' to quickly pick out our best options. From there we would go through the game rituals, who deals, how the cards are dealt and how and when to bet our chips - something one could take a Ph.D in but which has a simple starting-point.

It will take some practice. India was cheerful and upbeat and as a group we caught on fast. Most of us had learned 5-card draw or 7-card stud while growing up, which were a good foundation. By about halfway through the 1.5 hr class she had passed out plastic poker chips and we were off and running, playing under her supervision. We finished after about 10 hands played, with plans to take up where we left off next week.

I would say it wasn't yet a warm group as we are still a group of strangers but is promises to be a pleasant class which will teach an enjoyable pastime. Now I'll know how to gamble! :)

Alito

2006-01-10T14:02:00.000-08:00

The democrats have to fight Alito. Otherwise they have no identity and should be replaced by others with some spine.

There is the argument that if Bush won the election he gets to put his man in there, but that's defeatist. If we stand together they can filibuster this. Alito is not a mainstream candidate who sees personal suffering and rules on the side of empathy for the downtrodden. This is the establishment man in the worst sense.

I work on the theory that anyone chosen by Bush is either corrupt or incompetent or has an ideology which will greatly benefit Bush in his voracious lust for power but who is blind to Bush's faults. This probably describes Alito. I don't trust him.

This doesn't have anything to do with abortion, although I'm pro-choice. It has to do with protection of workers' and personal rights and his automatic deference to authority - that is, Bush. He's virtually bred to tip the balance of power in favor of the executive at the federal level, while simultaneously weakening the federal government vs. states rights. He'll break the country into pieces over time.

So far he's humble and well-spoken, if not as eloquent as Roberts was a couple of months ago. He's said all the right things, but it's all a Kabuki act where of course he says he cannot answer any direct question on where he will take the country and everyone knows that nothing he says now will be binding after he's installed. He says he respects the law but at this level he will now be the source of law so this position is meaningless. It's only meant to deflect inquiry.

I don't believe that the American people en large, if it were explained to them in detail, would agree with his positions. I think he will be confirmed and then the public, even in the Southern states, will be convulsed and infuriated when some of his more far-out opinions come down. Wait and see. With bipartisanship at an all-time-low, there should be some way to reign in dim-witted compromisers. This vote is an acid-test. If Lieberman strays, throw him out of the party.

Update: Alito's wife burst into tears as Ted Kennedy grilled her husband on Wednesday. I'm sure it was authentic, but it was a completely irrelevant bit of sappy theater and is being played up in the Right-wing Press. There doesn't appear to be a smoking gun and the democrats don't seem able to justify a filibuster without one, so the conventional wisdom is that Alito will be confirmed.

This is ridiculous. Nobody says this guy is unqualified per say. He deserves to be Borked because his views are outside the mainstream - that's enough. As it is the Democratic senators represent a larger population than the GOP, which has over a dozen members from the empty midwest. So notwithstanding the vaguaries of representative government, they have every right and reason to bork this guy. If only they had the nerve.

Update2: Lieberman says if he loses the Democratic primary in CT he will run as an independent. This would split the vote on the Left and almost guarantee a GOP win. It's the story of Solomon. If you don't choose (me), I will split the baby in two.. It's clear now that Joe's job is more important to him than Democratic party ideals or approval. This from such a nice Jewish mensch. sigh.

Scrubs is Done. ER also?

2006-01-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

I love Scrubs. I thought for years it was underrated. They were able to pull off a light, whimsical humor-style which takes a lot of imagination and nimble, clever writing. It's a wonderful escapist sitcom.

But it was a show about young students becoming doctors, and now that it's been four years it feels like they're fully fledged and it's time for them to face life changes and move on with their lives.

Also it feels like all the relationships in the show have been fully explored and are very comfortable in a stagnant way, where nothing ever changes and all the gender and heirarchical roles have been assigned long ago. The territory of office and gender politics has been passed over a hundred times and the boundaries have been clearly marked. It's light comedy. There's nowhere to go here.

And then, it was off the air for a while so the audience has put it out of our minds' eye, superseded by other shows.

So basically it's on it's last legs and has no future. The reason it's back on is because none of the replacement shows in the bullpen are looking very promising. Still I'm sure the creators are thrilled, as they've hit the magic 100 episode mark and will now have a more attractive package for syndication.

The only hope is for them to 1) Replace one or two major characters, and 2) Move the characters' lives forward a bit. They should get married and have children. They should go out and explore other locations, like bars or the gym or the characters' parents. etc. Even this will probably not keep this show alive, but it would save the ratings for the last few episodes.

ER is the best-written drama on the air, and has continually renewed itself with new characters for 10 years. I fully expect it will stay alive as the preeminent prime-time adult soap of the last two decades.

James Moore - Banned from flights in the US.

2006-01-05T07:23:00.000-08:00

James Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential and other books. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

The TSA has put him on a terrorist watch-list which effectively forbids him from flying anywhere in the country. Worse, he can't find out how he got on this list or how to get off of it. He doesn't appear to have any rights in this regard at all under the Patriot Act.. It's a very real form of government harassment by GOP loyalists which should absolutely not be tolerated, because if it is, it will surely spread and become commonplace. The democrats in congress should investigate this immediately and if they're given a load of 'state secret-can't tell you' bullshit, then they should make this a major campaign issue. This is a concrete example of abuse of authority and intimidation.

In Other news,

Ariel Sharon has had a massive stroke. He is not expected to survive, and if he does he will no longer be a presence in Isreali politics.

John Stewart will host the Academy Awards

12 of 13 coal miners in WV have perished.

Russia briefly turned off the gas to Ukraine, but Ukraine had some negotiating power because a pipeline traversed the country, supplying gas to Europe. I guess market energy prices are what being a soveriegn nation is all about.

There was a major, very unpopular transit strike in NYC. It had virtually no public support and was called off before Bloomberg fired them all. Memorable times.

The Abramoff-lobbyist scandal is exploding, as Jack is about to squeal to the Feds. Hmm..
I expect large parts of the press will work hard to turn this into a bipartisan event.
Unfortunately I think this kind of bribery is conmonplace and Abramoff was just the most brazen. Time will tell. It's bad press and an unfortunate curiousity that both he and Andy Fastow of Enron are practicing orthodox Jews.

Al Franken has moved his show to Minneappolis, Minnesota.
I expect he'll run for senate in 08.

Beloved actress Wendy Joe Sperber passed away last month. I hadn't seen the news.

The entire paper from the South Korean genetic engineers who had supposedly cloned customized stem-cells for disease treatment, possibly the largest scientific event of 2005 and a sure Nobel prize-winner, has been thrown out as fraud.
This guy surely must have known that other research teams all over the world would immediately try to duplicate their work and thus would quickly invalidate it with the backlash ruining their careers. This story has a touch of mental illness about it.

Gwyneth Paltrow is expecting her second child.

The evolution-in-the-classroom debate in Pennsylvania has ended, with the ID'ers being decisively rejected. What a shame - all they wanted was the freedom to repeatedly tell us their opinion until we break down and agree with them.

David Lee Roth is replacing Howard this week.
So far it's really bad - almost unlistenable.
Maybe he'll improve.

Slow Implosion at the NYT.

2006-01-03T08:55:00.000-08:00

Right now the NYT is ailing. It's the premier left-of-center paper in the country, but it's under assault from many directions and if trends continue it will become irrelevant. The locus of intense political discussion has migrated from the newsroom into the Blogosphere, a little-or-no-revenue environment which is a barren desert for them.

They could maintain their position as a shaper of national opinion by allowing free access as a loss-leader the way many other newspapers have done, but they've decided it's a money-losing game and have recently put up firewalls around their precious editorial and Op-ed content. That's their right, but their doppleganger the WSJ has continued to give it away for free, so they've effectively abandoned the public space to their often-malignant adversary on the Right and have become an ivory castle where their columnists are unavailable to most people.

Their top people will soon decamp to greener pastures where they can get back into the game and talent will be harder to accumulate and keep in the future - why write for the Greatest Newspaper nobody reads?

The LA Times and the Washington Post are having similar problems, but since they are also local papers they have some considerable footprint to fall back on. The NYT refuses to put funnies in there. It aims almost exclusively at an elite audience. But only about 5% of the population has any interest in their product and since it's eclipsed in the business arena by the WSJ, only news-junkies really have a priority to buy it every day. They have economies of scale on their side as a national organization, but it might not be enough.

Meanwhile the far-left has become very wary of the paper since their lack of skepticism over the WMD claims before the invasion of Iraq, and last year Jason Blair showed that the paper was prone to creative-writing parasites. And then there is the ongoing assault from the Right in an atmosphere increasingly partisan and hostile, where provable facts on the ground count for less over time. Times are tough.

It's still an excellent paper, and if I were a better person I'd read it every day, but I'm not, and I'm average in this regard, which does not bode well for them. They have to regenerate the Gravitas that they've lost from recent scandals, re-engage with the general public and find a way to succeed or they may be a slowing, sinking ship. There are hard days ahead.

Trick Words

2005-12-30T15:02:00.000-08:00

Words that have a wide range of meanings, which amount to grey areas in which Bush and others have manipulated the public. I will hereby work myself into a furious lather over these six key words below. Enjoy.

1) "War"
In the past when we were clearly at war there was a draft. 10 million people were in uniform in WWII and 400,00 were killed when the country was less than half as populous as it is now . During Korea and Vietnam the deployed armies had hundreds of thousands and over 50,000 were killed.

Iraq isn't really a war. We're nowhere near fully mobilized. Iraq is a large, long-term police action. Those who blab that we're at war as an excuse for everything are only trying to intimidate and browbeat the democrats. It's worked so far.

From a psychological point of view one needs an enemy to define oneself, so just as we were Americans because we stood against Soviet Communism and their fellow travelers, now we are defined as standing against terrorism - a markedly more ambiguous enemy, a string-puppet in the distance, riveting our gaze so that we are oblivious to our great leaders' hand up our collective tush, so to speak.

2) "Class Warfare"
Bush said this in 2002 when the Democrats were trying to curb his enormous give-aways to the rich.
This has been polled as something that is generally distasteful to Americans. But Bush's use of it was telling. In his usage, the underlying presumption was: There ARE classes in America and you people in the lower class should know your place and not attack your betters'. This is fundamentally different than the premise I thought America was built on - Everyone is equal before the law and we should work towards classless society/meritocracy. I think we're going more the direction of Feudalism.

3) "Freedom"
Freedom is the ying to Responsibility's yang. Neither stands alone - they each require the other for context. Bush's version of Freedom has no clear definition or understood limitations. It's an absolute good which doesn't respect or involve it's effect on society.

For example, Freedom is largely about ownership and one's ability to fully use one's assets without government interference or interaction. But ownership doesn't exist in a vacuum. Nobody fully 'owns' their property because nobody can defend their property from outside influence or attack without society, police, environmental rules, and the military. Ownership requires currency and monetary oversite for transactions to take place. Many interlocked institutions are required. Bush never seems to understand this. I think his version of freedom is not necessarily the freedom to reach for greatness, which requires education and nurturing and money, as much as it i the freedom to break away from obligations, like all the treaties he threw out when he came to office.
Or freedom could mean the promotion of Democracy, but Democracy, like a 1 or 2-legged stool, has many fine details and catch-22's which require close attention, and at worst it can be a shell game designed to give legitimacy to regimes which loot and do great damage to people. So it's not a clear word at all.

4) "Terrorism"
Terrorism is defined as attacks on civilians. It's an uncivilized behavior and, depending on the circumstance, deserves no mercy (after a fair trial). Throw away the key on those people.
Attacks on soldiers are by definition, NOT terrorism. They're insurgents or guerillas or dead-enders or a freedom-fighters or a dozen other phrases, but not terrorists.
This is an obvious grey-area and the media has been undecided about it, but the Bushy's are always trying to use the harshest language possible.

Similarly, the Bushy's use events in other countries to twist Americans view of 'terrorism'. The prime example is Israel. A bomber in downtown Tel Aviv is not necessarily people who would attack New Jersey. To pretend that they are is a simplified description of the world which coopts Americans' support to hundreds of conflicts which we may have no reasonable participation in. We become blind sheep. We are being taught who to fear (everyone in the Middle East), We're forced into our leader's arms. Bush's embrace. Comfy.

5) "Pro Life vs. Pro Choice."
So one side of the debate uses one hot-button word and the other uses the counterpart. This is to be expected, but it obscures the key question: When does life begin?
Gestation is 9 months. A child has no chance whatsoever of living outside the body before 6+ month. It will not have any real thought process until it is about 1 years old, and won't be fully sentient until it is perhaps 10. At 13 it's bar-mitzvah'd.

The other part of this question is, NOT 'when is this pregnancy a real child' - because there is nothing in a fetus except flesh. It has no soul nor anything like an active mind at this stage of life. The question then becomes, when is this child 'inevitable', such that one has a responsibility to see it's life to completion? I don't think this counts as a solid argument in the first two trimesters, but I can understand that by the 3rd there is enough uncertainty for people to want to support the would-be child, which is of course, the future in it's purest sense - it is an un-alloyed Good which is precious. But I think those who support 'life' on the basis that this child has emotion or pain, or is already entitled to protection, are imagining a 'soul' in a piece of baby-shaped flesh and thereby taking freedoms away from the mother. I'm Agin' it. Pro-choice all the way.

A related argument is this ongoing flap about stem-cells. Sure, one could pretend that the embryo's are real children, but that ignores the fact that they need a woman to gestate and become real babies. Pretending that these frozen testtubes are babies is an indirect slight on women, who hold the final say on this. They're devaluing the living to give precedence to the theoretically/future living - but currently inanimate.

Without willing women to deliver those babies their argument is demonstrably weak and naive. It misrepresents the situation with these fetuses and thus creates a false argument for either 1) forbidding invitro fertilization - which they have not attempted because they know it will backfire, or 2) preventing stem-cell research.

6) "Death Tax"
You're not taxed after you die. You're gone. You're interests cannot be protected because.. you no longer exist. You may still have legal rights through estate or trust mechanism, but that's a legal fiction. In reality you're in heavan or elsewhere, certainly not nearby.

The 'death tax' has nothing to do with you the taxpayer - you are not cheated or effected in any way. These taxes have only to do with your heirs, who are certainly rich, as anyone with less than $4M doesn't have anything to worry about. In this last moment of your life, their fury at the guvmin't will reach it's crescendo. How put upon they are! All talk of this in congress is a ruse, and a give-away to the rich. It is impossible to pretend otherwise.

One could make an argument that it is unfair, but that's basically a 'screw the government' debate where wealthy people pretend that they built their empire without any help from anyone anywhere, and they deserve their own sovereign financial castles and family estates in perpetuity without ever having to earn it individually. This isn't success. It's defending the right of the super-wealthy to spoil one's ancestors to the 100th generation. This is called Feudalism. It' generally not considered a step forward.

The Last Enron deal?

2005-12-29T13:10:00.000-08:00

Mr. Causey has copped a plea. So now everyone but Skilling and Lay have recieved a deal of one sort or another.

I know they have to find out where all the buried bodies are, but with a company with 15,000+ employees and easily 100+ people with detailed knowledge or participation in the scam, they should have kept more than just two guys directly in the legal crosshairs.

The Real Story on Iraq.

2005-12-27T14:19:00.000-08:00

I always felt there was more to the story of our invasion of Iraq. I had supposed it was to control their oil, but that only half makes sense as the market usually prevents nations from hoarding or cutting off supplies to anyone.

Even Israel has plenty of oil. They have had to buy through middlemen to circumvent the Arab embargo but this has never caused them any great harm. This may change as demand increases and supply stagnates, but the currency issue addressed here is mostly ignored by the mainstream media and is perhaps more of a ticking timebomb than the coming oil supply shocks alone.

Because every nation in the world uses American dollars to buy oil on the open market, the U.S. federal reserve, unlike any other entity in the world, has had an unlimited ability to float our national debt. Everyone else must accumulate dollars to use to buy oil, which inflates the value of the dollar and gives us a market to 'sell' them to seperate and apart from currency exchange necessary for normal commodities trade.

These dollars in foreign banks amount to a combined trillion+$ loan to the U.S. government at a low or 0% rate of return. A large part of this currency circulation stays permanently outside of the US, so we effectively get their material wealth funneled into the US for nothing but printed paper. And this practice has continued for decades.

So now we effectively owe so much that we own the bank. But with the emergence of the Euro over the last 5 years we will soon lose the power to maintain this ongoing petrocurrency monopoly. This is surely one of the reasons that the Europeans went forward with a combined currency. They've reached a critical combined mass. OPEC nations continue with this practice is force of habit and inertia in world financial markets and now with this war in Iraq, a not-so-subtle hint that the US military will not take kindly to their departure from our currency camp.

The U.S. thereby controls the world because international banks are unable to 'call in the debt' for the U.S. Federal Reserve. The system has been arranged in our favor since Bretton Woods after WWII, but not for much longer. Iraq's hostilities with the US and their willingness to take Euro's for oil payments was probably the key point which made war unavoidable, but threats and force can only succeed in the short term.

We do not want to be South Korea or Argentina. We want to continue to be 'too large to crash', but this bubble won't last forever. In the last 5 years with Bush and the GOP in control, we've lost our longterm financial stability and eventually world financiers will be able to say no to us, and they'll have better options available. Hopefully this will occur gradually without a 'hard landing', but within 10+ years, America will go from the richest country in the world to being one of the top handful, and within 30 years we might be eclipsed by China.

