Photon Theory & Other Intelligences

Whoa

2006-04-25T15:46:00.000-04:00

I think I've forgotten most html tags. It has been an embarrassingly long time. A LONG time and I see that my already-paltry readership is not down to single digits.

Shucks.

Well, the good news is that my new job is a good new job. It involves editing at a major humor publication, and it has not left me much time to get all sexy on the blogosphere. But I am trying to get back. This is the first attempt.

So here's something outrageous to get things rolling.

by digby

Thanks to reader Samela for pointing out this incredible series in the Chicago Tribune outlining contractor abuses in Iraq. It's rather surprising that no other papers or any of the networks have bothered to report the story (at least that I'm aware of) but I can understand it. The sheer volume on inhumane activity that the Bush administration has endorsed or perpetrated is so huge that it's hard to keep up.

"The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operations after confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Tribune."

It goes on to describe similar situations in Bosnia, in which people were routinely bought and sold as sex slaves—refugees with no home, no recourse, no law to protect them. These are the kinds of war-mongering venture capitalists making things run in Iraq. Heart breaking.

ESPN alum

2006-03-23T03:04:00.000-05:00

I have to get MSNBC. Keith Olberman is a-double-you-e-some, awesome.

[T]hat hotel balcony crack[by Laura Ingraham] was unforgivable. In was unforgivable to the memory of David Blum, it was unforgivable in considerable of Bob Woodruff and Doug Vought, unforgivable in light of what happened to Michael Kelly and what happened to Michael Weiskopft. It was unforgivable with Jill Carroll still a hostage in Iraq. And it was not only unforgivable of her; it was desperate and it was stupid."

After watching this clip, I said, "Hoooo."

Psych! (Sike!)

2006-03-19T22:20:00.000-05:00

The Guardian, anyway, is calling it one of the biggest financial frauds of all time. They speak, of course, of the Provisional Government's handling of some $23 Billion for reconstruction in Iraq — money that belonged to the Iraqi people and no one else. Money that was entrusted to the US-run organization by the UN to help the Iraqi people build hospitals and schools and to have clean running water and electricity and all the things a burgeoning deomcracy deserves. Instead, they gave it over to Republican securities firms and cronies to do with what they pleased. One who was there compared the atmosphere to the Old West.

Because the Iraqi banking system was in tatters, the funds were placed in an account with the Federal Reserve in New York. From there, most of the money was flown in cash to Baghdad. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash. And that is where it all began to go wrong.

One CPA official was given nearly $7m and told to spend it in seven days. "He told our auditors that he felt that there was more emphasis on the speed of spending the money than on the accountability for that money," says Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction. Not all coalition officials were so honest. Last month Robert Stein Jr, employed as a CPA comptroller in south central Iraq, despite a previous conviction for fraud, pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal more than $2m and taking kickbacks in the form of cars, jewellery, cash and sexual favours. It seems certain he is only the tip of the iceberg. There are a further 50 criminal investigations under way.

Another embarrassment, another blight, another crime in this terrible war.

Hume!

2006-03-19T16:25:00.000-05:00

When the revolution comes, Britt Hume will be first against wall.
He simply cannot see anything wrong with BushCo at all, and Bill Kristol (who is one of the main architects of the Iraq War and the global domination program) rips Britt a new one over Feingold's censure motion.

Hume: "That is absurd. No politician among those who have been thoroughly briefed on this claims the briefings were insufficient and vague…Rockefeller does not claim that. Rockefeller has said many things about this program, but he has never said that he wasn't fully briefed that I know of."

Which is, of course, more bull from one of the blind spouters. Britt thinks censure is completely motivated, the impeachment is wacko timfoil hat talk, and that the public is wildly in favor of wiretapping.

Oh, silent majority?

Senator Frist Threatens To Kill Senator Feingold!

2006-03-12T14:37:00.000-05:00

The wise and mighty Bill Frist responds to Russ Feingold's censure resolution. Some excerpts.

The Presiden't of the United States is out there fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden

destroy... all the families who are listening to us...

Russ is... dead...

...think back to 9-11...

...War On Terror...

...there is... a lack of support for our Commander-In-Chief...

...there is no crack...

Bush is out there fighting terrorists?
Threatening to kill a US Senator?
9-11?
No crack?
You're not making any sense, Bill!

Olde Tyme Baseballe

2006-03-12T14:31:00.000-05:00

Even though Jefferson and Washington never spent lazy afternoons throwing the old baseball around, Russ Feingold, that hero from the North, says Bush is about to strike the eff out.

Mr. President, return to the law. Return to our system of government.

Put Feingold in charge.