The 8,000 soldiers who will die and 100,000 who will be injured in Iraq are a futile act of resistence against world economic trends instead of working to be truly competitive. When the bubble bursts I hope people find Dick Cheney in his lair and tar and feather him.

Peace out.

Great Quotes

2005-12-26T06:39:00.000-08:00

"I'm very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch." --Woody Allen

"You know, I could run for governor but I'm basically a media creation. I've never done anything. I've worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But that's not the kind of profile you have to have to get elected to public office."
-- George W. Bush, 1989

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-- George W. Bush, August 5, 2004

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
--Hawthorne

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom profit that loses.
—Shirley Chisholm, who died 1-Jan-05

‘Without alienation, there can be no politics.’
—Arthur Miller, who died10-Feb-05

‘America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.’
—Hunter S. Thompson, who died 20-Feb-05

‘Me, I’m good at nothing but walking on the set with a pretty dress.’
—Sandra Dee, who died 20-Feb-05

‘War is a defeat for humanity.’
—Pope John Paul II, who died 2-Apr-05

‘There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever… money, for instance, or war.’
—Saul Bellow, who died 5-Apr-05

‘Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture. Marriage meant the taking was to extend in time, to be not only use of but possession of, or ownership.’
—Andrea Dworkin, who died 9-Apr-05

‘Abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy.’
—Edward Heath, who died 17-Jul-05

‘Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.’
—William C. Westmoreland, who died 18-Jul-05

‘I’m not tired of [beam me up Scotty] at all. Good gracious, it’s been said to me for just about 31 years. It’s been said to me at 70 miles an hour across four lanes on the freeway. I hear it from just about everybody. It’s been fun.’
—James Doohan, who died 20-Jul-05

‘The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.'
—Simon Wiesenthal, who died 20-Sep-05

‘There’s a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at.’
—Richard Pryor, who died 10-Dec-05

Writing in her February 23 column for Universal Press Syndicate, Coulter observed, among other things, that Guckert/Gannon was a better reporter than The New York Times' Maureen Dowd and his "only offense is that he may be gay." Nothing unexpected there, but Coulter also wrote: "Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president." (removed out by her editors, but still on her r website).
—Ann Coulter, very much alive.

"Liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole,"
—Column Title, — Ann Coulter January 6, 2005.

"This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law. Sometimes hard, sometimes unpleasant, this path relies on truth, justice and the rigorous application of the principle that no man is above the law. Now, the other road is the path of least resistance. This is where we start making exceptions to our laws based on poll numbers and spin control. This is when we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us, when we ignore the facts in order to cover up the truth. No man is above the law, and no man is below the law. That's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country."
—Tom Delay, commenting on the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.
Does he even know he has a double standard here?

"Blood will tell, as the old saying goes: [Mark "Deep Throat" Felt's] posterity is now dragging out his old body and putting it on display to make money. (Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?) And it gets worse: it's been reported that Mark Felt is at least part Jewish. The reason this is worse is that at the same time that Mark Felt was betraying Richard Nixon, Nixon was saving Eretz Israel. It is a terrifying chapter in betrayal and ingratitude. If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment's shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it."
—Ben Stein, American Spectator.

Walmart - Stung.

2005-12-25T08:34:00.000-08:00

This is very good news as it sets a precedent. There are very few laws protecting people at the bottom these days and the fact that Mao-Mart couldn't follow this one shouldn't go un-noticed by our supposed public servants in Washington. Spine would be appreciated. If the Walton family had to pay the fine directly, or were publicly shamed for this sort of thing or had to spent some time in jail it would be a better story still, but that is too much to ask for.

In other news, Bush ignoring the FISA court has become a growing story in the major media. It's potentially a Nixon-sized constitutional crisis and a real grounds for impeachment. It's here where the president lets down the curtain and shows the mainstream his true nature - the cruel, deceitful power-hungry face he shows to the left side of the aisle every day. It begs the question: Will congress be pull the trigger on Bush, or will they be intimidated? Spine. Stones. Sicilians. Please. We need Cheney in the White House.. ... Yeah! ... .. .

I expect the people on the Right have some anxiety and can sense that the ice beneath their feet is becoming quite thin. When the public changes its mind against Bush it will be a sea change and they will not stay in office. Will it take a depression for them to be shamed and discredited? We'll see.

Of course, god forbid the stormtroopers actually reconsider their views and question their emperor's actions. Hope springs eternal. We're back to the races in 2006.

Happy Festivus!

2005-12-23T08:01:00.000-08:00

History of Festivus
Many Christmas's ago, Frank Costanza went to buy a doll for his son. He went to reach for it because it was the last one, but so did another man and as Frank rained blows upon him, he thought there could be another way. The doll was destroyed, but out of that, a new holiday was born. He named it Festivus.

Festivus takes place during the last few weeks in December, families and friends gather at the dinner table and have "The Airing of Grievances". Durning this time, family and friends share all the ways they have disappointed each other during the past year.

After the Airing of Grievances, the "Feats of Strength" takes place. This is where the head of the household tests his/her strength with another friend or family member. The great honour is given out to a different person each year. Kramer was given the honor but passed it to George Costanza as he had an appointment. You can turn down a challenge if you have an appointment. Festivus is not over until the head of the household is pinned.

The Festivus Pole, is not a tree. It is a metal pole with no decorations. Frank Costanza believes that tinsel is very distracting. The pole is tall and silver.

Airing of Grievances
No Festivus is complete without the Airing of Grievances. Use the sheet below to make sure you have all your grievances listed. List of Grievances Worksheet

Festivus Fruitcake
The Festivus Fruitcake is a yearly tradition. Start yours today! Use the tag below to make sure your victim....I mean recipient is aware of the "tradition". Festivus Fruitcake Tag

Feats of Strength
You can't end Festivus without the Feats of Strength. Get the challenge card here. Official Challenge Card

Festivus Greeting Cards
To spread the Festivus joy, use the following document to create Festivus greeting cards. If you print them two to a page they are the perfect size. Official Festivus Greeting Cards
__________________________

Festivus pokes a hole in sanctimonious Christmas-blarney and all the obeyance to ritual and intentional self-hypnosis theirin. And then it takes a 2nd poke at forced family celebrations which often tweak people if their mood isn't as jolly that which is called for by the season. It's ridiculous - which is itself one of life's more inexplicable, sublime pleasures.

2005-12-21T05:05:00.000-08:00

Judith Miller - In the eye of the storm.

2005-12-19T15:49:00.000-08:00

Judith Miller.

The Left Wing Establishment is furious with her.
As the leading journalist of the leading Establishment Left-Leaning newspaper, when she bought in to the the Iraqi WMD argument back in 2002-2003, the Anti-War movement was decimated. Without the NYT to argue the case against war they had no solid mainstream platforms on their side other than fringe periodicals like Harpers and The Atlantic. The great mass of center-leaning Left had no basis to oppose the war, and so it came. We've lost 2,200 soldiers so far with perhaps 25,000 seriously wounded, which would be acceptable except that there is no light yet at end to this tunnel. It could yet be a 20-year disaster in progress.

But can anyone really blame this woman? Her defense was that she had a 20+ year record at the NYT and had won many awards, and she'd been right 99% of the time. That doesn't really wash when the 1% are the stories which caused such fantastic catastrophe, but that's her position. She also said there was an orchestrated plan to give her multiple false sources for her articles and create an 'echo chamber' between many periodicals, thereby eliminate her objective reporting capability and turning her into a stenographer for the defense department. And she's right about this. It's true. She was too close to her sources and they played her like a fiddle.

But what else could she do? How does one get independent sources about WMD's in Iraq? The U.S. has a $40B intelligence community which apparently succumbed to GroupThink and fantasies about WMD's. Whether this was a deliberate conspiracy by Cheney and friends, is open to debate - but the NYT, with a combined budget of perhaps $300M per year, doesn't have any independent way to investigate Iraq. Nobody did. The Press is completely inadequate and incompetent for this kind of task, and even if it did it's low budget would prejudice the reporters and everyone else to assuming the CIA's information was more valid. $40B to journalists would be like working stiffs, walking out of your old, sagging wooden house to gaze up at the 200 story glass skyscraper nearby. . it's easy to lose perspective. So J. Miller was stuck between a rock and a hard place. The furious Left would have her somehow disqualify all the multiple false sources that the administration sent to her, effectively asking for a superhuman level of wisdom intelligence on her part.

It was impossible.
It didn't happen.
Now we have war without end.

Don't blame the middleman.
Look at Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They're the ones who broke the system.
Judith Miller's career is a casualty of their dishonest game.

Of course later she proved she was far too close to her sources by going to jail for Scooter Libby, who had effectively given her a poison pill and taken advantage of their relationship in the Bush Team's vendetta agains Valerie Plame. She was too dim to realize she was being exploited by these people and valued her promise to Libby more highly than her relationship to her editors, and also the safety and welfare of the American Public.

She was protecting someone who was using her services to commit treason. It was very poor judgement on her part - a classic case of being too close to the trees to see the forest. But she paid the price - she's no longer at the NYT. She's now a liability, and she'll finish out her career as a novelist or nonfiction book author.

The moral of the story. Judith Miller deserves pity as much as scorn.

"The Constitution is Just a Goddamned Piece of Paper."

2005-12-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

Bush supposedly said this during a meeting with Congressional leaders last month about renewal of the USA Patriot Act. It says a lot, but this story is (left) is more troubling.

It begs the question: Why even bother having laws? Why vote for representatives who debate endlessly in Congress if Bush is allowed to just circumvent everything and allow spying on anybody, anytime without even a pretense of following through on the letter of the law?

It reduces the political dialogue and hairsplitting on talkshows and deliberations on the floor of the house & senate to a farce. He doesn't respect anyone - not the Democrats and certainly not the American people. He's playing us for chumps.

Bush started this back in 2002 when his popularity was still in the 80's, and one can make an argument that this was acceptable for a couple of months before the Patriot Act freed the government to spy to it's heart's content with just a figleaf of supervision. But after that, this was really a treasonous act and Bush and friends should absolutely be impeached for it.

There was a strong mechanism in place to allow these operation while protecting civil liberties. The secret FISA court process set up during the late 1970's, which Bush was ostensibly rebelling against, had ruled in favor of the government 99.9% of the time. They were denied the right to monitor 'suspects' just 5 times out of 19,000 requests. There were even provisions to get judicial permission 72 hours after starting the wiretap to avoid potential delay.

So they can complain about having to protect the secrecy of investigations, etc. but their argument is complete bullshit. This is a brazen power-grab of the Bush administration, taking authority out of the hands of the Judiciary and nullifying a constitutional Check to the Executive Branch.

They will say 'we've endangered America by alerting terrorists to our eavesdropping' - which is also bullshit. It assumes that if they'd gone through due process, someone on or near the secret FISA court would have alerted the enemy .. So we have lost our fundamental civil liberty, or even the right to judicial oversite .. just in case a terrorist spy somewhere on or near the secret Federal Court? It's absolutely unbelievable. These people are scoundrels.

It's hard to be a democrat these days. If the they had any stones at all they'd at least file a motion to investigate. They've held their fire because they know they'd be outvoted in committee, so the motion would fail, but at least they'd make a statement of where they stand on the rule of Law.

The Democrats and the NYT supposedly knew about this all along. If they were smart they would have dropped this bomb before the elections last year when it could have made a difference.. Why they didn't? The administration asked them not to.. I will never understand this. No stones. None.

The GOP hacks have also said in defense of all this treachery: 9/11! 9/11!! 9/11!!! 9/11!!!! 9/11!!!!! .

To which I say - A nation of sheep will surely beget a government of wolves.
We will reap the whirlwind for every month these terrible people cling to office.

Peace Out.

________________________________________________________

I have very mixed feelings about Colin Powell, but now it's clear his true nature is unknowable and untrustworthy and he has become the calming, friendly face of Bush. It's a tragedy. I only hope this will discredit him and he can retire far away from public life.

_______________________________________

Update: (12/29)
Another poison-pill detail here that sounds curiously similar to the Bushy's manipulation of journalists on WMD's before Iraq: They told congressional leaders and then swore them to secrecy. So they couldn't air their disagreement to the press or anyone else.

They were coopted by this abuse of the legal authority to enforce secrecy in order to give the administration a figleaf of pretending to follow the law, but actually barring congress or the judiciary from any oversight role. If they squawked to the press they'd be arrested. These people are monsters. Bush is a fiend and should be impeached.

And in another funny detail, the justice Dept. is now investigating who leaked the program to the NYT. So it's an impeachable offense, but they're going to prosecute the whistleblower. Dandy. Whoever went to the press is a genuine hero, but since the Democrats have no stones and probably won't have any means to defend him, the Bushy's will probably destroy that person to make their point. Terrific. Wait and see.

Howard's End

2005-12-16T12:30:00.000-08:00

Howard has left us to go on a new life-adventure at Sirius Satellite Radio. He will lose perhaps 4/5ths of his following, but in exchange he'll now own two channels where he can let loose all the course language he can imagine. Without boundaries it might become too harsh and unlistenable, but Howard’s depravity was never hateful or truly harmful; he just had a fascination with the body and the human condition which irked the sensors.

That said, the fart jokes have become tired and stagnant over the years. He’s been hemmed in by FCC sanctions. His program is mature in the sense that it's reached it's fullest potential, with the nation of pervs and juveniles types he's long ruled was just treading water. So now he's gone and has taken his big circus with him to this new place where he thinks it can grow and prosper into something new.

I wish he hadn't left us, not just because I'll miss him, which I will, but because he has such a powerful voice and presence which he could use for Good if he only wanted to. He's leaving the mainstream for a premium-channel ghetto, and the causes that he supported, directly and indirectly, will suffer from his absence. Nobody had his stature in the fight against intimidation and censorship by the FCC. Howard’s support for Kerry in 2004 certainly effected tens of thousands of votes.

Howard is a natural leader. He could have gone the route of Jerry Springer or Al Franken who have used their charisma to educate and enlighten and fight the corruption and stupidity in the system. But instead he sees himself as just a pure entertainer. He's abandoned the fight. I understand, but I'm dissapointed nonetheless. It's his choice.. He'll be replaced by someone on a tight leash and with no opinions, more empty morning show pablum for the masses.

I think he'll regret this. Over next few years he'll shrink and may eventually dissapear. He'll be a has-been and a living legend / tragic story for a while. Perhaps in 5 years the landscape will have changed and Sirius will be a profitable juggernaut and he'll re-emerge into the mainstream. But I doubt it will reach critical mass. We’ll see.

Syriana - Review

2005-12-16T08:04:00.000-08:00

I was mesmerized watching this movie. I've never seen a film which assumed such a high level of comprehension by its audience - so high in fact that some parts were barely understandable for long periods. The four multi-layered intertwined plots did eventually come together in a moving crescendo and in the last moment the film felt very solid and barren and hot and dry, with its unbearable truth revealed which made the world a much uglier and less hopeful place.

But there were flaws in the details which I thought made this - supposedly a realistic story - impossible. This work has great breadth and value, but I felt I was being given a worldview which doesn't quite jibe.

-Spoiler Alert-

Bob is a CIA handler. He's a trusted man with a lifetime career on the inside. I don't believe that his superiors would circle the wagons against him to shield themselves the way it's described in the movie, and if they did do so, it would be 'for show', and he'd be given a new identity with a hefty golden parachute. Anything less would cripple the morale of the agency, as other agents would assume that they'd also be easily cut loose and destroyed.

Bob would also would NEVER threaten to kill the family of his superiors. That's treason in itself. And even if he did so he'd still have no solid motivation to fly back to the Kingdom and warn the Prince that he was going to be assasinated. He would never be able to prevent a missile assasination and he wouldn't know exactly where the caravan of vehicles was located, as he'd be cut out of the top-secret information loop.

On a more fundamental level I felt that if the film is about international international bribery competition by nations for strategic oil reserves, I didn't want the oil to go the the Chinese. I got the filmakers' point. Fine. Is Clooney et al. so concerned with showing their ugly truth that they cannot even advocate for America's success? Or do they have an assumption here that the Chinese would act fairly, like angels, and only the Americans are corrupting?

Actually everyone is corrupt, all the time - which leads to an even playing field of sorts. It was incumbent on Arab leaders the to hold a fair bid for their oil field contract and to select the right son to be the Emir and protect their own interests. The father failed at both tasks.. Their backwardness and cruelty is largely their own fault, just as much as by American intrigues. At the largest scale there is no order imposed from above. Only chaos.

So the story describes a dark game, but an unavoidable one, and from that corruption there is intrinsic evil and exploitation (the Pakistanis) which we can never cure - it's beyond the scope or abilities of the US to do so. I felt entertained and drawn in to this film, but with these and a couple similar problems, and this lack of a clearer moral framework - I'll deduct one star. 4/5.

LOTR - The Two Towers - Geek Heaven

2005-12-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

This quote - is the heart of Aragorn and Arwen romance and as such is the heart of the whole trilogy. It is an enchanting, sublime moment of cinema which expresses the mature love of a father to his daughter.

Elrond, to his daughter Arwen
If Aragorn survives this war, you will still be parted.
If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true... you will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality. Whether by the sword or the slow decay of time, Aragorn will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of his passing.

He will come to death. An image of the splendor of the kings of men in glory, undimmed before the breaking of the world.
But you, my daughter, you will linger on, in darkness and in doubt. As nightfall winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell, bound to you grief, under the fading trees, until all the world has changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent.

Arwen... there is nothing for you here, only death.
A im ú-'erin veleth lîn?
["Do I not also have your love?"]

Arwen
Gerich meleth nîn, ada.
["You have my love father."]

Joe Lieberman - Mush-Headed Bushy

2005-12-10T12:00:00.000-08:00

Lieberman is the Alan Colmes of the senate, a man who will fight for a while, but when things come down to brass tacks can always be counted on to 'be reasonable' and sell out his party. Bush loves this guy - he's exactly the kind of bipartisan he's looking for, one who can be lied to and who's priorities can be beaten down and cheated, but who will come back the next week to do business.

His definining moment was when he debated Cheney in 2000, where the VP, who is of course the Devil in human form, dominated Lieberboy.. What he should have said : "Oh - you collected $40M for four years running a defense contractor with questionable contracts, while almost bankrupting the firm through incompetence".. .. He either thought it unsportsmanlike to mention such things or he just wasn't prepared and deserved to lose. I'm sure he's honorable in a dim-witted way, but Bush and Cheney are not. He has to realize that they'd gladly harvest and sell his organs if it would help them pass their latest tax-cut package.

Lieberman doesn't understand that no relationship with the Whitehouse is acceptable outside of the Senate leadership. Those days are gone. The GOP has been running a scotched-earth policy for years, picking off vulnerable democrats on close votes and then breaking their agreements. They've left our legislative branch to act like much more like a parliament than ever before. Our only possible defense against such tactics is to stand together with one voice, but instead we have JoeMomentum wheedling around the edges of our resolve.

He should realize that he cannot give the Bush regime credibility with the democrats. He only be exploited as a trophy by red-blood conservatives, his appearance used as proof that their adversary is weak. Good going, Joe. This warm and friendly man is the frog that won't jump out of the pot and will be quickly boiled.

The left wing of the Democratic party represented by Daily Kos and TPM, among others, has thrown down the gauntlet and is now working to unseat Lieberman in the primary with Lowell Weicker, an unprecedented defection in the ranks which just shows the depths of annoyance he's fostered. See http://www.dumpjoe.com/. I'm not from Connecticut so my opinion is moot here, but I do hope they can get it together. Preliminary polls are encouraging.

I hope he can go away and become a Temple-association president in a suburban bedroom-town backwater. Let men of iron will take the leadership and get this soft-hearted, soft-headed man off the stage.

Fascism 101: 14 Points

2005-12-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism - Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause - The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military - Even when there are widespread
domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism - The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media - Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security - Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined - Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected - The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed - Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts - Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption - Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections - Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Roland, Marlborough - roads to nowhere.

2005-12-05T15:08:00.000-08:00

2nd meeting with Roland V. today about possible software collaboration/direction for his PHP craigslist database project. We seem to be talking past eachother.

I'm not sure there's enough overlap in our ideas to make a practical entrepreneurial enterprise. Also I don't think he needs me. He has a very good skill-base. He's just muddle-headed. He's already put perhaps 100+ hours in and changing the direction of his work feels like pushing at the side of a moving ship. The momentum is already there and has a life of it's own. So much passive resistance, so early. . It's not promising at all.

He wants my advice on how to pitch to Andrea. I feel like I'm advising on approaching a screaming blind woman waving a horse-whip in every direction. Conclusion: Don't Do It! Second conclusion: I'm a whipped, weak person and I regret everything.
_____________________________

2nd note: P. Brown has decided to hold back on his offer of $1200 for the Marlborough studio, because it took us 2+ days to get a reply from the landlord, and meanwhile he's seen another ad in the paper and has to check it out.

So we're left with nothing, holding our dicks. We should cash his credit card # for the fee and let him sue - we're in the right, but I don't want to be that person and I hate that this is who I've become. that I can't do a good day's work for a good wage and I scrape by on bullshit, only to have the rug pulled out easily, all the time. Damn. damn. damn damn damn damn damn damn.

Lori's Voice. And Eaon Flux.

2005-12-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

Lori, one of my co-workers here in Boston, has a voice that saps life energy out of me every time I hear it. Her harsh, Miami-Jewish nasal tones make me tense up and cringe. Always a vacuous story about a failed romance or some shallow gossip about imaginary friends that leads nowhere.. Auggh!

Surely these people, who grew up with her, hooked up, had children and enjoy normal lives, must dread her silly banter just as I do. They sit at Abe & Louie's steak restaurant on the busy Boardwalk and ... she approaches.. getting closer.. Abort the Entree! Aaugh!! .. Imagine Fran Drescher, only frumpy and profoundly annoying.

I can barely stand her presence, she gives me a deep sense of revulsion - that work and life have forced me to spend time with this draining, whiny old spinster - whose life has gone nowhere.. Her existence is the worst potential future for myself that I could imagine.

Ho Hum.

Eaon Flux

The premise of the movie is that Eaon is a secret 'terrorist'/freedom fighter/assasin, out to eliminate Trevor Goodchild, the corrupt leader of a future Utopia/Dystopia in a post-apocalypse world 400 years into the future. But of course there's more to the story. She discovers a hidden truth:

The plague that destroyed most of humanity way back in 2011 had left the survivors sterile, and what people had thought were newborn babies were in fact implanted clone embryos.

Society had become a sterile museum piece, with no fertile offspring, no new ideas or growth was possible and the world had become a meaningless, perfect but unchanging island of technology.

On the other hand, death has been banished - as clones take the place of children, individuals had for centuries been succeeded by their carbon copies. So while individuals had aged and passed, their DNA blueprints had endured.

And so the question: Is life so precious that it should be preserved if technology makes it possible is invented? The answer: No. That position - that Cloning is Good - is taken by the villains. The moral: Death is necessary.. As carbon copies we lose our individuality and our sacred concept of pure free will is degraded as our abilities and attributes become tracable and assigned to our DNA instead of our personal decisions.

And thus humanity in the current definition ends, and we become simple cogs in a soul-less machine/society. Eaon sees this, as she describes the citizenry as 'walking ghosts'.

Like Venice, embalmed in the 1850's into a museum-area for tourists, so too would the Eaon Flux Future be a bleak and meaningless place. Inflexible, narrow, devoid of uncertainty and the pleasure or pain of a dynamic possibilities.

So .. Eaon figures out who the good guys are. She Arranges through a long and overly complex plot to kill the bad guys, thereby freeing the future from it's well-intentioned but wrong-headed techno-overlords, and lives happily ever after in a fertile world - until her certain death in the distant future, which is exactly as it should be.

In the end the city wall is broken and a reborn humanity is again free to flood outward into a rejuvinated natural world, a new Garden of Eden with a limitless future.

Yippee!..

Charlize Theron looks like a stunningly perfect ballerina sculpture from every angle, absolutely hypnotizing, like a poised Leni-Reifenstahl Uber-Athlete made of porcelain. At 29 years old, I'm glad she made this movie. The world wants to see her profound beauty, and as gravity catches up with her it's likely she'll never look quite this good again.

But sadly..there wasn't enough personality in this film - the sterility was deeper than the surface. Every single sentence felt like a movement of a chess piece on an inorganic 3D backboard which really needed more verve and charm. The total abstraction of 'society', while necessary to the story, felt shallow.

If we're meant to root for humanity - we needed to see it. I didn't see anything on the screen worth saving - instead we were supposed to be rooting for a deeper, more complex humanity which the filmakers didn't decide to show us, probably due to time-constraints and lack of imagination. They've built themselves a magnificent edifice, but there wasn't any jelly in this donut. Just cement sculpture and beautiful acrobatics.

The above-described premise also has a couple of subtle flaws: Civilization/Society is cumulative and even if individuals' genetic dynamic chaos had been eliminated, there would still be large-scale randomness in other facets of society. That is, even if DNA-clones 'repeated' , the world would have moved forward from the time of their predecessor and they would have different, random relationships with others in the city. So this world, while not organically diverse, would not be completely stagnant.

They could also produce multiples of clones from each blueprint, so you would expect the geometric growth of human populations over the past 400 years. Why the # is stuck at 5M is beyond me. Also, why are they stuck in a single city when there's a new, empty world to conquer? What's holding them in that city?

The best book to read along with this would be Alduous Huxley's 'Brave New World' (1962). There are many movies that approach the subject of totalitarian/techno-dystopias. My favorites are George Lucas's THX1138 (1970) Gattaca (1997) Equilibrium (2002) , Code 46(2004) and Brazil(1989). Eaon Flux is lighter fare than these, but still worthwhile.

Fitzmas, Celebrity BabyLand, Scotus, Etc.

2005-10-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

News:

1) Gwyneth Paltrow is pregnant again.
2) Tina Fey had her baby.
3) Maya Rudolph had her baby with Paul Thomas Anderson. (!) There is no better Celebrity lineage I could imagine.

Harriet Miers's SCOTUS nomination has been withdrawn. The figleaf was that senate confirmation-questioning would impinge on W's Executive privilege. Basically she was unimpressive and refused to cooperate.

This means that a Right/Left showdown is inevitable. Bush will nominate a well-documented conservative and either (A) fulfill his wingnut-crazy mandate, or (B) fail to do so and become a crippled lame-duck for his final 3 years. I'm hoping for the latter.

Since the 40's the 2-term limit has made this political fallow period inevitable. As people start thinking about 2008 Bush's authority will evaporate while all the problems he's ignored will come back and linger like crows circling his precious historical legacy. He'll go down like Hoover, and he may yet regret running in 2004.

Fitzmas has come 'Scooter' Libby has been indicted and resigned. I had hoped for Rove to go down as well, but he dodged the bullet. There is much talk of the Bush whitehouse in melt-down because of these scandals and his now sub-40's polling numbers. I'll believe it when I see it unfold. After all I expected Kerry to win, so it may yet all be wishful thinking. Still, Fitzgerald hasn't disbanded his special-counsel and the black cloud over the White House may bear more fruit.

We've quickly passed by the 2,000 mark in Iraq.. This wouldn't work - I knew it was a catastrophe in the making back in 2002. I would still certainly like to be proven wrong by events and I'd bow my head and give those loathsome neocons them all the credit. So far no luck.

At this rate we will have a collapse and pullout but 2013 with 7,000 dead. It will count as a failed foreign adventure under President H. Clinton...and W will shamelessly blame his successor. Time will tell.

Thoughts on Democracy

2005-10-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

The founding Fathers understood Democracy to be a precarious balancing act.

Elections and Democracy are the only way for national leaders to gain political legitimacy and is thus the most valid and substantial political environment out there. But I do recognize it's foibles and potential systemic flaws, and they are interesting to describe and talk about.

Democracy is like a soap bubble, with millions of molecules(citizens) all in allignment to form a self-supporting surface. We each live within a limited range of motion and we must obey certain rules or risk collapse. This sits in on a piece of land surrounded by nearby 'bubbles' like Canada and Mexico, etc.

Usually democracies turn into bipolar dichotomies, split between two spheres which can be represented by one or more alligned parties, one sphere being the Public Interest (left) and the other the Private Interest (right). Other factors include Religion and Regional Subculture identification and the rise of charismatic leaders.

Here are a few ways Democracies can fall apart at any time.

1) Collapse Into Dictatorship

Democratic authority can collapse into an individual and the government could disintegrate into dictatorship.
EX: Hitler.
EX: Juan Peron.
EX: Vladimir Putin.
EX: to a far more benign extent - FDR.

2) Distinct Voting Blocks
Democracy - ethnic/religious voting blocks become too distinct, then power might accumulate into a permenant majority block, which could then abuse or disenfranchise a minority populations/voting blocks.
EX: Blacks in the South before the Civil War - and after.
EX: The Sunnis in Iraq, who may have no oil revenues to their region
(not that they don't have it coming)
EX: The Kurds in Turkey,
EX: Indians in Chiapas, Mexico.
EX: Jews (among other groups) in Germany.

The extreme result of this would be a breakdown into civil war, where two voting blocks are effectively intertwined nations, fighting to control a disfunctional state apparatus, or one wants to form a seperate state.
Ex: The Civil War of 1861.
Ex: The civil war in Lebanon in the 1970's.
Ex: The Tamil Tigers - Civil War in Sri Lanka.
Ex: Greeks vs. Turks on Cyprus in the 70's.
Ex: Eritreans vs. Ethiopians in Ethiopia - etc.
Ex: Civil War in Yemen.
Ex: East Timor in Indonesia

An interesting footnote:
Jesse Helms lead the most extreme part of the Southern American (confederate) polity which is now represented by the GOP. He was an enormous jerk, but he continued to work with the congress as a member of the loyal opposition. He never 'opted out' the way the Southern congressmen did in 1860 which lead to the schism and the war. His dissent came from within the accepted framework, and by doing so he kept the government solid. So we owe him some gratitude...

3) Collusion /duopoly / Oligopoly
(The Center joins together and dies on top)
Political parties can become friends across the aisle., and the subordinate block may cease to be a clear alternative to the party in authority. So Democracy can effectively collapse because the two large bodies fill the political environment and block alternative or underrepresented interests. Depending on the system, the barrier to entry for a new political party can be prohibitive, and Democracy can effectively cease to function.

EX: Many think that a large portion of the current Democratic party are corrupted and are frequently voting against their party platform/interest or ideals, but they have no alternative vote. Their voice/influence has been coopted and Democracy has become ineffectual.

Eventually either the 'radicals' in a party who defend a postion/cause will take over, (Howard Dean), or the party will be superseded by another which will act in true opposition and the older party will shrink and die(the Whig party).

4) Self-Destructive Inertia
Democracy automatically avoids tough society-wide decisions and sacrifices which have no immediate constituency but which are necessary for the country to act on the larger stage.
EX: The draft. We can't impose one until after catastrophe, like Pearl Harbor.
EX: Changing Social Security/Benefits. We can't do it until after collapse, like Argentina in 2001.
EX: Fuel-Efficiency regulations. We can't ...etc.
EX: Limiting imports from China, or even having hard negotiations with them. We...etc.

5) Susceptability to Corruption
Democracy can be Bought. Office-holders are always under constant pressure to campaign and refresh their electoral mandate. This costs money, which is a corrupting influence to all politics.
EX: American Health-Care legislation.
EX: American environmental legislation.
EX: American tax code.
EX: American Credit-Card industry/financial legislation.
EX: American Agribusiness legislation.
EX: American military-industrial-complex legislation.
EX: George W. Bush
Etc.

6) Influence Gamesmanship and InterLocked Issues
Parliamentary Democracy can deliver enormous, disproportionate power to small minorities which would hold the deciding small % to move (swing) between two different voting blocks and form a government.
EX: The ultra-orthodox parties in Israel, where for decades, the swing-vote block of 12% of the population could dictate policy on certain issues to the rest of the country.

This problem is reduced in the US where primaries take the place of parliamentary parties.
Instead, Congressional Democracy can link issues to specific parties, paralyzing many issues for decades at a time.
EX: The GOP is anti-environment. One cannot be pro-environment and Pro-Life in the USA. EX: The GOP is Anti-Gay-Marriage. One cannot be Pro-Gay and Pr0-Life in the USA.
EX: The GOP is Pro-Iraq-War. One cannot be Pro-War and be Pro-Choice and Pro-Environment in the USA.

7) Numbers-and-Percentages Gamesmanship
Decisions can be redirected up or down a federal/state/local political gradient, manipulating decisions. This mechanical issue which can become a point of abuse.

If a nation has 10,000 people, 5001 are required to win an election. (Bedford, MA) 4900+ can be rejected and subordinated. This is Relatively Potent Democracy.

But if a nation has 900M people 450M+1 are required to win. (India) so 449.99M can be rejected, or more than the whole population of the USA and England combined - all subordinated. This would be Extremely dilute democracy...

So the clear question is: How does one define the voting polity?
Who, and how many people are allowed to vote on which issues?
An issue can be taken away from a given community by being delegated to a larger political entity, thus rendering the Democratic Process mute and toothless much of the time.

EX: Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, and he then held a plebicite on this invasion..which included in the voting block the rest of the German nation - 50M non-Austrians who all had their say on the state of Austrian sovereignty. It was an obvious trick, but it worked.

Leaders who are unable to deal with a large framework will break that voting 'state' into agreeable smaller states. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does complicate a one-man-one-vote dynamic. Leaders who want to enforce their will on an area might 'kick it upstairs' so that outside votes might outweigh the local opposition.

The most extreme case of this is when a question is kicked 'upstairs' and out of the voting system altogether, which is when it arrives at the door of the Supreme Court.

8) Freedom of Information and Education
Democracy requires an educated electorate who have access to accurate news and knowledge of their environment. These news sources can be coopted, removing democratic government's checks and balances from functioning.

A) Conglomeration: Media companies are owned by similar-minded wealthy interests, at the expense of the Public Interest.
EX: Less than 20 companies now own most of the radio stations in the US. If they agree that Bush is better than Kerry, who is to say otherwise?
EX: If the NYT says there is good evidence of WMD's in Iraq, who is to say otherwise?

B) Legal Restrictions To Investigation: Laws that forbid financially damaging information from being disseminated at the expense of the Public Interest.
EX: If laws forbid investigation into, say, WallMart's business practices, how would the public know of wrongdoing, and then how would democracy correct this problem?

9) Church-State Separation - The Moral vs. Functional Spheres.

Moral Questions arguably should not be voted on, even in democracy, as they overlap with religion. The South wanted to vote on Slavery at a state-wide level. Of course, none of the slaves could vote. This led us towards the civil war. The largest current question is about Abortion.

More later.

Hitler quotes - because Evil had a voice.

2005-10-18T07:02:00.000-07:00

Hitler was the ultimate right-wing dictator and the very definition of Evil, a trait he shared with Stalin and Mao at the other end of the spectrum in the 30's and 40's.