Oh, Murtha

2006-03-05T14:30:00.000-05:00

Crooks and Liars has kind of been my saving grace these past couple weeks. I rarely have the stomach to watch the news anymore, so watching Quicktime clips of the relevent conversations -- enlightening or enraging -- is a nice alternative. Today they have a very impressive interview from Face the Nation with John Murtha, who lays out the arguments against BushCo's strategy - ahem - in Iraq so plainly and intelligently that everyone with a TV should see it. And he also makes the provocative but completely true assessment that the only ones who want us there are Iran, al Qaeda and China. Worth watching if you haven't seen it already.

Speaking of Space...

2006-03-01T14:53:00.000-05:00

Space Hawks. Is a terrific term. It seems at once powerful and outlandish; serious and cartoonish. And that's exactly how it sounds when you hear people talk about developing space militarily over the next generation. The costs will be astronomical and it's a subject that used only to be considered in Sci Fi books. But we all know that that particular genre is often a better gauge of the future than anything else.

Despite the lack of tangible progress, the Bush administration increased the Star Wars budget by 20 percent for 2007, with the total allocation reaching $10.7 billion, an increase of nearly $6 billion since 1999.

Gagnon is convinced this master plan for space defense is nothing but a fantastic Trojan horse.

"This massively costly program under way today is not really about defense," he said. "The true purpose of this arms program is to control and dominate space. And whoever controls space will control the Earth."

In January, Russia announced a ...plan... to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2015 and mining operations to extract helium-3 by 2020. China, which in 2003 became the third country in the world to send a human into space, has announced plans for an unmanned lunar landing by 2010, and a manned moon mission by 2020.

Warfare, they say, will be waged differently in the future. I guess so. I guess it's going to resemble an episode of Battlestar Galactica more than Saving Private Ryan (which was overrated, anyway.) I oscillate between knowing amusement and terror at the thought of what space wars might bring and what forces might come to bear as we head toward that last horizon.

I've said it before, but the Neocons are planning for the End Game -- as are the Russians and the Chinese -- which is what the War On Terror and the jockeying for influence in Central Asia and the Mid East is all about. Oil, gas and geopolitical influence. But even Baghdad will pale as a prize in comparison to the strategic rewards of the moon, should we develop the technology to use it.

Proof That Supernovae Don't Care

2006-03-01T10:41:00.000-05:00

What the hell goes on here. And it is only a matter of time till that comet or meteor or giant slug alien monster plops on down here and makes us into fossils for the news cycle of a far off civilization.

Scientists have found what they believe are traces of the lost Indonesian civilization of Tambora, which was wiped out in 1815 by the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

Guided by ground-penetrating radar, U.S. and Indonesian researchers recently dug in a gully where locals had found ceramics and bones. They unearthed the remains of a thatch house, pottery, bronze and the carbonized bones of two people, all in a layer of sediment dating to the eruption.

University of Rhode Island volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, the leader of the expedition, estimated that 10,000 people lived in the town when the volcano erupted in a blast that dwarfed the one that buried the Roman town of Pompeii.

It gives me comfort, from time to time, to think an exploding star somewhere in the cold silence of space and try to imagine any way, from that perspective, to give two shits about George Bush or Hamas or global warming.

Before and After

2006-02-28T11:49:00.000-05:00

I found this on Screenhead. Some of them are subtle, some not so subtle, but it's an interesting exercise. Photos of the same spot before and after 9-11.

Kristine Larsen dot com.

Talk About Triumph Of the Human Etc...

2006-02-24T10:27:00.000-05:00

This is pretty neat. I guess, mathematically, it's bound to happen. They will make a movie about it. Elijah Wood in a headband...?

[Team manager Jason] McElwain, who's autistic, was added to the roster by coach Jim Johnson so he could be given a jersey and get to sit on the bench in the team's last game of the year.

[His team was down by double digits with four minutes to go] and, in his first action of the year, McElwain missed his first two shots, but then sank six three-pointers and another shot (video), for a total of 20 points in three minutes.

I mean that's pretty uplifting, right? Clearly this is Hallmark material. But, really, pretty cool. Go human spirit, go!

NASCAR Fans, Take Notice!

2006-02-22T16:28:00.000-05:00

Your philosophical leader has pulled out of the Neocon program. It failed, he says. It failed and it should be destroyed. If this won't convince America's radical right mainstream, I ask bewilderedly, tasting the bitters in my cheek, WHAT WILL?!

Francis Fukuyama, who wrote the best-selling book The End of History and was a member of the neoconservative project, now says that, both as a political symbol and a body of thought, it has "evolved into something I can no longer support". He says it should be discarded on to history's pile of discredited ideologies.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, America at the Crossroads, Mr Fukuyama declares that the doctrine "is now in shambles" and that its failure has demonstrated "the danger of good intentions carried to extremes".

Going further, he says the movements' advocates are Leninists who "believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practised by the United States".

See, Earl and Bill and Jebediah? See Suzie-May and Marge and Stella? The Jesus head of unilateralism thinks your president's masturbation rocket ritual will go down in flames -- and he invented it. How do you reconsile that, eithically and intellectually? Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Port Fever!