Churchill described Hitler as the devil's representative on Earth and his acts of terrorism, intimidation and aggression are beyond the human scale. He was completely devoid of compassion and human empathy which he considered weaknesses in the Nietzchiean model. Hitler's war killed 46 million people. That's 1100 people every hour, 24/7 for five years. Bush is smaller than an ant in comparison, like a clumsy yokel with bulldozers compared to a creator of earthquakes. Note: The war in the Pacific killed around 15M.

Curiously, a fraction of the things he writes sound benign - even acceptable as pep-talk banter.. unlike his actions in Germany and during the war, which were truly terrifying and inhuman.

And of course he turned his followers into depraved monsters themselves, so that even their deaths in battle were celebrated instead of mourned by Europe, and so these millions of brainwashed Germans were perhaps his greatest victims. He marched them into the Russian winter and from there straight to the grave.

One thing that is missing from the historical record is his voice on the radio and at rallies. They make up part of the background of the lead-up to war that was incredibly powerful and hypnotizing and which has been purposely left out of the historic record to prevent his martyrization. Even his photos have a certain aura that I don't quite understand.

I must admit to a perverse fascination here. We live our lives surrounded by a structure of ideals and limitations which allow for organized society, but we all have a part of us which secretly would like these barriers would dissapear and let us reach our dark inner dream - the domination of our enemies, lust for power and wealth, etc. Hitler convinced millions that this inner-demon was their true voice..

He made selfishness and cruelty a virtue. Or failing that, he made everyday German's subordination of personal morality and other decisions to state-control so complete that they effectively became slaves. So there is some profoundly ugly wish-fulfillment, which one at play with the study of Hitler and Nazism.

That such a person could exist and succeed says enough to break one's faith in God - and is part of the reason I am irreligious.

The standard theological argument against this view is:

(1) the story of Job 'Mysterious Ways', etc.
To this I say: God (or Darwin) gave us a mind to think with - to give up on our questions would devalue this.. Self-imposed restrictions are just a crutch for clerics without effective answers. A mother's scold. "It's because I said so. That's why."

(2) Free Will. God gave humanity a choice - 'and one must be able to do evil in order to have the choice to be Good'.. ehh. O.K.

(3) (which is part of 2) God's Works are through human action - and Hitler was ultimately defeated, so there is some Justice and Divinity in the world, if we make it so.. But that won't comfort the innocent 46 million people who starved or died in his war and thus I have trouble accepting it.

My complaint agains these three don't necessarily preclude God. But they do remove him as an option for personal communication or interaction with humanity. Think of all the desperate prayers he ignored in those years. Meanwhile the Vatican was officially non-interventionist during this whole period. See here.

Great Hitler Books:
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny - by Allan Bullock. Dated (1961) but very informative.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich - by William Shirer
The Psychopathic God - by Robert Waite - fascinating psychological dissection.
Inside the Third Reich - By Albert Speer - Nazi Minister of Armaments and deceptive, guilty collaborator of ghastly,terrible slave-labor camps - but it's a fantastic read.
Inside Hitler's Germany - by Matthew Hughes. This is a well-constructed history/photo essay.

Here are some quotes, just for curiosity's sake, because it's hard to look away.
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"Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

"In actual fact the pacifistic-humane idea is perfectly all right perhaps when the highest type of man has previously conquered and subjected the world to an extent that makes him the sole ruler of this earth. Therefore, first struggle and then perhaps pacifism."

"The [Nazi party] should not become a constable of public opinion, but must dominate it. It must not become a servant of the masses, but their master!"

"For there is one thing we must never forgetÂ the majority can never replace the man. And no more than a hundred empty heads make one wise man will an heroic decision arise from a hundred cowards."

"There must be no majority decisions, but only responsible persons, and the word 'council' must be restored to its original meaning. Surely every man will have advisers by his side, but the decision will be made by one man."

"Never forget that the most sacred right on this earth is mans right to have the earth to till with his own hands, the most sacred sacrifice the blood that a man sheds for this earth...."

"The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of flowing passion, but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in others."

"It must be thoroughly understood that the lost land will never be won back by solemn appeals to the God, nor by hopes in any League of Nations, but only by the force of arms."

"How to achieve the moral breakdown of the enemy before the war has started -- that is the problem that interests me. Whoever has experienced war at the front will want to refrain from all avoidable bloodshed."

"Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless"

"A single blow must destroy the enemy... without regard of losses... a gigantic all-destroying blow."

"Strength lies not in defense but in attack."

"Words build bridges into unexplored regions"

"How fortunate for leaders that men do not think."

"Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future."

"Germany is prepared to agree to any solemn pact of non-aggression, because she does not think of attacking but only acquiring security."

"We are all proud that through God's powerful aid, we have become once more true Germans"

"National Socialist Germany wants peace because of its fundamental convictions. And it wants peace also owing to the realization of the simple primitive fact that no war would be likely essentially to alter the distress in Europe... The principal effect of every war is to destroy the flower of the nation... Germany needs peace and desires peace!" (1935)

"England, unlike in 1914, will not allow herself to blunder into a war lasting for years... Such is the fate of rich countries.. .Not even England has the money nowadays to fight a world war. What should England fight for? You don't get yourself killed over an ally." (1939)

"The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew"

"The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness." (1941)

"Whatever goal, man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality"

"We will not capitulate - no, never! We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us - a world in flames."

"Struggle is the father of all things. It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle. If you do not fight, life will never be won"

"There could be no issue between the Church and the State. The Church, as such, has nothing to do with political affairs. On the other hand, the State has nothing to do with the faith or inner organization of the Church"

It must be thoroughly understood that the lost land will never be won back by solemn appeals to the God, nor by hopes in any League of Nations, but only by the force of arms.

"It is always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge"

"The German people are not a warlike nation. It is a soldierly one, which means it does not want a war, but does not fear it. It loves peace but also loves its honor and freedom"

Always before God and the world, the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills"

"The majority can never replace the man"

"What we have to fight for is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the creator"

"Struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive"

"The world will not help, the people must help themselves. Its own strength is the source of life. That strength the Almighty has given us to use; that in it and through it, we may wage the battle of our life The others in the past years have not had the blessing of the Almighty - of Him who in the last resort, whatever man may do, holds in His hands the final decision. Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward"

"Only force rules. Force is the first law"

"The only people I have been able to use are those who fought"

"The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force."

"The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category."

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."

"When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."

"Who says I am not under the special protection of God?"

Salada Quote - & TShirts, bumper stickers.

2005-10-14T07:12:00.000-07:00

"Buy!: One word commercial."
Surely the least clever Salada teabag quote ever.
But still fine with honey and an ounce or two of cream.
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Yom Kippur: I showed up about 40 minutes late - which was fine.

After a few moments of trouble finding Mom & Dad, I stay the remaining 1:45. The sermon of the day was Darfur - 'never again' etc. A black-and-white issue with no hot-water politics. etc.

Rabbi Stern told a story about a Communist and a Rabbi during WWII, forced by Nazi guards to jump over a deep, wide body pit at Auschitz, with certain death if they failed. They're starved and weak and as they jump the Rabbi Prays for deliverance, while Communist clutches the Rabbi and gives in to God(!)

So we all Get Religion at the last moment. It was heartwarming, sort of.. Except it almost certainly was urban legend BS, which peeved me, the Rabbi said right there on the pulpit - 'true story' - and I respect Rabbi Stern as a Good and virtuous teacher and leader. He appeared to be using a vast human tragedy as a background for sermon-shtick, and unless it was a solid story, it felt innappropriate. Putting words in the mouths of the deceased is tricky.

I would want to poke him and ask him for his sources - but that would have been an unpleasant conversation. Besides, religious people are surely given license to fabricate their moral tales. After all imagination and lack-of-attribution over the course of centuries is the wellspring of all miracles.

The new cantor has a phenomenal voice but when she talk she's giving too much singing direction and it breaks the mood of the service and grates on my nerves. She wants us all to sing and we're not into non-melodic sephardic chanting durges. I hope someone has the stones to tell her - hopefully this year.

I then spent two hours browsing in Borders Books - a total waste of time - before coming home and sleeping a few minutes before going to Diane's to break the Fast with many delicious little deli sandwiches from a big platter which later gave me some indigestion.
I especially liked the pickled green tomatoes. I'll have to seek them out.

Me and Ben and Morgan and Jack sat in the den and watched 'Fairly Oddparents' and 'Danny Phantom' on Nickelodeon kid's channel. And it was awful terrible ultra-rich visual pablum. I felt I was being drowned in high-caf expresso coffee to a silly, relentlessly cheerful soundtrack. The shortcut animation was disguised as a visual-style when it's really just tacky low-budget lack of artistry. . Perhaps I've just slowed down, but these seemed shallower, but far more intense than any of Hanna Barbera's 60'-70's junk.

I'm sure it's like smoking crack to the minds of young kids - Morgan and Jack appeared hypnotized - even tranquilized. I had thought that Nick' was a good, wholesome company. Like the AMD to Disney's Intel, there to keep their larger competitor honest. Not So! They are the worst by far. Drivel..

_______________________________________________________

These are just a few graphics from an online store.
They're not especially clever, but I think they might be worth saving.

Surely if Jenna or Barbara enlisted, even into non-combat positions, that would make an enormous statement about the Bush family's values and sense of participation and personal commitment. But since graduating school they've been idle rich diletantes', wasting taxpayer money on their Secret Service details.

To be fair, Barbara, the Hot One, went to South Africa for a few months to work in an HIV clinic - certainly a good cause - but Dad is demanding that those countries spend all their foreign aid to pay for expensive, patent-protected brandname antiretroviral drugs..

Thereby draining the U.S. federal budget to pay (handout) money to Big Pharma.. in order to help 1/3rd the number he could help if he bought generic drugs...

So whatever her personal virtue, the lobbyists have their foot firmly in the door and the Bush/GOP mental disconnect between helping people vs. helping campaign donors..is complete. The big picture here for Africa is still terrible. Barb' just gets to play the Noble Princess Nightingale-Bush in her personal life. Whoopee.

________________________________________________

I'm somewhat uncomfortable around homosexuals, but of course I have no choice about my orientation and neither do they. To hate or fear them would be an ethical and moral flaw and I don't want to be that kind of person, and to block their legal marriages and happiness which are harmless to straights, seems shallow and pointlessly cruel.

It's a debate about language and labeling which I think is just a red-herring distraction away from more important issues. Of course people do have the right to be bigots. Let them hate. The real question is: why does the government have to participate in this at all? The GOP has staked out that negative worldview, which suits me just fine. I'm proud to be counted against them.
____________________________________________________

I'm not a Christian, but my general understanding is that Jesus would not bomb anyone.

But Evil (with a capital E) does exist and some wars are surely valid and justified - I.E. Just-War doctrine in Christian theology. WWII was a noble cause, although I do count most of the Germans among the victims.

I still don't know whether going to war for oil was justified. Jesus would probably frown, but we need that oil.. Saddam Hussein complicates this and I'll continue to fret about it until long after events have made the debate irrelevant.

Simple and clear.

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I like this shirt because it represents pride in our designated media label. When the Republicans outmaneuvered the Democrats in the use of language in the 80's and 90's, they were able to define Liberal in the public mindset as the worst type of clueless, lefty nutcase.

These people exist, but they're less than 10% of the Democratic Party. Clinton was more mainstream.

Of course, the language is the playing field, and we can never make our case without great attention to defining the terms of debate. We must face this head-on, take the label with pride and explain exactly what we 'the left' stand for or we will continue to be undermined and beaten at the polls.

Of course labels change their meanings over time. It's hard to believe that the GOP was the party of Lincoln..(!) I cannot imagine him, a Unionist representing the North, anywhere near the Bush/Delay/Dobson camp today.
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Straight from Gandhi.

Nixon Quotes

2005-10-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.

A man who has never lost himself in a cause bigger than himself has missed one of life's mountaintop experiences. Only in losing himself does he find himself. Only then does he discover all the latent strengths he never knew he had and which otherwise would have remained dormant.

A public man must never forget that he loses his usefulness when he as an individual, rather than his policy, becomes the issue.

A riot is a spontaneous outburst. A war is subject to advance planning.

Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that.

Any change is resisted because bureaucrats have a vested interest in the chaos in which they exist.

Any lady who is first lady likes being first lady. I don't care what they say, they like it.

As far as I am concerned now, I have no enemies in the press whatsoever.

As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.

Don't get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.

Don't try to take on a new personality; it doesn't work.

Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.

For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all of the people on this earth are truly one. One in their pride at what you have done, one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth.

I also believe that academic freedom should protect the right of a professor or student to advocate Marxism, socialism, communism, or any other minority viewpoint-no matter how distasteful to the majority, provided.

I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.

I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.

I doubt if any of them would even intentionally double-park.

I had never expected that the China initiative would come to fruition in the form of a Ping-Pong team.

I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body. But as president I must put the interests of America first Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

I knew if I continued to look around it would be difficult for me to contain my own emotions. So I turned away from the red eyes of the crowd and looked only at the red eye of the camera, talking to all the nation.

I let the American people down.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

I want you to stonewall it.

I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don't have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.

I wouldn't bet the farm on it, but I'd bet the main house. I wouldn't even bet the outhouse on Mondale.

I've never canceled a subscription to a newspaper because of bad cartoons or editorials. If that were the case, I wouldn't have any newspapers or magazines to read.

If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything.

If I were to make public these tapes, containing blunt and candid remarks on many different subjects, the confidentiality of the office of the president would always be suspect.

If you think the United States has stood still, who built the largest shopping center in the world?

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

It I talked about Watergate, I was described as struggling to free myself from the morass. If I did not talk about Watergate, I was accused of being out of touch with reality.

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.

It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.

It's a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can't stop playing the game the way you've always played it.

My telephone calls and meetings and decisions were now parts of a prescribed ritual aimed at making peace with the past; his calls, his meetings and his decisions were already the ones that would shape America's future.

Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

Once one determines that he or she has a mission in life, that's it's not going to be accomplished without a great deal of pain, and that the rewards in the end may not outweigh the pain --if you recognize historically that always happens, then when it comes, you survive it.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out.

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we're both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.

Scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans has as much dignity as the Presidency.

So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance. The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

The press is the enemy.

The student who invades an administration building, roughs up a dean, rifles the files and issues "nonnegotiable demands" may have some of his demands met by a permissive university administration. But the greater his "victory" the more he will have undermined the security of his own rights.

There are people who read too much: bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I'm not like that I never shoot blanks.

They say, "Gee, you look great." That means they thought you looked like hell before.

Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.

Tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers, the manner in which the president personally exercises his assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by another branch of government.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

Watergate had become the center of the media's universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.

We are all in it together. This is a war. We take a few shots and it will be over. We will give them a few shots and it will be over.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn't I?

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

When I grow up, I want to be an honest lawyer so things like that can't happen.

When I retire I'm going to spend my evenings by the fireplace going through those boxes. There are things in there that ought to be burned.

When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.

When the winds blow and the rains fall and the sun shines through the clouds he still resolves as he did then, that nothing so fine ever happened to him or anyone else as falling in love with Thee-my dearest heart.

You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or on his teammates.

Good Jokes - and Baby Porcupines!

2005-10-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

More bile for the scrapbook!

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing.
He concludes by saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."
"OH NO!" the president exclaims. "That's terrible!"
His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the president sits, head in hands.
Finally, president looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"
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Wow. He does look ferocious here!

I think they took a photo and did a reverse mirror-image of his trademark half-mouth smirking sneer.

Quote:
"Where is my goblet of
Iraqi children's blood!? "

Cheney will always fascinate me.
Remember his opening line in his debate with Edwards in 2004.
"We've never met!"..

It was a baldfaced, open, brazen lie, and everyone knew it. Even the media said as much.. But it worked - nobody ever counted it against his character. The debate stopped being about the Truth and became a sort of contest of who could command the most authorative air - and Cheney has authority. Cheney's worldview: lying is acceptable.. Truth is for the weak.

To do this takes amazing power and charisma and and an ability to brainwash vast numbers of people that is unparalelled in U.S. history. That is why he is VP.

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On a different note.
Cute baby porcupines. - Adorable!

New Cartoons

2005-10-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

Kreider cartoons

2005-10-01T15:53:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered this guy. I love his work.

SJ ;0)

Megalodon - the Giant Prehistoric Shark

2005-09-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

Does not every small child, and every adult with a childish disposition have some affinity to nature's monsters? They have been the zenith of life on earth sitting perched at the top of the food pyramid, at least until recently when Man jumped to the top of the heap and relegated his erstwhile competitors to either extinction or endangered status or, if they're lucky, game preserves.

Here is my favorite. No part of Megalodon fossilizes except the teeth, but they're enormous teeth. The archeological estimate its size based on a scaled-up bodyshape and dimensions of a Great White shark, which is a distant relative. Megalodon lived 65M-1.5M years ago and best guestimates are they were 40'-50' long and weighed in at 35+ tons, compared to the 20', 2.3 ton size for the largest Great Whites today. In comparison, a Honda Accord weighs 1.6 tons. Big M would be the same weight as around 350 adult humans, or a loaded, heavy tractor-trailer truck. It's head alone would be 11'+ in diameter.

Larger than a killer whale (30', 6 tons) , but still smaller than a sperm whale, cachalot which at 50'-60+' and 40+ tons, holds the record as the largest predatory carnivore ever to live. The big, gaping jaws of Megalodon probably gave it an advantage when these two giants met in the ocean, but sharks lack whale's echo-location, and a large, fast whale could probably avoid contact if it wanted to.

Blue whales are still significantly larger (80'+, 120+ tons) - the largest animals ever to live, but they eat krill and plankton, like the cows of the ocean. Megalodon probably fed on all species of whales and other large aquatic mammals and fish, fitting the ecological niche filled by killer whale pods today. But unlike whales, sharks do not socialize, and this one probably hunted independently.

I have an image of a diver or a seal trying to hide among the coral outcroppings as Big M floats nearby, and then like my dog Sammie working on an elevator door, M would jam its huge nose into the opening with the force of a battering ram until the coral space broke away. Megalodon could swim faster and with greater stamina than anything else in the ocean. There would be no escape.

Sharks have no emotion that humans would recognize. They don't need them. They can't be trained and their brains are very small. They're expressionless killing machines, the same today as they were when they shared the ocean with ichthiosaurs 100+ million years ago, and so in a limited sense they are immortal, already having achieved a sort of sustainable perfection in their environment that humanity does not approach.

For more info see links Fish1 and Fish2.

Cost on Ebay: Around $200 for the largest teeth.

The one in this painting is perhaps 80'
+, which is too large. Scary, though.

Quotes 4

2005-09-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

On August 25, Bush said about soldiers who get killed in the Iraq:

"I guess you couldn't ask for a better way of life than giving it for something that you believe in. "
(Sort of ... But is dying a "way of life"?)
_______________________________

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
George S. Patton - 1943 - used in the intro to Patton- 1970.
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"What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."
Barbara Bush, about the Hurricane Katrina refugees at the Astrodome in Houston.

Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
JFK

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived, and dishonest -- but the myth -- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
JFK

It was absolutely involuntary. They sank my boat.
JFK answering a little boy on how he became a war hero

Khrushchev reminds me of the tiger hunter who has picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger's skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas.
JFK

A police state finds that it cannot command the grain to grow.
JFK

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Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Terry Pratchett.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Galbraith.

He who finds though that lets us penetrate even a little deeper into the eternal mystery of nature has been granted great grace. He who, in addition, experiences the recognition, sympathy, and help of the best minds of his times, had been given almost more happiness than one man can bear.
Albert Einstein

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
Jack Handy -- Deep Thoughts

Whole Lotta Abe Lincoln

2005-09-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

No president before or since ever spoke or wrote with the clear grace and beauty of Abe Lincoln. And nobody (except perhaps FDR) ever dedicated our nation to as high a calling. He was as close to a saint as anyone in our history and by far the greatest national leader of the 19th century. When I read Lincoln I feel great pride to be an American.

Of course it was much less clear at the time. Please see this stupid jerk's website at www.rebelgray.com He's so O.K. with slavery that I'm sure he'd be fine with volunteering himself for it.. right?
______________________________________

"If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."

"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it."
"Letter To Henry L. Pierce and Others" (April 6, 1859)

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." (August 1, 1858?),

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Lincoln's Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.

"I leave you, hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal." "Speech at Chicago, Illinois" (July 10, 1858)

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.
Letter to Horace Greeley" (August 22, 1862), p. 388.

"Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them."

"I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day."

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
Lincoln's First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861.

"I cannot make it better known than it already is that I strongly favor colonization."
Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

"I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
"Letter to Albert G. Hodges" (April 4, 1864)

"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."
Lincoln's 'House-Divided' Speech in Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858.

"Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

"I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot."
"Remarks at the Monogahela House" (February 14, 1861)

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863.

"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed." "Lincoln-Douglas debate at Ottawa" (August 21, 1858)

"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863.

"I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying, God bless the women of America!"
Remarks at Closing of Sanitary Fair, Washington D.C." (March 18, 1864)

"I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that 'it was not best to swap horses while crossing streams'.
Reply to Delegation from the National Union League" (June 9, 1864)

"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana Regiment" (March 17, 1865)

"The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me."
"Speech on the Sub-Treasury" (in the Illinois House of Representatives, December 26, 1839)

"Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today." "Notes for a Law Lecture" (July 1, 1850?)

"In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book."
"Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible" (September 7, 1864)

"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."
"Reply to New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association" (March 21, 1864)

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

"My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell." Lincoln's Farewell Address at the Great Western Depot in Springfield, Illinois, February 11, 1861.

"Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough."
"Notes for a Law Lecture" (July 1, 1850?), p. 81.

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything."
"Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois" (September 18, 1858)

"I have stepped out upon this platform that I may see you and that you may see me, and in the arrangement I have the best of the bargain."
"Remarks at Painesville, Ohio" (February 16, 1861), p. 218.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity.
Lincoln's Temperance Address, Springfield, Illinois, 1842.

"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party - and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose."
"Meditation on the Divine Will" (September 2, 1862?)

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

"What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?" Lincoln's Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.

"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty and tyranny."
"Address at Sanitary Fair, Baltimore, Maryland" (April 18, 1864), p. 301-302.

"There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law."
"Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum,of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838)

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to 'preserve, protect, and defend it'."
Lincoln's First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.

"I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.",
"Speech to One Hundred Sixty-sixth Ohio Regiment (August 22, 1864)

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum,of Springfield, Illinois (January 27, 1838)

"I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union."
"Proclamation of Thanksgiving" (October 3, 1863)

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.
Letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby" (November 21, 1864)

"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!"
Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin" (September 30, 1859),

"If all do not join now to save the good old ship of the Union this voyage nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage."
"Speech at Cleveland, Ohio" (February 15, 1861),

"Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

"I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."
"Letter to Joshua F. Speed" (August 24, 1855)

"You think slavery is right and should be extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us."
"Letter to Alexander H. Stephens" (December 22, 1860) Stephens was the future Confederate vice-president.

"Stand with anybody that stands RIGHT. Stand with him while he is right and PART with him when he goes wrong."
"Speech at Peoria, Illinois" (October 16, 1854)

"To state the question more directly, are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken, if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding the single law, would tend to preserve it? But it was not believed that this question was presented. It was not believed that any law was violated. The provision of the Constitution that 'The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, shall not be suspended unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it,' is equivalent to a provision---is a provision---that such privilege may be suspended when, in cases of rebellion, or invasion, the public safety does require it. It was decided that we have a case of rebellion, and that the public safety does require the qualified suspension of the privilege of the writ which was authorized to be made."
Lincoln's Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861.

Wave Vs. Particle: Science BS #2

2005-09-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

World events are largely binary and cyclical. This appears to be built into the fabric of the universe. Modern Physics defines matter in terms of quantum mechanics, explainable partially through wave-description-mathematics, and partially through particle-description mathematics, which are complimentary to each other.

This isn't understandable at the human or the even microscopic scale, but it works at the atomic/particle level where different physical forces come into play. A classical particle is a discreet function which is expected to act as similarly to a macro-scale object, like a billiard ball on a table. A wave is continuous and random, such as an electron whizzing around the nucleus like a housefly around a baseball in a playing field. It's exact location can only be predicted with zones of probability.

But in a different sense, at the level of the baseball and larger, even though there are many more variables and cannot be described easily by physics, the same particle/wave descriptive analogies work, and are useful and may have some substance in describing the human condition and the natural world.

My proposition here: The cyclical nature, i.e. the dichotomy, of many large scale phenomena in nature and society, which is the human expression of nature, is actually the exhibition of the cycle between wave- and particle behaviors of matter..

Or actually, of humans cycling back and forth between both paradigms to better fit a world where both wave and particle theories work in tandem to some extent, and where the best solution is frequently an uneasy combination of the two.

This is true of nature as well as politics. The prime examples:

Republicans = particle = free enterprise = production
Democrats = wave = union = distribution

Male = particle = Competition
Female = wave = Cooperation

O.K. That's my premise.
The amazing and interesting question here is whether there's any natural plateau near the break-point of the wave/particle dichotomy, or whether war and conflict between these alternatives is inevitable..

I guess the question is a variation of 'is war inevitable or not', from an unusual science/physical paradigm. And as such it's just as unanswerable here as it is elsewhere.. Or more accurately, the answer is it IS inevitable and the plateau is an inherently unstable, temporary construct.

So putting aside this conclusion, here's my sense of it.

SEESAW VS. PLATEAU

I believe, and I think history shows, that we are destined to jump from 'wave' governments to particle governments and back at various intervals, often violently.

Logically, most (smart) individuals know that it's the combination that allows for progress and growth, but people are invested on one side vs. another and those individuals will fight the 'switch in polarity', if you will.

One primary example would be political revolutions, with one party representing one model of thinking about government questions and another representing the opposite /counterpart. Neither works very well when taken to the exclusion of the other, and those examples represent a lack of 'plateau' and occasional violent revolution.

In Cuba, the mafia didn't want their casinos to be nationalized. (corrupt particle?)
In the USSR, the politburo didn't want to be disbanded. (corrupted wave?)

That is to say, the plateau is often fought against by entrenched groups, and when it does emerge it requires constant human supervision. It's a sociological bubble of sorts that requires constant scrutiny and maintenance, and is never, ever stable. But the plateau is recognized as valuable by all parties and does (hopefully) emerge, given the right conditions.

Elections are a prime example of an unstable, man-made plateau. Although the political body can devolve into tyranny on either the left or the right, everyone everywhere including leadership would prefer legitimacy. It makes things so much easier. So elections are supported and become a tradition, and with good maintenance they ensure a plateau where a civil-war revolutionary scenario becomes unnecessary.

Iran has recently been experiencing a false plateau, in that the election of Khatemi in 1998 conveyed no power on the victor while the hardliner who replaced him has full government powers. So one party has been neutered.. Assuming the Moderates represent a real majority, there is a spiky summit in the future when true polarity shifts. That is, a civil war..
_____________________________________

In biological terms the equivalent is the male-female dichotomy. Neither side is fertile alone. The natural world evolved this option at inception to separate and make more efficient these contradictory natural tendencies (male= competition, female=nurturing).. The alternative scenario would include.

1) less genetic variability, where every descendent is a clone.
2) less competition for fitness = everyone would reproduce, and the Darwinian competition would be crowded with also-rans that could more easily be eliminated by Debb refusing to go on a date with me in the first place. Better that mortality remove them naturally.

The fact that cooperation with another outside animal is necessary for survival is a tacit natural allowance, supported over time by evolutionary selection, that ultra-competition within a single species is not fruitful, and certainly, ultra-nurturing of ones own offspring is similarly less than optimal.

More accurately, there were almost certainly several reproductive schemes swimming protozoa in the protazoa 3+ billion years ago, and this was the best option which overwhelmed the rest.

So, evolution has established a niche where there is recognition in nature of a need for a kind of plateau for larger organisms. That's what works.

There is not, however, any kind of plateau built into politics.
There is a great yearning for one, and a tendency, when lucky, for such a plateau to emerge and to function, but it's not a stable phenomenon. It cannot be counted on for any length of time without constant oversight, and nothing is ever assured or written in stone.

The Mists of Avalon

2005-09-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

The Mists of Avalon movie (2001), starring the lovely Julianna Margulies and the tough old Anjelica Houston.
This was just excellent. I could see that it was adapted from a novel and that it had a wider scope and ambition than the usual miniseries-scifichannel dreck.
It posits several interesting points that add context and meaning the the Arthurian legend.

The key points:
Merlin was not a Wizard - he was a Druid Priest, a Pagan who opposed Christianity in favor of the Gaia, the Earth Goddess - and the Lady of the Lake was not a Fairy Queen, she was the head priestess of this ancient, Matriarchal religion, with spiritual magic thrown in). Apart from the usual soap opera of this kind of thing, there is also the larger context of the slow demise of Druidism and its replacement by Christianity.

And meanwhile the Angles are invading by ship every year from Denmark and Germany, a relentless tide of progress, perhaps for good, perhaps not.

The Druids lose favor with Gaia, as the Lady of the Lake had attempted to breed both of Arthur's offspring in the siring of little Mordred, and this is such an act against nature that their magic would would fail, and the Druidic world would fall into decay and be conqured. The Earth Goddess would thereafter be be represented indirectly - through the worship of Mary, mother of Jesus, which continues to this day.

I just thought the characterizations were just peachy here. All the motivations and dialogue felt, if not Great, at least accessible and fun and full of character. The budget was not very high on this - perhaps $20M for a 3+ hour movie, but they made the most of it.
One standout: Samantha Mathis as Guinevere - It's good to know she's still acting.

See this in conjunction with the milestone Excalibur (1981), by the great John Boorman, which shows a much shorter, more traditional Arthur-Legend storyline with very beautiful cinematography and a very different feel in its dialog and editing. It would be considered the 'front' story while the events of the Mists of Avalon continued behind the scenes, so to speak. As expected, Merlin is a wizard, there is no Pagan backstory or feminist slant, and Morgaine is the enemy. Look for a young Patrick Stewart as one of the knights of the round table.

Four Types of Truth

2005-09-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

1) PureTruth:
PureTruth(s) are an abstract method that follow logical rules that can be empirically proven backwards and forwards.
Examples do not connect to real-world physical objects or interactions, although they are applied as the descriptive language and modeling-method for real-world observations.

The examples are primarily mathematics.
2+2 = 4. 2x2 = 4. Pi = 3.14159.. No other answer would be logically true or provable.

2) Physical Truth:
Observations of the natural world that are clear and provable through experimentation.
This category represents the Hard Sciences - chemistry, physics, biology, etc.

Example:The speed of sound at sea level is ? 620 MPH.
Iron is the element which transports oxygen in the blood.
There are 26 chromisomes in the human genome.
The largest land-predator in Asia is the Siberian Tiger.
G = Acceleration @ 32.9 M/S² E=MC²
The speed of light in a vacuum, etc.

3) Convential Truth:
Facts that are true because vast numbers of people agree on them as an organizing principle, but which do not occur in nature and have no meaning outside of human collective experience.

A red light at an intersection signals ‘stop’.
Washington, D.C. is the capital of the

United States

.
Americans all drive on the right-hand side of the road.
Americans speak English.

It is through the formation of Collective Truths that society functions.

4) Subjective Truth:

The trick is always to have the Conventional Truth match the Physical Truth.

There are often so many variables in complex phenomena that no one can definitively know the Truth. And since no one person’s opinion is inherently better than another’s (at least in principle), this version of the truth is personal, and may not be subject to scrutiny the way the others are. This is the one that really gets people into trouble.

Jesus is the son of God. Saint Peter is a real saint.
There is only one god and Mohammed is his prophet.
Everyone in America should own an automobile.

People generally work with the default assumption that no one person’s opinion is intrinsically more valuable than another, and so people’s working theory for many (if not most) activities is “there is no such thing is objective truth”.
____________________

Subjective truth is a practical concept, but it is a paralyzing at a certain level. It leads to moral relativism and ultimately selfishness and indecision.

One could easily say “The Nazis are not evil – they are just different, with different priorities.” Or “Stalin caused a lot of deaths, but who am I to be against him? “

In other cases both positions might be demonstrably, physically true, but each person might have different and conflicting priorities. Environment vs. Industry, Healthcare vs. LowTaxes, etc. But the debate would appear the same and would be directed around Truth, both on paper and in the hearts and minds of the debaters.

In areas where subjective truths can conflict, and collective decisions are important for society, the American method of solving the potential conflict is Democracy. - I.E. - Majority rule. In this way, Subjective truths are transformed into Conventional truths, as large numbers of people decide to work in cooperation towards a society which both reflects their best collective understanding of Physical truth and the priorities and of their society.

In theory, if conventional truth is at odds with physical truth, and people feel there are better methods than the government’s policies, then democracy can correct the imbalance and ‘right the ship’, so to speak. Or if democracy fails because people are misinformed or brainwashed, and correction becomes impossible, the ship sinks as it did in Germany in WWII. A more verifiable, accurate Truth emerges from the aftermath.

So these three types represent a heirarchy, from subjective, to conventional, to Physical as the final definition. Pure Truth exists as an abstract, but is more of a mental tool-set for science and pursuit of physical truth.

More on this later.

Political Cartoons

2005-09-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

These cartoonists represent my worldview and graphic sensibility and I admire and enjoy their work.

Hopefully they're O.K. with the reproduction of my favorites here. If not, please let me know.

SJ
(617) 359-5889

Pinky the Wild Cat

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying’. And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did’.
Jack Handey
Deep Thoughts

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice, I.iii

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Proverb

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.
Richard Feynman (1918-1988)

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying.
Woody Allen (1935-)

The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you.
Kin Hubbard

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.
Dennis Wholey (1937-)

When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail.
Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are.
Harry S Truman (1884-1972)

The Devil's Daughter

2005-09-14T13:36:00.000-07:00

What can I say.

Barbara has beautiful posture
and she's easy on the eyes.

Letter to a Fiery RightWing GasBag

2005-09-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

Jay Severin is a local right-wing talk show host on FM96.9 in Boston. He is fascinating and infuriating to me. I admire his beautiful, articulate verbiage and breadth of knowledge and his powerful voice. But he's brainwashed and his logic is flawed and he takes pathetic cheap shots at his opponents and Librul adversaries on the air. Much of the time he's spews unbridled anger, which I don't really understand. Anyway, he's an amazing specimen.

Recently I called in to his show for about 4 minutes before he cut me off, so I sent this email.
________________________________________

Jay,

I was the caller who around 6:40 monday night who gave you a hard time about homosexual marriage for about four minutes before you cut me off.

That really was not the reason I called. My point there was that gay activity and gay nomenclature, whether they want to call their couplehoods 'Unions' or 'marriages', etc. have no direct impact on your relationships or your personal well-being. It's a linguistic red-herring. I think the GOP uses this issue, among others, to distract voters from dollars and cents priorities. Like why is there mercury in the fish, and why is health insurance going up so much faster than inflation? Etc.