2006-02-22T12:31:00.000-05:00

From the New York Times. The last lines of the article:

Lawmakers from both parties have noted that some of the Sept. 11 hijackers used the United Arab Emirates as an operational and financial base. In addition, critics contend the UAE was an important transfer point for shipments of smuggled nuclear components sent to Iran, North Korea and Libya by a Pakistani scientist.

The first lines of the article:

President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday.

You know, it's fine. The Times article is about the White House's damage control, not Dubai's checkered past. So let's take it for what it is.

The President of the United States had no idea that an Arab state-run company was being sold the rights to control the most important shipping ports on the Eastern seaboard. He had no clue. It never came up. The President for whom protecting every single American was never let in on the conversation about who we'd be putting in charge of this. Ok. Fine.

So: why wasn't he told? There are three possible explanations:
1) He is incompetent, uncurious, and not at all concerned with the security of America.
2) He was purposely kept out of the loop, either at his own request, or at the behest of someone else who wanted the deal pushed through.
3) He is lying and was aware of the deal.

And in consideration:
1) This is all true. He doesn't read the papers and had never been off the continent before getting elected as leader of the free world.
2) This is possible. If there was some concern that this deal would be met with trepidation or outrage, they may have wanted to keep Bush out of it.
3) This seems most likely. Given the fairly close ties to Dubai Port (Treasury Secretary John Snow was CEO of CSX, who the same company bought a few years ago -- those connections are not mentioned in the article) it seems improbable that he would have heard nothing about this. Given, too, that protecting the ports was a major Democratic concern in the last election, it seems likely that it would at least have been on his mind. Things are never what they seem, however, and very little seems ever to be on his mind, so who knows.

But why would the President be so adamant about pushing this deal through -- a huge, controversial deal with a country who provided two of the 9-11 hijackers -- when he had known nothing about it just days earlier? Did his cabinet convince him? Did dollar signs flash in his eyes? Or was he aware about it to begin with? Why threaten a veto, which he's not used once in six years, on something so trivial he didn't bother to learn of it till it made the news? Why the sudden 180? What is so important about this deal? He says it would send the wrong message to the Arab world to turn the deal down. We have a saying for that: too little too late. A president so concerned with the Arab view of America doesn't invade sovereign Arab nations and declare a holy crusade.

Something is fishy here -- something is always fishy -- and I do not like it. They are expending a lot of political capital on what looks to me to be a no-win situation. Unless there's a very, very important reason they put Dubai in charge of East Coast ports. Not that I can think of one. I mean, what good would another terrorist attack do them, anyway? It's not like BushCo saw any advantage from 9-11.

L'humeur

2006-02-21T14:02:00.000-05:00

I saw this lady last night and I think she is funny.

Le Futur

2006-02-21T12:54:00.000-05:00

This article on DU got my blood boiling again, like it used to back in the day so long ago (2003) when I thought things were really bad something had to be done about it and before my passions were overwhelmed and silenced by the deafening hum of nobody doing anything or caring.

And so, under Bush/Cheney, we've become an America that has codified torture in official state policy, that admits it went into a war under false premises but continues to keep our targeted troops there anyway, that spies on its citizens without court orders, that is willing to out a covert CIA agent (one who was probing the extent of Iran's nuclear program) for reasons of political retaliation, that "disappears" American citizens into military jails and doesn't permit them any contact with the outside world, that flies suspects in its care to secret prisons abroad and "renders" others to countries that use even more extreme torture measures, that passes laws permitting police agents to "sneak and peek" into citizens' homes, phone records, computer databases, library requests, e-mails and medical records without permission or even informing those whose privacy had been violated, that neuters the Congress by saying it will listen to "suggestions" but that the ultimate decisions are to be made by the Chief Executive, that emasculates the political opposition in Congress by cutting them out of the key decision-making processes, that declares the president has the right to violate the law whenever he so chooses and Congress and the courts have no role to play in reining in that power-grab, that is eager to keep America on a permanent war footing since it's engaged in a never-ending battle against a tactic (terrorism), and on and on.

I don't know what happened to me, a young man who filtered almost everything through my new looking glass of oncoming fascism, while still maintaing a sense of humor. I read voraciously all the news and information and opinion, from both extremes of the political spectrum and recalled it all. It was stamped into me. I could think critically and fast and I believe that, in my prime, I could have gone toe to toe with any of the Right Wing pundits now vomiting across the airwaves and more than held my own. But now. Well.

I think part of the problem was how rabid I was. Because all was filtered through this one world view, and the world view called for a great deal of complaining and outrage and windmill tilting, I kind of lost steam. It was unbalanced. I've tried time and again in the last year or so to get back into it, but those days are over. That's not to say I've lost any political bent -- clearly I still do -- but it'll have to be under a different glass. That one stopped working.

Yet I do believe this is a dangerous aministration heading toward fascism and bent on global domination. I do and that's the truth. And our president absolutely ought to be impeached if there is anything resembling a rule of law left here. That said, go read the above article and let your blood boil, too.

Morals Morass

2006-02-14T16:10:00.000-05:00

Is it wrong that I kind of hope this guy dies, just to see what happens?

The fellow hunter who was shot and wounded by Vice President Dick Cheney has suffered a "minor heart attack" after a piece of birdshot migrated to his heart, a hospital spokesman said Tuesday.

Dr. David Blanchard, the hospital's emergency room chief, said Whittington suffered an "asymptomatic heart attack," without displaying symptoms such as chest pains or breathing difficulty. He said a roughly 5 mm piece of shot became lodged in or alongside Whittington's heart muscle, causing the organ's upper two chambers to beat irregularly.

I mean, I know it's wrong but, admit it, you've thought about it, too.

Sign of the Beast

2006-02-14T15:23:00.000-05:00

Found it on DU, channeled it through Phillip K. Dick.

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them.

CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.

Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries.

I'm glad to see that's a growth industry, and that businesses and government alike will be looking to find ways to use this technology and convince us all that we need it. Under the guise of national security? Maybe there will be another kidnapping hysteria? Identity theft? Uncertain, but it will happen, just as SciFi predicted. I really need to get that novel finished...

What's That Word?

2006-02-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

It's like Hubris or something. I can't remember. Some of the ancient empires -- those silly old coots -- had it, and I guess it didn't work out for them. Here in the US/A, however, we know we're the best and we know it for a reason: because we are. And we'd never let that get in our way.

French farmer Jose Bove, a prominent protester against genetically modified food and agricultural free trade, has been denied entry into the United States, officials of an event he was due to address said on Thursday.

Bove arrived at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport with a valid U.S. entry visa on Wednesday afternoon but was detained for several hours and later returned to Paris, according to William Kramer, a spokesman for the conference.

The Frenchman rose to fame in the late 1990s for denouncing globalization and junk food, and spent six weeks in jail in early 2003 for smashing up a McDonald’s restaurant.

Hubris borne out of a kind of parnopid xenophobia -- nay, a xenanoid paraxobia -- I don't know. The old empires were plagued by it but here, here we have Free Speech and all. I mean we took out Saddam Hussein and the Taliban to protect it. After all. I couldn't imagine an America where free speech is reXXX XXXXX XXX XX XXXXXX X XXX XXXXXXXX X XXXXX X XXXXX

Something I Don't Like

2006-02-08T15:52:00.000-05:00

Is the way talk of invading Iran has been ratcheted up in the last few days to coincide with the rioting in the Islamic world. I knwo the President is reading this, so let me be perfectly clear: I in no way support an invasion of that sovereign nation and urge you to put aside any plans to do so. And to retire.

Perhaps there is a stench in Denmark...

Oily

2006-02-08T12:36:00.000-05:00

Just in case there's any doubt who really runs things.

he United States will always rely on foreign imports of oil to feed its energy needs and should stop trying to become energy independent, a top Exxon Mobil Corp. executive said on Tuesday.

The world's largest publicly traded oil company, however, says hoping to end foreign oil imports is not only a bad idea, but also impossible.

"Americans depend upon imports to fill the gap," McGill said. "No combination of conservation measures, alternative energy sources and technological advances could realistically and economically provide a way to completely replace those imports in the short or medium term."

Good boy.

A Mecca For Controversy

2006-02-08T11:20:00.000-05:00

Salon has a fairly even article this morning, giving some perspective on the Danish newspaper and the state of things in Europe in general.

The paper wanted to instigate trouble, just not the kind of trouble it got. And in this mission it acted in concert with the Danish government. "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid," boasted the minister of cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, in a speech at his party's annual meeting the week before [the newspaper's cultural editor] Rose's cartoon editorial last fall. Mikkelsen is a 39-year-old political science graduate known for his hankering for the "culture war." He continued, "The Culture War has now been raging for some years. And I think we can conclude that the first round has been won." The next front, he said, is the war against the acceptance of Muslims norms and ways of thought.

Denmark is no paragon of free speech. Article 140 of the Criminal Code allows for a fine and up to four months of imprisonment for demeaning a "recognized religious community."

Mogens Glistrup, a tax protester turned xenophobe, was imprisoned for 20 days last year for a racist speech. He compared Turks to rabbits. Back in 1975, Jens Jorgen Thorsen, a multimedia artist belonging to the "situationist school," had a government grant provided to make a film about Jesus taken away. Five thousand young Christians had demonstrated in the street of Copenhagen against Thorsen and his movie and tumultuous scenes broke out.

This shed some light on things, (and the cartoons themselves, all twelve, are fairly lame, it turns out) at least from the perspective of the newspaper, so I don't have to be in almost total agreement with the slime of the Right Wing here in America. Still, I cannot support what the extremist Muslim element has done here, no matter if they were provoked or not. There is blame to go around all over the place here, though I try to take an absolutist approach when it comes to free speech versus religion as I believe the former to be an actual right, as close to divine as it gets, whilst the latter is nice, though completely made up. That sounds ridiculous. But it's something like what I believe.