But if you're determined to talk about gay marriage, fine.
A) I'm not gay, just so you know. B) When conversations about two consenting adults devolves into Man-Penguin marriage, which is where you took it, you must know you have a weak case and you're just shouting me down.

As for whether someone should be able to vote on gay marriage on the federal or state level. I don't know why this should go to a vote. It's none of government's business. You can't vote on the status of straight relationships So why should you be able to vote on gays? Unless you're a bigot?

As you know, some things should NOT be subject to majority rule. Otherwise all the African Americans in the southern states would still be slaves. Or was the Civil Rights movement .. and for that matter the Civil War... a big step backward for you? You champion the views that in another time would have put you on the side of the slaveholders, which was after all a functioning democracy of sorts. (White) Southerners all voted for slavery to continue, fair and square. So don't give me 'majority rule' as an absolute virtue and pretend that's all there is to it.

As it is, gays are only 6-10% of the population, you have a permenant whipping post to distract people away from those huge, regressive tax-cuts over the past 5 years. Good for you. I guess you believe, or you side with the people who believe, that the deficit is healthy and should keep growing forever.

And if you don't think so, you should vote for the Democrats. Because they're the people who, despite their flaws, have shown under Clinton that they understood arithmatic.

And they also don't lie to take us to war (recently). Most people would think lying or incompetence, which caused the deaths of many thousands of Iraqis and Americans, would disqualify someone from High office. But not you.

Anyway,

The original point I wanted to make was that you were claiming Ruth Bader Ginzberg avoided all her questioning during her confirmation hearings, and that Ted Kennedy defended Earl Warren when he did the same thing.

Prove it. You would have so much more substance if you employed an intern and had them dig out the transcripts. It would give you plenty of fodder to fill air time, you would convince all the fence-sitters that your points have substance, and your show would immediately achieve national-syndication-level depth and stature.
Al Franken has researchers.

As it is I think it's likely that you're blowing hot air.
You're a determined apologist for Bush. Don't pretend otherwise.

Stuart in Brighton

A Once Beautiful Automobile

2005-09-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

The Subaru Impreza WRX came out in 2002 and I loved it from a distance.
But whoever is running their front-end styling department isn't playing with a full deck.

See here.

2002 - Cute, unique, eccentric

2004 - Less so..

2005 - Aughh!

Like a duck-billed platypus!
What can they be thinking?

Quotes 3 - and the Matrix

2005-09-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail - November 1972

We accept the reality of the world we are presented with, it's as simple as that.
Christof
The Truman Show - 1998

An unexamined life is not worth living
Socrates 420 B.C.

No god & no religion can survive ridicule, no political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field & live.
Mark Twain - 1885

(My favorite Man-God Metaphysical Babble movie dialogue.)

The Matrix Relaoded – Neo Meets the Architect

The Architect - Hello, Neo.

Neo - Who are you?

The Architect - I am the Architect. I created the matrix. I've been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also irrelevant.

Neo - Why am I here?

The Architect - Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. While it remains a burden to sedulously avoid it, it is not unexpected, and thus not beyond a measure of control. Which has led you, inexorably, here.

Neo - You haven't answered my question.

The Architect - Quite right. Interesting. That was quicker than the others.

*The responses of the other Ones appear on the monitors: "Others? What others? How many? Answer me!"*

The Architect - The matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth version.

*Again, the responses of the other Ones appear on the monitors: "Five versions? Three? I've been lied too. This is bullshit."*

Neo: There are only two possible explanations: either no one told me, or no one knows.

The Architect - Precisely. As you are undoubtedly gathering, the anomaly's systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations.

*Once again, the responses of the other Ones appear on the monitors: "You can't control me! F*ck you! I'm going to kill you! You can't make me do anything!*

Neo - Choice. The problem is choice.

*The scene cuts to Trinity fighting an agent, and then back to the Architect's room*

The Architect - The first matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime. A triumph equaled only by its monumental failure. The inevitability of its doom is as apparent to me now as a consequence of the imperfection inherent in every human being, thus I redesigned it based on your history to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature. However, I was again frustrated by failure. I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother.

Neo - The Oracle.

The Architect - Please. As I was saying, she stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of all test subjects accepted the program, as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level. While this answer functioned, it was obviously fundamentally flawed, thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anomaly, that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself. Ergo, those that refused the program, while a minority, if unchecked, would constitute an escalating probability of disaster.

Neo - This is about Zion.

The Architect - You are here because Zion is about to be destroyed. Its every living inhabitant terminated, its entire existence eradicated.

Neo - Bullshit.

*The responses of the other Ones appear on the monitors: "Bullshit!"*

The Architect - Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

*Scene cuts to Trinity fighting an agent, and then back to the Architects room.*

The Architect - The function of the One is now to return to the source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program. After which you will be required to select from the matrix 23 individuals, 16 female, 7 male, to rebuild Zion. Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash killing everyone connected to the matrix, which coupled with the extermination of Zion will ultimately result in the extinction of the entire human race.

Neo - You won't let it happen, you can't. You need human beings to survive.
The Architect - There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept. However, the relevant issue is whether or not you are ready to accept the responsibility for the death of every human being in this world.

*The Architect presses a button on a pen that he is holding, and images of people from all over the matrix appear on the monitors*

The Architect - It is interesting reading your reactions. Your five predecessors were by design based on a similar predication, a contingent affirmation that was meant to create a profound attachment to the rest of your species, facilitating the function of the one. While the others experienced this in a very general way, your experience is far more specific. Vis-a-vis, love.

*Images of Trinity fighting the agent from Neo's dream appear on the monitors*
Neo - Trinity.

The Architect - Apropos, she entered the matrix to save your life at the cost of her own.

Neo - No!

The Architect - Which brings us at last to the moment of truth, wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately expressed, and the anomaly revealed as both beginning, and end. There are two doors. The door to your right leads to the source, and the salvation of Zion. The door to the left leads back to the matrix, to her, and to the end of your species. As you adequately put, the problem is choice. But we already know what you're going to do, don't we? Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic, and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you from the simple, and obvious truth: she is going to die, and there is nothing that you can do to stop it.

*Neo walks to the door on his left*

The Architect - Humph. Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.

Neo - If I were you, I would hope that we don't meet again.

The Architect - We won't.

Dedicated Geek website

Quotes 2 - And Bob Dylan

2005-09-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

Let us be thankful we have commerce. Buy more. Buy more now. Buy more and be happy.
-Loudspeaker Voice - THX 1138 (George Lucas - 1972)
THX 1138 Script

We Welcome Other Faiths (just kidding)
-Church Sign
The Simpsons

Well huzzah, huzzah. I'll just throw back my legs and pollute my britches with delight.
-Mr. Burns
The Simpsons,

I was working on a flat tax proposal and I accidentally proved there's no god.
-Homer Simpson

I'm gonna die! Jesus, Allah, Buddha - I love you all!
-Homer Simpson

You are a blinding brilliant light from heaven.
-Will Ferrell as James Lipton SNL parody of "Inside the Actor's Studio"

Sadly, now there can be but one outcome.
-Darrell Hammond
Quoting the nature channel when a weakened animal strays from the pack.
____________________________________

Tangled Up In Blue

Early one morning the sun was shining

I was laying in bed

Wond'ring if she'd changed it all

If her hair was still red

Her folks they said our lives together

Sure was gonna be rough

They never did like Mama's homemade dress

Papa's bankbook wasn't big enough

And I was standing on the side of the road

Rain falling on my shoes

Heading out for the East Coast

Lord knows I've paid some dues getting through

Tangled up in blue

She was married when we first met

Soon to be divorced

I helped her out of a jam I guess

But I used a little too much force

We drove that car as far as we could

Abandoned it out West

Split it up on a dark sad night

Both agreeing it was best

She turned around to look at me

As I was walking away

I heard her say over my shoulder

"We'll meet again someday on the avenue"

Tangled up in blue

I had a job in the great north woods

Working as a cook for a spell

but I never did like it all that much

And one day the ax just fell.

So I drifted down to New Orleans

Where I happened to be employed

Working for a while on a fishing boat

right outside of Delacroix

But all the while I was alone

The past was close behind

I seen a lot of women

But she never escaped my mind and I just grew

Tangled up in blue

She was working in a topless place

And I stopped in for a beer

I just kept looking at her side of her face

In the spotlight so clear

And later on as the crowd thinned out

I's just about to do the same

She was standing there in back of my chair

Said to me "Don't I know your name ?"

I muttered something underneath my breath

She studied the lines on my face

I must admit I felt a little uneasy

When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe

Tangled up in blue

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe

"I thought you'd never say hello" she said

"You look like the silent type"

Then she opened up a book of poems

And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet

From the thirteenth century

And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burning coal

Pouring off of every page

Like it was written in my soul from me to you

Tangled up in blue

I lived with them on Montague Street

In a basement down the stairs

There was music in the cafes at night

And revolution in the air

Then he started into dealing with slaves

And something inside of him died

She had to sell everything she owned

And froze up inside

And when finally the bottom fell out I became withdrawn

The only thing I knew how to do

Was to keep on keeping on like a bird that flew

Tangled up in blue

So now I'm going back again

I got to get her somehow

All the people we used to know

They're an illusion to me now

Some are mathematicians

Some are carpenter's wives

Don't know how it all got started

I don't what they're doing with their lives

But me I'm still on the road

Heading for another joint

We always did feel the same

We just saw it from a different point of view

Tangled up in Blue.

Bob Dylan, 1973

Katrina and King George

2005-09-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Bush has been ripped to shreds over the slow federal reaction to Katrina this past week. I guess the to and fro' of battle between his phalanx of brainwashed defenders in Big Media and the Leftwing Blogosphere is entertaining. But as usual, without an independent inquiry this cacophony will quiet down as soon as the next National Event occurs. The guy's a big shmuck. It's well documented - one more disaster won't change anything.

One detail that the press doesn't seem to notice. Right now the Rove machine is in damage-control-mode, so they're scrambling. But Bush didn't originally see himself as the hands-on leader. Their plan and goal was to fulfill the psychological niche of Leadership, because the Loyal Bushies on the ground need to work for someone. They, like most people, don't necessarily have the capacity to act independently in these circumstances and truly run their own show.. They must be in the service of a Higher Power, and that's Bush's working model for his job - to be the Noble Lord, to whom one owes allegiance. This is an across-the-board observation. The Dems also fulfill this need, but unlike Bush, I don't think it's their prime Modus Operandi.

So Bush goes down to Louisiana and hundreds of people fawn over him, and he conducts press conferences using desperately needed helicopters as background props. I think this makes him a tone-deaf jerk and a showboat, but to his followers Bush's attention validates their suffering. The Leader is in paying close attention, so their situation is legitimated. The mental framework they've constructed for their lives remains intact.

This is similar to Bush Senior in 1991 when he awkwardly said to the camera "Message: I care!" . Under the royal model of leadership, this is enough - it is all one can ask of one's Superiors. It didn't work for Hurricane Andrew back then and it's not working now. The wounded ask not whether the Royal Bushies care - they ask what they've done - in both cases, too little too late.

I don't expect Bush to know very much about disaster management, as the great man can only know so much, and God knows he needed his 5-week vacation. His larger responsibility as President has been to appoint talented people, not political hacks - and to fire them if they don't succeed.

He also has to allocate money to prevent this kind of thing. He's always failed at these tasks, surrounding himself instead with schemers and incompetent ideologues and reducing the budget to pay for tax cuts. Catastrophe's like this are a prime example (in my opinion) of the main purpose of government. Percieved failure here would capsize the administration.

The telling trait of Bush's press conference is their shortage of details and heavy doses of cheerleading blather where they're basically ramming their version of the world into the mediasphere where no mistakes were made and everything is on track. If you can change the past you can change the present - it's plain as day.

Bush even gave George Tenant and Paul Bremer the Medal of Freedom, to aggressively whitewash the disconnect between objective success and Bushworld's surreal alternate universe in Iraq where we're winning and things are going swell. This disaster in 'conventional reality' is the inevitable outcome of the all-PR-All-the-time administration. It's probably only the tip of the iceberg.

It's been interesting to see the media try to spin this kerfuffle away over the past few days. I expect they'll succeed over time. We were beaten in November, and now the public has become cynical and docile and impervious to scandal. We have three more years to go.

The Numa Numa Dance. :)

She's gone.

2005-09-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

Mary has left the office and it's unlikely I will see her again.

I feel very alone right now.

I wish she had said goodbye.

S

Political Humor

2005-08-26T16:42:00.000-07:00

A few old favorites from the past election.

Cheney without
his costume.

Yawning Boy :)

Bush Speech -
Veterans of Foreign Wars - 8/22/05

Frodo failed
Bush has the ring!

Great Quotes 1

2005-08-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Thomas Jefferson

In the beginning the universe was created. This has been widely criticized and generally regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservative.
John Stuart Mill

The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.
Teddy Roosevelt

The administration says the American people want tax cuts. Well, duh. The American people also want drive-through nickel beer night. The American people want to lose weight by eating ice cream. The American people love the Home Shopping Network because it's commercial-free.
Will Durst

Lewis Sinclair, on the value of first-hand experience in journalism.
Young foals were sent down the mine shafts to pull coal wagons through the tunnels.
When I asked how the horses returned through the narrow openings, everyone laughed. The horses did not return. Only their bones would see the sunlight again.

One cannot simultaneously work for peace and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein
This sounds profound and it is. .. But it invariably leads to a bothersome conversation about the necessity of adequate defense, strong borders etc.

But it is a natural lie to tell, my lord!
Court Barrister arguing for the defense before the Puritan Inquisitor in the Salem Witch trials - Arthur Miller's The Crucible - 1952

Enforcing debt payments is the state.
Larry Gonnick - Ancient Roman Patrician to a local peasant - History of the World Pt.2
As true today as it was then.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
Anne Coulter in her syndicated column. Sept. 15, 2001.

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
Joseph Stalin

The wisdom of Star Trek...
Kirk: Well there it is...war. We didn't want it, but we've got it.
Spock: Curious how often you humans manage to obtain that which you do not want.

On a lighter note:

What's the goal of the Jewish Football Team? To Get the Quarter Back!

Why are Jewish noses so big? The air is free! (guffaw)

Dorothy Parker, challenged to use the word 'horticulture' in a sentence:
You can lead a whore to culture - But you can't make her think. :)

One time when I was feeling very generous, I filled up my rental car with High-Test.
- Woody Allen's standup.

Why is it that everyone writes on the walls but me?
Graffiti on a bathhouse wall in the ruins of Pompei - 79 AD.

Movie Review - Luther

2005-08-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed this movie very much. It's describes a great shift in people's inner beliefs and their heartfelt religious convictions and the beginning of the great schism Luther caused in Europe in the 1500's. It's a very lofty, ambitious goal.

Although I am not a Christian, I saw this as more of a story of breaking away from corruption and manipulation of the Catholic Church of the period. The abuse of religion is a very sophisticated and ugly form of enslavement and the struggle for freedom from these sorts of constraints is usually too complex for film, all the more reason to look closeley at this work.

I also appreciate the excellent period detail and the fine dialogue and discussion of the issues of the day. Of course everything had to be simplified to fit within 2 hours, but they still presented the key theological points clearly and with with earnest passion. I felt the producers were very sincere in their intentions and if perhaps they were at times a bit awkward or obvious in their presentation, it was a forgivable flaw.

On the other hand, Luther was not the saint he was portrayed here. He was famously anti-Semitic. At times he was enthralled by the violence around him and called for more bloodshed and he didn't necessarily love the peasants like we see here..he was alligned with the local nobility against the Catholic heirarchy. Luther was a mixed bag.

In fact he was a very eccentric, difficult curmudgeon in later life. If he did have a hint of the divine in him it was only a part of the whole.Now the producers/underwriters of this movie is a Lutheran foundation..so one might call this a whitewash.. And I think that's unfortunately somewhat true.

Yet on balance I thought this project was a great success because in a world of junk movies this was about something deep and important which is a valuable history lesson. Just add a grain of salt.

Obvious Pseudo-Scientific Blather #1

2005-08-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

The kind of science I’m interested in is the unprovable future speculative kind, where I can extrapolate what I see today into future trends.

None of what follows here can be proven. That doesn’t make it wrong. The observtions seem clear at face value, and only time will tell with the predictions. But writing this kind of thing goes put me out on a limb when I’m talking to people who don’t think along these lines. Which is to say, I can be a bit flaky sometimes. It's true. I’d better get used to it.

The similarities and differences between an organism and a super-organism

The Super-O is human Society, The Global marketplace, the General Human Condition in advanced civilization. This is just a list of curious similarities between the traditional animals and this larger organizational structure we walk around in every day.

1) Transport Structures

Formation of veins/arteries to move different materials.
Including secondary transport systems for different substances.

Arteries & veins
- primary and secondary
Lymphatic system

Vs.

Highways & surface roads - primary and secondary
River barges and railroads and air traffic.
______________________
Nerves vs. Fiber optic lines

2) Organized Feeding and Waste Elimination..

One jaw and stomach and GI tract to extract food for the whole organism.
One bowel for elimination. One kidney for purification.

Vs.

Farms to produce food.
Water treatment facilities, to take the waste far out into the ocean.

3) Maintaining Membranes:
Modulation of wide variations/fluctuations of outside conditions.