Nonetheless, the integration or non-integration of Muslims into European society seems to be a difficult and important issue. We are all more comfortable and amicable to the moderate persuasion, but continuing tensions could snap it all. As the writer says at the end of this article:

[T]he cartoons apparently provided a grand opportunity to extremists: for radical elements in Islamic countries rife with internal dissent, and for right-wing extremists in Denmark and Europe, to mobilize supporters from the disaffected. Among the victims are the moderate Muslims in Europe and worldwide, who now find themselves increasingly wounded in the crossfire between xenophobes and Islamists.

The danger here, as always, is with the extreme elements of any society. Just as the Right Wing media here tries to divide, push buttons, enrage, and couquer, the Danish paper provoked dangerously. This does not mean we should give a pass to those who responded to the provocations: there will have to come a time in society when individuals and the groups they find themselves in take responsibility for who they are and what their lives become. Through all my liberal beliefs, I think we miss out too often on a message of empowerment, a message of personal responsibility. Not in the way BushCo and the fundies has coopted the term, but in the true sense.

But I digress. Way too much.

Birthday Wish

2006-02-07T17:15:00.000-05:00

The Russians are famous for publishing madness (ever read Pravda? Eesh) and now one of their righties says the US will invade Iran for sure. And on my 28th birthday, to boot!

A senior Russian parliamentary official and leader of the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Vladimir Zhirinovsky believes that a US attack on Iran is inevitable, he has told Ekho Moskvy radio station.

“Any country claiming a leading position in the world will need to wage wars. Otherwise it will simply not be able to retain its leading position. The date for the strike is already known — it is the election day in Israel (March 28). It is also known how much that war will cost,” Zhirinovsky said.

He went on to add that the publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons in the European press was a planned action by the U.S. whose aim is “to provoke a row between Europe and the Islamic world”. Russia should “choose a position of non-interference and express minimal solidarity with the Islamic world”, Zhirinovsky added.

The kill their own Muslims elsewhere which we quietly ignore, so I guess this makes sense. I would like to see a list of the dates that invasions of Syria, Lebanon or Iran have been predicted in the last two years. Just for old times' sake.

Oy Vey!

2006-02-06T17:18:00.000-05:00

And now the Jerusalem Post is publishing the cartoons. Why are they doing this? Sigh.

A facsimile of the original page from the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, in which all twelve cartoons were published, on September 30, is featured in today's edition of the paper.

t is also available on the Jerusalem Post digital edition, available to paying subscribers only, but not on the paper's free-access website.

The Jerusalem Post did not wish to comment on its decision to publish when it was contacted today by MediaGuardian.co.uk.

But in an editorial published today, entitled "The Prophet's Honor", the paper contrasts the outcry that the Danish cartoons are causing in the Muslim world, while "Arab cartoonists routinely demonise Jews as global conspirators, corrupters of society and blood-suckers".

"Arab political 'humour' knows no bounds," the Jerusalem Post editorial said. "A cartoon in Qatar's Al-Watan depicted prime minister Ariel Sharon drinking from a goblet of Palestinian children's blood. Another, in the Egyptian Al-Ahram al-Arabi, showed him jackbooted, bloody-handed and crushing peace."

They could have made the same point without reprinting these cartoons. Because they are right: the Arab press is viciously anti-semitic in a very crude way. Of course, the Israeli government is viciously anti-Arab, as well. The sad thing here is that we're going through all this at all.

Ze Plot Thickens

2006-02-06T15:59:00.000-05:00

That Danish newspaper that published those Muslim cartoons? Apparently, the editor refused to print satirical drawings of Jesus Christ.

In April 2003, Danish illustrator Christoffer Zieler submitted a series of unsolicited cartoons dealing with the resurrection of Christ to Jyllands-Posten.

Zieler received an email back from the paper's Sunday editor, Jens Kaiser, which said: "I don't think Jyllands-Posten's readers will enjoy the drawings. As a matter of fact, I think that they will provoke an outcry. Therefore, I will not use them."

But the Jyllands-Posten editor in question, Mr Kaiser, told MediaGuardian.co.uk that the case was "ridiculous to bring forward now. It has nothing to do with the Muhammad cartoons.

"In the Muhammad drawings case, we asked the illustrators to do it. I did not ask for these cartoons. That's the difference," he said.

"The illustrator thought his cartoons were funny. I did not think so. It would offend some readers, not much but some."

There is a distinction here, and, though it is small, it is still relevent. This has not to do, in my opinion, with racism or religious prejudice, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but with one group of religious fanatics turning violent over something that offends only them so deeply. Fear and violence and blind, suffocating faith.

I've written more than enough about the way we treat and see Arabs and Muslims and the crimes of the USA and Europe. This is something else. This is the point where the multiple prongs of extremism meet, and wherever it happens, I am opposed to it.

To make things even more interesting, it appears that Iran's largest daily is retaliating with a special contest.

"It will be an international cartoon contest about the Holocaust," Farid Mortazavi, the graphics editor for Hamshahri newspaper, which is published by Tehran's conservative-run municipality, said on Monday.

He said the plan was to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression.

"The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let's see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons," he asserted.

Though his point be well taken -- and I believe there is a dangerous oversensitivity to anything "anti-zionist/ anti-israel, anti-semitic," as the phrases have all come to mean -- I don't understand what, specifically, the millions of people who died in the Holocaust have to do with the Danish newspaper's drawings. Not to mention the fact that Iran already has a, well, questionable relationship to Israel and the Jewish faith in general.

Over at DU they are defending the rioting Muslims and drawing conspiracies that Israel got the paper to publish the cartoon to spark the riots in the first place. Why wasn't there outrage when they first ran months ago? It was only when they were republished in France that the poop hit the patisserie.

Anyway, it's a touchy subject, but one that should be treated fairly and not through the sole prism of the Iraq War, US foreign policy and the misery and mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims at large. This is a modern world we live in. I'm usually fairly intolerant of accusations that liberals get too lost in sensitivity and that they only hate Bush and everything is filtered as a reaction to that; but in this case, I think some of us are refusing to see.

Complete Insanity

2006-02-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

They will not get over these cartoons!

Several thousand Syrian demonstrators set the Danish and the Norwegian embassies on fire on Saturday to protest at the publishing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad by European newspapers.

Chanting "God is Greatest," the protesters stormed the embassy; threw stones and shattered its windows; burned the national flag and replaced it with another flag reading "No God but Allah, Mohammad is His Prophet."

History.

Mohammed

2006-02-03T23:14:00.000-05:00

I never want to be lumped with the kind of people that are having a field day with this Mohammed caricature stuff, but I still feel strongly that religious fanatics cannot bully and threaten and restrict those who do not follow their faith. No matter how rude it may be. Here are the offending pictures. (Strangely, I had a difficult-ish time tracking down decent .jpegs of these. A lot of the links were broken or unaccessible.)

Yep. That's it. These are cartoons. Drawings. Of a political nature. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that America has a terrible and hurtful prejudice against Arabs, both here and abroad, and that we've treated the citizens of Arab and Muslim nations as terribly as we can. But this is different. This goes beyond all that. If those drawings, those 4" by 6" cartoons are worth starting a war over, then something is very wrong and irreconsilable. Fundamentalism, man, is a drag.

Here's What's Dumb About Fundamentalism

2006-02-03T16:29:00.000-05:00

No matter the stripe, it's dangerous to be a rabid, dogmatic religious zealot. Dangerous for nations within and without. The Taliban are a bunch of lunatics, as is Pat Robertson and his ilk. Yes, they can be compared. The Taliban would like a global Muslim state of repression. Pat Robertson would, too, except a Christian one.

These people are acting crazy in Palestine and Turkey and almost everywhere over the caricature of Mohammed.

Demonstrations were reported from Turkey, where protestors burnt French and Danish flags, to Indonesia, where around 100 men stormed the building of the Danish embassy, chanting "Let's go jihad (holy war), we're ready for jihad."

In Gaza City, the preacher at the main mosque said "those who have published these caricatures must have their heads cut. We we will not accept anything less."

I do not believe in organized religion, but I respect people's right to follow it -- NOT to force it on everyone else. I understand that this is a matter of respect, and I believe that the faith's ban on depicting the Prophet should be respected. However, there is a line, and there is freedom of speech within the secular world. It's part of what it means to be modern. It is part of "progress." It is one of the few things I believe in.

But they are acting like crazy people. These most extreme are medeivel and frantic reactions. I cannot understand this: I suppose that is part of the problem, the cultural gulf, but this is really a matter of compulsion, obsession and dogma. With all due respect to their faith, I am confident I will not go to hell for depicting the prophet and, as I am not an adherant to the faith, it means absolutely nothing to me that He be depicted. It is insensitive to do so, but to threaten to chop off the cartoonist's head is something more real and more immediate and less steeped in the nebulous and particular ancient strictures of an organized religion based in faith. That is murder.

As unacceptable as it may have been to portray the prophet, it is infinitely more unacceptable, to me, to threaten violence over a religious and, really, arbitrary preference. I really find it shocking and scary and I think faith like this, like the people who launched the war in Iraq, is extremely dangerous.

Gobbledygook

2006-02-02T15:46:00.000-05:00

The State of the Union Address didn't increase Bush's poll numbers in Turkey.

In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother.

They kill dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shoot the groom in the head, and drag those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv.