The Body:

Temperature Modulation
98.6

Water availability to all cells.
- constant maint.
Temperature
Heating, air conditioning

Water availability to everyone -
-constant maint.
The whole organism pursues a full diet to meet metabolic requirements (salt, iron, etc.)

A Large spectrum of specific nutrients are then provided to each cell, allowing for each to specialize more on particular functions. This allows greater specialization of cells.

Fat cells can store energy, bone cells can provide support.. It’s all teamwork.

Energy Regulation: sugar out of the liver.
Pumping of the heart.

White Blood Cells screen for Pathogens
Can mass to defend wounds/repel invaders.

Cancer: A part of the organism refuses to cooperate & die, and takes over the body.
The whole organism pursues the necessary diety of metabolic requirements, (salt mines, Iron mines, etc.)

Vs. Maintaing Membranes / Barriers In Society:

Individuals can pig-out on these to their heart’s content = This sustenance allows greater specialization of worker’s individual skills.

Everyone doesn’t have to know how toengineer a bridge, fix a car, etc.

Energy Regulation:
Congressional Budget,
The Fed controlling interest rates.
***corollary: Money is energy, or is a direct stand-in. It goes almost without saying.

INS screens for invalid/unauthorized.
Work Permits/Greencards required.
Military can mass to strike larger targets.
For defense, not offense - that would be silly.

Analog to Cancer: North Korea refuses to cooperate and assimalate (and die), and seeks to take over the body.

Difference between organisms and the Societal super-organism:

Body Vs. Society:

Specialized reproduction vs. EVERY PERSON IS FERTILE.
Wholly owned part of the body vs. every particle is a whole new body, if ever possible.
Will die on command for the greater whole if pressed vs. Individuals will throw the system and start anew

Unlike an animal, which has a built-in lifespan and only one way to grow outwards (procreation), Society is a constantly growing cancer, with it's cells (people) growing and expanding in every direction. Their self-interest/survival instinct takes precedence.

In terms of longer-term evolution, this larger organizational structure has dominated our direction for the last 40K+ years. We’ve evolved into a less general, more specialized creature over time. We're not as strong as apes, we require a large, rich diet. Most people can’t run far or fast. Our senses aren’t especially acute. Modern humans in smaller numbers would never survive in the wild - with tigers and bad weather and strange diseases. If society falls, 90% would not survive the breakdown of our super-environment - including me.

The older clans and 'groups of humans used to entail a few hundred individuals at most. This larger Society/Market is a new pheonomenon, less than 6000 years old, and is now in a state of rapidly increasing complexity and flux.

I believe that with future evolution there will eventually be a split in Homo Sapiens into two or more species (see HG Wells - The Time Machine). Perhaps this will manifest itself as a sort of extension of the castes in India the English Class-system from cultural phenomenon into biological differentiation. Genetic engineering will make this a reality within the next 100+ years.

Meanwhile the civilized 1st world will slowly grow at 1-3% a year while the third world will go through faster growth and decline cycles. The 1st world will eventually triumph, and those who can’t transfer between these 'organisms' or who find themselves at the outskirts of the system, will be virtual slaves, or will die. Guatemala coffee growers come to mind.

Would they be better off in smaller societies, outside of the global Marketplace?
I don’t know. They won’t have that option anyway.

Or perhaps we’re all virtual slaves anyway.
I certainly feel that way.. But I do have health care and steady food supply.
That’s something. If we’re small links in an endless chain of existence, with limited latitude, then at least my eyes are open to this vast organizational puzzle-box of which I am a part.

If God(fate) gave us this gift of limited self-awareness, we have to live with that blessing and take it to the limit.. It’s our only gift. To turn away would be to deny the closest thing to a holy spirit that I can manage to digest.

Photos

2005-08-17T05:56:00.000-07:00

Morgan Butler in the Back Bay Office

Sammy waits impatiently as I sit & read at the Reservoir near Boston College at sunset.

Dieting can be unpleasant.
A serving of rice at the Prudential Center Mall.

Mary S - Right back at you.

The combined Gibson crew chat in front of a rental apartment in the South End that we are looking to review & price.

Joel Lapidus flanked by gourmet cheeses at Formaggio's in the South End, ordering a Roast Beef sandwich

My father reading the newspaper on the porch last Sunday.

Mom on the porch in a state of repose, with the cat nestled behind her knees.

Movie Review - The Assas. of Richard Nixon

2005-08-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

This is a wretchedly sad, depressing film - but since that's it's exact intention I would count it as success on it's own terms. Watching the lovely Naomi Watts and the rest of the cast beat Samuel Bicke into a pulp - not even to submission, but beyond that - we watch as they actively abandon him again and again...it was hurtful to witness - but I did care about Sam and I could not look away.

Penn made Sam's violent plan understandable. A person under such severe, constant assault will strike out, rather than die quietly. I surely feel Sam was an honorable man - crazy, but noble, in a twisted sense. I wonder what the larger story was with him. He may have been on the downward spiral of paranoid schizophenia, or he might have hit his head in a car accident and lost his mental faculties. But nobody even cared. The sense of isolation and anomie was very disturbing.

The acting, dialogue and period design were also just superb. Even the film's colortones felt felt authentic to the early 70's. It just looked perfect. This film was still a total downer and I doubt that the Academy will notice such a niche film, but Sean Penn surely deserves a nomination for this performance.

Bush speaks out for Intelligent Design

2005-08-12T06:53:00.000-07:00

Bush has weighed in on the Kansas school board's new plan to teach Intelligient Design as an alternative to Evolution. It was framed in the usual way - 'we have to give kids access to different schools of thought, and let them decide.. teach both sides..'

It's pure bullshit. I.D. has no testable concepts, makes no predictions and it has no working mechanism. Worse, it doesn't explain the problem of Where Intelligence first originated. No accredited scientist of any stature supports it. The only use of such a lesson would be to demonstrate that which is patently not science, and is therefore identifiable as junk and flawed logic. But that's not their plan.

But the Wingnut Base loves this stuff and they curiously see W's approval as akin to divine intervention. Once again - is bush a pious fo0l, or is he cynically playing his followers, or is he too dim to comprehend what he's doing? It might all be subliminal on his part. W is such an arrogant, deceptive jerk. I do so dislike him.

Update: Bush Lackey Bill Frist has just signed on with the evangelical wingnuts on the ID debate. That's fine. He wants to be president, but only a centrist has any chance in the 2008 general election. The tides are against him this time so he's probably bought his ticket to oblivion.

Update 2: The brand new Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) has formed in response to this Kansas kerfuffle, and has given me a brief moment of happiness. :)

Touched Indeed!

Cindy Sheehan is a war mother from California who lost her son in Iraq. People are flocking to her vigil outside of Bush's Crawford ranch - a small army of fellow-traveling protesters and sympathetic media outlets. I may side with W on this, as it would be a bad precedent for people to just stalk the president everywhere he goes and demanding face time. But Bush has an all-GOP congress and has avoided maybe a dozen legitimate investigations over the years, WMD's, mismanagement, fraud and deceit - so if this is the only way to get under his skin, so be it.

As it is she's had her 15 minutes last week.. so now I guess Bush can ignore her with impunity in the Press. That's his style. Meanwhile the great Hannity is telling his vast flock of lemmings that this is all organized by the Liberal media.. So it's a conspiracy..of people who disagree with the war.. What a bunch of weasels. Hannity would be a gifted greeter into the first level of Hell.

Ode to Richard Nixon

2005-08-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Nixon became president the month I was born and had left the scene just before I became politically aware. Both he and Johnson were invisible to me in the 70's. They belonged to a past era which nobody much wanted to revisit, and so I knew very little about either of them as a kid or teen.

By resigning Nixon had admitted at least some guilt in the vast number of things he was accused of and his abdication was a political cataclysm. Through my childhood years he lived out his old age as a pariah off in San Clemente, California, the personification of the period of enormous turbulence during the height of the Vietnam war. He was the living embodiment of the dark heart and excess of the GOP, and everyone, especially in Democratic Massachusetts, considered him a cancer on the body politic and was happy he was gone. To many his ouster was the triumph of their political lives.

But Nixon's resignation was sincere and he was mostly contrite. In retirement he was a sad old man in exile and after a while the Press which had hounded him from office allowed him some dignity as an elder statesman and left him alone.

In 1978 he published a memoir as big as a phone book which I recently came across on Amazon. He wasn't anything like the gaping caricature I expected. I've read about 1/3 of the 1200 page book and I have to say - I really like him. He's very thoughtful, well spoken, modest, with good intentions towards the country and had a warm, respectful dialogue with the major figures of the day.

It's a beautiful book. Reading it was easy to see how he had become a leader. He writes with the air of solid, calm composure and reasonableness which I admire. If he had doublespeak tendencies, the clues are missing for someone who didn't live through that time period.

But his flaws are still very much on display here. For one thing, Nixon wasn't entirely remorseful. He saw himself as the victim of many media conspiracies and other antagonists, both real and imagined. But Nixon has the breadth of worldview and honesty with himself, and by extension the reader, to allow us into his world.

The personality contrast with Bush could not be more clear - Maybe the candor came from Nixon's retirement, but I can't imagine Bush being this straight and honest with his audience. I feel that Bush just isn't smart or eloquent enough to write this kind of book, and he's too secretive to make that leap of trust to allow us into his mind.

Nixon seems sincerely misguided, which is understandable. But I know enough about current events and G.W. Bush that I see more deception and arrogance, which are far less forgivable traits, even after the fact. I believe Bush isn't trying to be straight with the American people - For him it's all a game, and full sincerity has an implied weakness and admittion of potential fallibility which Bush won't concede.

And Nixon did have a good reason for going down the wrong path. During an era when 30 soldiers were being killed in Vietnam every single day - over ten times the volume of Iraq - and the world convulsing in protest and chaos around them, Nixon's lieutenants and were just brutalized by their environment and lost their sense of direction and fought back with every realpolotik' weapon they could imagine, under the understnding that everyone else was doing it, so they should too - the classic slippery slope argument.

He was much too close to the action to see how complicity he was - and as the leader he was de-facto fully culpable. But he did take responsibility resign over it - so if it is noble to forgive, then he deserves some rest.

My folks, however, who were voting in the 60's and 70's, still disliked Nixon because they thought the GOP machine had sabotaged all the moderate Democratic primary candidates, leaving only Muskie and worse, McGovern, who was far too weak and radical. So he had effectively dismantled Democracy - even aside from the Watergate bugging and coverup. I'm sure it was infuriating at the time, but now, after the cancer has been lanced and we have survived him, Nixon's oversteps feel like water under the bridge. It's time to move on.

I'm only sad that such a great figure has passed from the scene. I hope he had some enjoyment of life in retirement.

In summary, Nixon's Triumphs:

1) He got out us Vietnam (too late)
2) He got us off the gold standard
3) He went to China
4) Salt Treaty

His enormous Flaws:
1)The Southern Strategy - Building a majority by pursuing Southern racists cast out of the Democratic Party during the Civil Rights years. This decision set the faultlines for politics for the past 30 years.
2) Prolonged the Vietnam war?
3) Subverted the Constitution- destroyed democracy, etc.

The Nature of Good and Evil

2005-07-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

I have trouble with philosophy. The air around the that section of the bookstore is one of tenured professors, using over-specialized language and producing wooden, nitpicky essays which often don’t shed light for the layman. But I’m interested in big questions, so here’s part of my perspective at one of the larger ones.

What are Good and Evil?

These are very subjective and frequently fall into the category of ‘you know it when you see them’. Or they can be defined indirectly or by reverse-reference. For example, Hitler was Evil, so by definition, fighting Hitler would be Good. This might add clarity, but does not address the basic definition.

One functional definition of Good is selflessness - sacrificing one's personal resources or opportunities for a greater health of others or the greater society. Evil would be the opposite - sacrificing the Greater organization's resources for personal/individual gain. This model works for me the majority of the time..

It fits my personal left-leaning worldview in a left/right dichotomy - The Democrats would fill the Left/cooperative position and the GOP filling the Right/Selfish slot in opposition, in a sort of Yin vs. Yang state of dynamic equilibrium. But that only touches the surface.

Yin and Yang are inter-related, so aligning with one to the exclusion of the other doesn’t work. If Yin were defined as selflessness and cooperation., Yang would still be an integral, required part of the whole. A world without some element of greed and self-interest would not function, and selflessness, when taken to extreme, leads to a sterile, flat society, devoid of competitive achievement and the passion both required by and intrinsically part of the human psyche.

If it were formally codified into law, a selfless cooperative society would be undermined constantly and would be impossible to implement. The individual’s situation would be indistinguishable from slavery. So that can hardly be an absolute Good. The best example of this is the failure of classical Marxism

Also there are questions of scale which plague this paradigm. It only works from the individual perspective in relation to their society. But society itself can be directed toward Evil goals, and so conformity in that case would be complicity in that Evil. For example, Individual Bolsheviks or Nazis could be selfless and most sacrificed everything for the greater whole - it was just that their larger organizations were genocidal..

The opposite view of Good in this paradigm – Freedom to be true to oneself and following one’s own destiny to the exclusion, even the exploitation, of the greater whole..never really worked for me. This is the right-leaning perspective. It always seems flawed by self-interest and self-serving corruption.

But this kind of Freedom does allow for market-economics, which is a magic bullet which makes up for perceived drawbacks. I don’t completely buy this viewpoint. I believe It’s the ultimate sophist argument – that is, an excuse to do what one would do anyway – take advantage of others and exploit the environment for personal gain without compassion or caring for mankind. It requires no self-discipline at all – just the ability to look past suffering – something I don’t see as a virtue.

But it’s hardwired into us and it’s genuinely necessary at a certain level, so it can’t be ‘Evil’ per say. If the paradigm were Responsibility vs. Freedom – There must be a place for freedom, which includes all the negative options entailed in that freedom.

Nietzsche was the ultimate Right-Wing Philosopher who took this worship of Freedom as an absolute Good to it’s logical conclusion. His sense is that Good and Evil are so subjective that they don’t exist in a broad context. They are only human tendencies – not universal laws.. So ‘Good’ can only be reached through evolution and the replacement of inferiors with superior types.

His example: a hawk's job and the whole purpose of it's existence is to kill pigeons and other birds.. The pigeon would undoubtedly see the hawk as evil, but the hawk would be unable to even think in those terms - It isn't being 'selfish' - it has to eat. Thus the good/evil definition is meaningless outside of the identity of the participants and particular circumstances.

Just as pigs or cows or timber-trees would see humanity and our farming practices as evil, surely their definition would hold no weight either in the large scheme of things.

There must thus be a natural hierarchy among species, or potentially within society, which supersedes the flat, normal altruistic tendencies and cooperative practices which are usually defined as Good.

Nietzsche postulated very cold, negative vision of the world, dominated by competitive forces where compassion and other altruistic emotions have no place, and as such only expansion and the defeat of one's competitors could be defined as a greater 'good', as it would lead to expansion and propagation of higher types, closer to perfection.

Nietzsche put forward the idea of an Overman at the top of this imagined heirarchy, a superior person, who, in this ultimate competitive environment, would have the power and ability to ignore societal norms and restrictions and be cruel to their inferiors. Just as the hawk would kill the pigeon, living according to this natural hierarchy in a true 'state of nature'.

Ultimately the Overman would eliminate God, who Nietzsche also looked on as the personification of all these mental crutches for a weak humanity. Without compassion or religion holding him back, this new species would truly be the master of his own destiny, and this total freedom would be an absolute Good.

Hitler loved this guy. The question – the usual Achilles heel when people become enamored of a philosophy and try to implement it: - Who gets to define and choose the designated Overmen, and the Unworthy who don’t deserve compassion? Hitler volunteered for this, and the rest is history. The SS and the death-squads of WWII were a direct outgrowth of the worst possible interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy by the Nazis.

My sense is – the Overman belongs to fantasy literature as much as it does to philosophy. It’s an imaginary concept, not unlike Plato’s Utopia, and the total freedom the Overman embodies cannot exist – it is an open state of war of all-against-all, and is itself an Evil. The real competitive environment in the state of nature requires more than just cruelty.. It requires mass-cooperation.

Humans are social animals and do not function individually or in isolation. Surely these Overmen – our genetic superiors - will always need someone to clean the streets and do farm and mechanical labor.

Society is already a cooperative enterprise which rewards people for their success and has a place for those with lesser talents. This is already the modern way of things – so what is Nietzsche saying which is new? Where would the Nietzsche’s Overman fit into this puzzle?

Nowhere. The parts that Nietzche wants to strip away are essential parts of the human condition. The Overman’s version of Good is completely divorced from the Good for a more traditional Homo Sapien. So he’s really a thought-experiment of a type of mental monster, and nothing more.

So if Marxism, and total submission to collective interest is unstable and ‘flawed and Evil, so too is Nietzche’s Overman, that mythical Person, who would represent the zenith of the selfish and self-interested individual. So neither side can ever be defined as wholly Good, or wholly Evil.

Scientific Art

2005-07-29T12:25:00.000-07:00

Art produced by simulating quantum-level events with supercomputers.
In many of these, the lines represent the paths of electrons as they spread away from a contact point on a wire or surface. The spheres represent wave functions and the geometric shapes involved with advanced mathematics.

I love these - they're so perfectly formed and deeply complex and symmetical. More at the Eric Heller Gallery.

Parallel Hero Stories

2005-07-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

The cornerstone of the epic stories in the media which populate the American psyche is the theme of the everyman hero's fight, not just against some large physical enemy, but more importantly against his own inner demons and doubts and secondary needs and the hero's commitment to a 'higher', more pure ideal.

It's part of the human condition's innate hardwired directions, as we aspire to reach our fullest potential and reach the heights of power among our peers and in the larger society, and ultimately gain control both our own destiny and to make the world a better place for others. The pursuit of the Good - See above-.

They also frequently hint at a hidden 'royalty', that is - the change from small-time nobody to Great King was predestined and part of a larger story, as if God or Fate had looked down and picked this one person. They grow into their great shoes and show themselves worthy of praise and adulation of millions.

Key examples - All similar.

1) Frodo - and the rest of the characters - in LOTR.

2) Luke Skywalker - and others - Star Wars saga.

3) Harry Potter - His series.

4) Neo - the Matrix series

5) MiracleMan - Alan Moore's old comic series.

6) Abraham, Moses and others in the biblical series.

7) Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - Manga series.

8) Spider Man - Movies and original story.

9) Abe Lincoln comes to mind as well, with his log-cabin to president story.

Most of the time the structure is only indirectly implied, but not with the story of young Luke Skywalker. He was apparently born with Force superpowers which entail all sorts of fighting skills, supernaturally good luck and as he gets older, leadership charisma. Events occur around them - they are always at the center of the action, with millions effected by their decisions and/or millions following their lead.

These are the physical manifestations of intense inner focus and awareness of the mystical energy fields (the force) which surrounds us like water and has it's own designs on our destiny, a cinematic imaginary Hand of Fate.

Star Wars is a film-treatment in storyform of Prof. Joseph Campbell's books on the subject, which articulated these themes and others on how people have an inborn tendency to either build or latch on to mythologies which incorporate universal archetypes. Lucas's work is basically a connect-the-dots meditation on Campbell. More later.

The Mind-Body Dichotomy - Two Spheres.

2005-07-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

The question is: Why do people get embarassed by nudity?
Everyone knows exactly what folks look like without their skivvies.
This question goes right back to Genesis, with Adam & Eve eating the Apple and having to hide themselves.

Clothes serve many functions, the most important of which is to retain the heat envelope and allow the natural regulation of body temperature in ranges beyond that which our hairless, inefficient bodies could manage.

The second function is to allow people to seperate themselves fromt their most personal physical needs which are made obvious by the presence of the body: These include sexual, excretory and the secondary but powerful effect of the body's beauty, health or flaws.

People can briefly imagine that they are unencumbered by these strings and that their conscious mind is totally in control of their actions and interactions. It allows a safe 'public space' for interaction between people where they won't be distracted by these exterior factors.

This mental construct is the physical manifestation of the mind-body Split. The mind is of course the product of the activity of the brain. It doesn't exist independently. The best analogy I've heard is that the brain is the symphony and the mind is the music it creates. Humans do not think of themselves as inanimate or as physical packages of meat and bones, although this is plainly the case. At some point in early childhood development this distinction manifests itself and becomes a dominant feature in adult human psychology.

And so we all live in two spheres of existence, the 'public sphere' or 'mental sphere', where everyone is assumed to be roughly similar and one only addresses the mental presences of their counterparts, and the 'private sphere', or 'physical sphere' where everyone is alone and free to walk around naked in their apartments, or lust or masterbate, or have prejudices, or suffer with their physical ailments in private or with their close family.

This dichotomy can even become a cause of severe individual or sociological neurosis. The primary examples would be Saudi Arabia and other countries where the Burka is common, where female sexual characterics are so off-putting that they must be eliminated from 'public space'. This is very damaging - a psychological pecadillo run rampant, harming millions.

This also 'solves' a different part of the human condition for the Saudi men - the dilemna they have when dealing with female authority. Women have power in their selection of sexual partners. Their Burka-fication reduces this significantly and makes them chattel property of the men in society. So their neurosis has a niche..

More on this later.

Justice from Mr. Roberts.

2005-07-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

The establishment press likes him, including NPR. He's articulate and charming and he isn't a fire-bomb thrower or a crazed wingnut. The Democrats don't have any clear reason to oppose him, and so they will hold back their very limited gunpowder and save it for the next engagement when Justice Rhenquist retires or passes on within the next two years.

It's like seeing the birth of a new, all-powerful baby - Judicially, that is. He must have attended many Mason's meetings and Claverns with the Bilderberg Group and covens with the Illuminati and Protocols with the Elders of Zion and Skull & Bones society dinners to be so elavated at such a young age.

I have doubt that any goodness can come out of George W., but hopefully I'm off-base here, if only because this is appointment is already set in stone and without hope we are truly lost.

On this man's character and depth of compassion and reasoning skills lies the weight of our civilization. As the swing-vote Roberts is unquestionably more powerful now than a lame duck W. will ever be again. May the angels whisper loudly in his ears.

In other news, James Doohan, Scotty from the original Star Trek, passed away yesterday. He was a good guy and he had a long life, which is a blessing. I hope he enjoyed his celebrity and made the most of it.

Update:
He's very charming, but he's stonewalling the confirmation hearings..
This was widely anticipated, but it's not a promising development. He may yet be a wolf in sheep's clothing.

The Tale of Rove

2005-07-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

Karl Rove is an ugly man - not on the outside - that part doesn't matter. It's his soul that is black. Right now we all must wait and see whether the independent prosecutor will smell blood and attack. I hope he takes the smug jerk down.

Over the years Karl Rove's genius at character asassination, manipulation of crowds and divide-and-conquer politics have turned us into an angry, bitter nation where people routinely call eachother liars on national television. That will be his legacy. There is no dialogue across the aisle today. No common ground exists and the Truth is not respected as a priority. I hope we can withstand the damage he has caused.

Rove and friends are a new phenomenon in American Politics, The administration's tactic to obscure sources of information and then to tell huge, whopping lies, on the premise that people will give him the benefit of the doubt, or will fight for a limited time and 'split the difference' in Bush's favor. The public can do nothing else. The alternative worldview - that we have a fledgling Ministry of Love a la' 1984 in our midst - is too much to grasp and is indigestible.

If ever there were qualities that made America a new and greater nation, he stands against them. If these trends persist in 30 years we may be a weak, balkanized state along Red and Blue lines, eclipsed by China.. There may even be civil strife within our lifetime. If it's happened before, it can happen again.

Today Rove is the indespensible man - the 3rd part of a Triumvirate headed by Bush and Cheney, which would be adrift without him. Without Rove, the politburo-like loyalty to the Bush Clan, which has for years stifled dissent and made dozens of legitimate corruption investigations impossible, would be lifted - and at last Government would be able to self-correct. Nothing is as healthy to government as sunlight.

Some would say this is a minor, technical mistake on his part...which may or may not be true - but the important detail was that this leak was for malicious intent.

Turd Blossom's brazen, shameless bullying, lying and his appeals to constituents' basest emotions and his long history of dirty tricks in the past - that I'm not really concerned about whether the punishment would fit the crime. He's an evil man. It's time for him to go.

Bush has proven to be loyal (i.e. psychologically dependent) on his top officials so the Architect may yet have the most secure job in the government. He will work in the White House until he goes to trial. Let's hope that's soon.

Some Buddhas

2005-07-12T16:10:00.000-07:00

They're deep in meditation. May their peace and harmony spread in your direction.

China makes a pass at Unacol - will the Great Cheney let this happen?

2005-07-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

A Chinese company is doing it's best to buy Unacol, one of the mid-size players in the oil services/exploration industry. Apparently it's up to the shareholders to decide whether to take their money and sell this firm and all it's technology and oil exploration leases and contracts to this Chinese-government-controlled entity.

This will be a very telling moment regarding the Bush administration. Personally I don't believe the Bushies give a rat's ass about Democracy. The raison d'etre of the war in Iraq is probably 10% WMD's, 90% control of oil-resources.

There were human-rights issues and other secondary, positive motives involved when we invaded, but we routinely ignore those factors in other parts of the world. It's really about the oil, and it always has been. Cheney did a cold calculation - 2000 American soldier's lives, so that 200 million barrels of oil will be controlled by someone who can be bribed by the USA, and NOT someone bribable by the Chinese, or the Russians, or the EU.

That oil is a strategic asset. We need it - honestly and legitimately - it's a limited commodity and we're in genuine competition with other places that want to horde and control the few sources out there. The fact that Halliburton and Chevron and Exxon all benefit - to Cheney those are likely side-benefits.

This is in fact the most charitable view of Cheney I can dream up. He's the puppetmaster with his hand up President Bush's ass. The VP believes the U.S. needs the oil, and everything else, all the lying about WMD's, BS about Democracy, war-profiteering etc. are excusable sins meant to keep the gullible press and other dupes in line and on-board.

So he's a liar with good intentions who believes in Oil Realpolitik'.. Fine. I understand this, even if I disagree with it. Of course they've been profoundly incompetent at pursuing this agenda - Nobody has agreed to this - we're in for a 10-year guerilla war. But at least they had understandable motives.

The only alternative view is that Cheney's an amoral, power-mad monster who has accidently brought forth an ocean of blood - and I think that's unlikely.

So here we are at the moment of truth. We've lost 1800 soldiers (and counting) and maimed 8000 more to secure this Iraqi oil as a national asset. It's value is strategic - it's not measurable as a market commodity. Will we sell Unacol to the Chinese? Will we let the stockholders decide?

For christ sake, if it's been just about the money, then Cheney has let all those soldiers die - for something he doesn't even care enough about to keep in American control when it's an easy, painless decision to make. Where do his interests lie? With the U.S.A., or with the Market - or is his interest in the U.S. just a way to play and game the market for all it's worth(?)

Now, I don't necessarily dislike China for this - If I were them I'd look for fools and do the same thing in pursuit of their own sovereign interests. That said, if Cheney lets China succeed at absconding with this vital national asset, along with other areas that the Bushies have played a weak hand with our largest international adversary, such as devaluing the Won, trade chronic trade imbalances, etc. One could make the case that the Bushies are more allied with the Chinese leadership's interests than they are with the American people.

I know the details are more complicated - they always are. But sometimes when something stinks on the surface, it's rotten to the bone. If this transaction goes forward, then Bush-Cheney are exposed (in my slightly paranoid view) as a monster, with no redeeming graces at all. He won't just be misguided or wrong-headed - he'll be an evil man. Which way will it go? Let the angels decide.

The Universe is Inside A Black Hole .. Inside A Larger Universe

2005-07-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

I try occasionally to think in terms of space-time and the related universal cosmology & physics. I have some vague understanding of it, but like the other 99.99% of the population I'm not quite bright enough to do the math and so it becomes a vague thought-excersize.

The universe is not infinite, but it's not a 3-dimensional 'box' or sphere, either. Distance away from earth is measured in space, but also in time as measured by the time it's taken for the light to reach us from that distance. So the distant stars correspond to the distant past. And 15B light-years from here, there are (were) no stars, and the galaxies were as yet unformed.

That, along with the constant, ongoing expansion of space demonstrated by Hubble, points to the 15B year-range as the starting point of space-time, corresponding to the Big Bang. So looking away in every and all directions is simply looking back towards a single distant point of origin - because space-time is curved .. this part always sounds tricky - something only the real math-heads can digest.

The Big Bang was the expansion of the universe from a single point of infinite energy. And of course matter is like the ice to energy's water - so energy eventually 'congealed' into more stable forms - Hydrogen and Helium to start, and later the other elements came into existence through nuclear fusion reactions in star supernovas.

At the time of the Big Bang, the four basic forces of the universe that together govern everything we do and are, were laid out and set in stone, unchanging since the beginning. These are: Electromagnetism, The strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravity.

Supposedly they are all different aspects of the same universal physical laws, but this has been unprovable and the theory, called the Unified Field theory, has so far been beyond physic's ability to comprehend. Einstein pursued the problem for 30+ years, and failed to find the answer.

And so there are many physical 'laws' in the universe, and forces and constants which correspond to eachother at very precise ratios - which if they were even slightly different, would either eliminate matter, stars & galaxies, or both.

Meanwhile, the experiments still indicate that there's much more matter in the universe that can't be easily detected.. So there may be exotic non-interactive forms of matter out there, which amount to 95%+ of the mass of the universe. It has gravity, but that's it. It's like ghost-matter.

When I read this - it told me that the physicists don't really know anything at all. They're mathematical sorcerers, in this case charlatans. But they still seem confident of their other theories, so I'll put this inconvenient fact aside.

So one point of uncertainty is.. what happened 'before' the big bang? This is just the way the mind works, when one really should try to avoid doing so. Time had not 'started' yet - it's like trying to find land north of the North Pole - there's nothing 'higher' , or in this case 'earlier'.

But there had to be something / somewhere to start the universe. The current thinking, is that we are inside a Black Hole. That is, the Big Bang was formed as the 'interior space' when a Black Hole formed in another, different Universe. So we're inside a 'bubble' of space-time from a different universe - one which might be very different than ours, with different physical laws.

It's an interesting theory - it (partially) solves the Quandary of infinite-regression - that is, the 'who designed the designer' argument which plagues much of religious/spiritual thinking. But it doesn't solve every hurdle because it's essentially unprovable. This doesn't mean it isn't true - it's just beyond our abilities to ever be able to test it.

This universe would thus be like an air-tight capsule - the only way to see would be to .. send a probe into a Black Hole into another Universe and back, through a point of infinite density.. You can't buy equipment like that at Radio Shack. And black holes are (thankfully) not nearby. So the question stands. Black Holes and their close relatives worm-holes have become fodder for science fiction. Every light-speed hyperdrive in Star Trek & Star Wars is based on the same half-baked premise.

The best current estimate is that universes have 11-dimension - but that can't be comprehended by anyone other than the top 200 physicists in the world, so the best practical analogy would be a series of plastic bags..with tiny holes/passages connecting them, filling out an infinite horizon. Their interiors represent normal space and the tiny connections represent black holes which shoot matter or energy between them. This is the Cosmos.

Whether science will ever be able to do anything even slightly related to this is not likely. The forces involved in experiments on these topics are orders of magnitude larger than the mass and energy of the sun.. it's unimaginable that we could ever control anything large enough to even approach big physics questions like these. The answers are with the natural phenomenae, which we can only witness and try to interpret.

So we'll continue to look skyword with astonomical tools and in doing so perhaps someday, paraphrasing Einstein, discern the Mind of God.. if only from a distance.

What the Hell Has Happened to Lindsey Lohan?

2005-07-04T16:29:00.000-07:00

She became a superstar when Mean Girls came out two years ago. I admired her as a very powerful, sensual presence, full of fire and emotive energy. She was almost an icon at 18. The whole world had watched her grow and blossom, so to speak. The media and the rest of us could not turn our collective eyes away.

But now she's lost weight and she's apparently overworked and a little flaky. She was never fat - she was voluptuous, like a Frank Frazetta painting, and she should have embraced it rather than attempting to be the traditional Hollywood stick-figure. Alas, she's hiding her chest when she should be carefully figuring out how to exploit it (in a good way). I feel she's been burned by fame and she's not wise enough to manage through all the BS thrown her way, and now the press has taken her vulnerability for weakness and has pounced. I see photos and I want her to get off the diet and be healthy! Something feels off-track.

Kitten-In-BeerGlass. :)

Much Ado About Comet-Bashing.

2005-07-04T12:51:00.000-07:00

There's news out today about how NASA has successfully crashed an 820 lb. probe into a comet. A coffee-table sized device detached from the space probe and moved toward the target, which was the size of a city and comprised of dust and ice. The impact was at 22,000 miles an hour. This, along with the comet's negligable gravity made for a 50+ mile radius explosion of dust and debris that blew out a crater the size of an NFL stadium on the comet's surface. See here.

The NASA folks intend to spectrograph this debris, which dates from the origin of the solar system 4+ billion years ago and thus gain New Knowledge. This cost $333M.. It's nice that they've succeeded, but I have to ask the question - who cares? The question could be answered with 100% accuracy, and would still have no impact on modern astronomy or anything else. That's too high a price for a gee-whiz-factor..

I suppose it is a good that they've got some practice at hitting celestial bodies, which they might have to do someday if they ever find an asteroid on a collision course. Otherwise this was a vanity project, much like the rest of NASA. It will never pay for itself.. It exists to fulfill a place in people's imaginations and as a way to fund military space & missile research indirectly. Oh well.

Even their most adventurous, interesting projects like sending a man to Mars, is a complete boondoggle when you look at it closely. Mars is after all a barren desert far less hospitable than the coldest, darkest part of Antarctica. It doesn't have a magnetic field, and it doesn't have enough light from the sun to be terra-formed. It would be nice to discover life there, but I have no idea how it would benefit humanity today. It's a vanity project - start to finish.

There are companies that want the equipment and research contracts and PhD's who have a yen for adventure.. There's money for this, because the dream of space and those who shephard it through public relations have something too romantic and fantastic to let die.

NASA is the vessel, or the vehicle.. It represents hope for a better, distant future, where man conquers nature on a grand scale and humanity is imagined as part of nucleus, expanding outwards through space colonization into infinity. We would thus collectively conquer death, in a manner of speaking. The quest itself fulfills our deepest need.

It sounds great. The movie visuals are very powerful. The reality is far less promising.. The stock response to that is the goal won't ever get any easier if we don't start now. But at some point we have to face our limitations. Manned space flight to Mars might succeed, but it won't benefit anyone other than the contractors. Sustainable colonization is impossible, and the stars are out of reach.

I believe such emotions would be better focused on the ground, where we have a troubled world of people that needs food and shelter and opportunity.

As it is there's the ticking time-bomb of Malthus, somewhere in the distance. We will certainly have worldwide population peak and catastrophic collapse someday in the next 400 years. Looking towards the heavans only takes our eyes off the ground, where there is still much work to do.