"Valley of the Wolves Iraq" set to open in Turkey on Friday feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward their longtime NATO allies: Americans. Advance tickets are already selling out across Turkey for the film, which has dialogue in Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish and English.

This is a little unsettling and the first thing I wondered was, Who the heck would play these parts? Would they get American expats, or American looking Turks? Not exactly.

The movie's American stars are Billy Zane, who plays a self-professed "peacekeeper sent by God," and Gary Busey as the Jewish-American doctor.

Yes. The bad guy from "Titanic" and the fat guy from that TV show about fat people.

God bless America!

Not That We Haven't Seen Enough

2006-02-01T12:50:00.000-05:00

Of Christopher Walken, but I really like to think that he builds robots in his spare time. Lazy Sunday Afternoon.

Nice.

F U

2006-01-26T15:34:00.000-05:00

All y'all can shove it.

"I am troubled by Judge Alito's apparent views on matters such as executive power, his past opposition to the principle of one person, one vote, and his narrow interpretation of certain civil rights laws," Johnson said. "Even so, I cannot accept an argument that his views are so radical that the Senate is justified in denying his confirmation."

Yes, this is the kind of retard talk we've come to expect from thin-willed, yella-bellied dem-o-craps. Thanks, guys! You'll be dead before all those unborn babies that will be born into crack houses and brick homes alike who will have to live with the legacy of this court!

Nice Guy Eddie

2006-01-25T09:32:00.000-05:00

Chris Penn, who I'll always think of in a wrinkled jogging suit and a dirty, dirty mouth, was found dead yesterday.

Police found the 43-year-old actor's body in bed about 4pm on Tuesday after being called to the four-storey beachside apartment complex by a housekeeper.

There were no obvious signs of foul play, according to police. Autopsy results were pending.

Hours after the body was found, fellow actor Martin Sheen left the building from a rear exit with two older women, but did not comment.

He was definitely a relic from my own pop cultural development and it's sad to see him go.

"First things fucking last."

Talent?

2006-01-24T15:52:00.000-05:00

My friend Jason is all fancy. But is he talented? You decide.

Nearing high school graduation, Roeder turned to lyrics in order to expand his artistic palette. It was during this period that he completed his only original song, "Three-Legged Lover." Best known for its provocative chorus -- "She's got three legs and three very high heels/ something like a tricycle, except not with wheels/ She's got two to run and two to jump/ she puts the third aside for her dog to hump" -- the song somehow never climbed past No. 52 even on Roeder's imaginary charts. In this track, Roeder mumbles a cappella while waiting for his mother to pick him up from his after-school job at the movie theater.

Yeah. He is.

Hurricane

2006-01-24T15:35:00.000-05:00

Who's got time to remember the outrage we all felt several months ago when all those black people drowned in that stupid hurricane thing?

[Officials received] an e-mail sent to the White House Situation Room hours before Katrina hit, warning that the storm's surge could breach levees and leave New Orleans flooded for weeks or months.

The e-mail included an Aug. 28 report by the Homeland Security Department's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center, which concluded that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would cause severe damage in the city, including power outages and a direct economic hit of up to $10 billion for the first week.

The top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee also accused the White House of trying to block or delay the panel's inquiry into the government's sluggish response to Katrina.

Hellooo? There's a reason they ignored this then and it's the same reason we're ignoring it now: it's BORING with a capital B. Come on, what are we supposed to do, get all upset about it? We get it, you're too poor to get out of the city and you're too poor to have a nice house on a hill. Why don't you try living the American dream and being white for a change?

Between

2006-01-24T12:38:00.000-05:00

I actually did have a dream last night that the Democrats filibustered -- successfully -- Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court. It was a weird kind of creepy-hazy dream, almost like a nightmare (?) in which it was clear that something that wasn't supposed to happen was happening. Anyway, this was just a dream. They'll never fucking do that. They're going to hold off until Bush nominates Jerry Falwell's baby-eating doppleganger. And, it's like, did you need to nominate the baby-eater? Human Falwell is bad enought.

The Judiciary Committee favorably recommended Samuel Alito's Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate on a party-line vote Tuesday, ensuring prospects the conservative jurist will join the high court bench.

All 10 Republicans voted for Alito, while all eight Democrats voted against him. The partisan vote was almost preordained, with 15 of the 18 senators announcing their votes even before the committee's session began.

That's a bowl full of terrific. Really. He's going to be a really, really great guy, a guy who thinks the President is a king and that the king's job is to protect unborn babies from the coat hanger of Amorality. It's just too bad that he won't sit in the Supreme Court for the rest of his life with no way anyone can ever remove him. Damn it.

The Futre of the Past Tomorrow Today

2006-01-23T10:35:00.000-05:00

They're trapping atoms now so we can download porn faster.

"With quantum mechanics, an object can be in two places at the same time, as long as you don't look at it," he said. The quantum computer architecture can store quantum bits (qubits) of information, where each qubit can hold the numbers one or zero, or even both digits simultaneously.

When a qubit is added to a quantum system, the computing power doubles. Thus, the quantum machine can crunch numbers at a rate that is exponentially faster than conventional processors, said Monroe.

Electrically charged atoms (ions) for such quantum computers are stored in traps in order to isolate the qubits, a process that is essential for the system to work.

Sorry I made another joke about Internet porn.

All the Bloodsuckers

2006-01-20T11:34:00.000-05:00

Finally, someone with conviction, morals and a nice set of teeth to run for governor in Minnesota.

My name is Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey, Ph.D., L.D.D.D. I am a Satanic Dark Priest, Sanguinarian Vampyre and a Hecate Witch. My Magikal Path name is: Lord Ares.

I despise and hate the Christian God the Father. He is my enemy...

During my time as Governor, drug dealers and users will live in fear. I
will introduce extremely harsh punishment for those who not only use
illegal drugs, I will fight to make dealers serve life in prison, or better
yet, Impalement.

Any Terrorist who is caught in Minnesota while I am Governor, will find
out what the true meaning of my nickname 'The Impaler' means.
Right in front of our State Capital. Then Fed’s can take the terrorist’s
body from the impaling stake. If the US Department of Justice (DOJ)
wants to charge me with brutally murdering a terrorist, they may do so.
I do not see an American Jury convicting me.

I actually think it's brave for a vampire to step up and thrust himself into the public eye. It's just a shame that all the press conferences will have to be held at night. No, no. He's a Republican.

Racist Much?

2006-01-19T17:51:00.000-05:00

Do you want to be mathematically proven racist? This will do it. (Through Becky.) I got seven. Average.

The Wall

2006-01-19T17:12:00.000-05:00

My friend Dania is back in Palestine, researching a story about the wall. It turns out that most of the people building this thing are, of course, Palestinians badly in need of a paycheck. So they find themselves building their own ethnic prison, of sorts. Here are some images of this thing. It's monstrous and the scope, the scale, is terrifying.

Nice, huh? Just a small wall to keep some of the riff raff out. Like some nightmare, is what it is. Difficult to believe it's true and I can only imagine what Dania feels like, what they all feel like, watching their homes get slowly walled in.

Help America Vote (For Bush)

2006-01-18T10:58:00.000-05:00

One of the most common things I read on conservative blogs is how liberals never want to hear the facts. All they do is complain and blame, and yet they never show any facts to back their yelling up. Now, this is a tall order when you live in a world where George W. Bush is a good Christian, racism has been eradicated and Jesus designed the T-Rex a hundred years ago.

That said, one thing they (and most of America) refuse to admit is that there were, to say the least, irregularities in the 2004 elections. People have talked about missing ballots, long lines, wrong dates and wildly disproportionate voting percentages. Articles written, studies done, reports submitted, and yet no one seems to care. They want more facts, facts, apparently, which are only facts when they meet the criteria set out by the conservatives who want to see them, namely: 1) Bush is right 2) God is right 3) Big Business is right and therefore 4) I am right.

My friend Jim showed me this new report by the National Election Data Archive which seems to indicate -- which does indicate statistical discrepancies that cannot be explained away by chance.

1. In E/M precinct 27, with an estimated 100 respondents, Kerry’s official vote count was 29% less than his exit poll share, creating a 58% difference between Kerry and Bush exit poll and official vote margins. There is less than a one in 867,205,500 chance of this occurring due to chance.

2. In E/M precinct 25, with an estimated 62 respondents, Kerry’s official vote count was 28% less than his exit poll share, creating a 56% difference between Kerry and Bush exit poll and official vote margins. There is less than a one in 234,800 chance of this occurring due to chance.

3. In E/M precinct 48, with an estimated 100 respondents, Kerry's official vote was 16% less than his exit poll share, creating a 32% difference between Kerry and Bush exit poll and official vote margins. There is less than a one in 17,800 chance of this occurring due to chance.

Their abstract says they use "the most accurate statistical method yet devised for determining whether exit poll error, random variations, or vote count manipulation cause the discrepancies between exit polls and official vote tallies." Now, I know this isn't straight up fact, but it is math, and in some countries they'd accept things proven by math to be fact, at least when it comes to counting ballots and things like that. Will this change anything? No. It's just so those of us *knew* that 2004 was stolen can be able to gloat. To ourselves.

They close with these remarks.

New electronic voting equipment without voter verified paper ballots, implemented under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, makes it easier for a small number of people to manipulate vote counts and nearly impossible to independently audit vote count accuracy. Virtually every county in America today publicly reports its vote counts in a way that hides evidence of miscounts. This allows those with access (whether authorized or not) to manipulate or make mistakes in vote counting with negligible possibility of detection.

Oh, I'm sad.

Durrrr

2006-01-17T11:26:00.000-05:00

Don't hateful, racist conservatives ever stop to think about the fact that they're all white and the only ones like them are all white and that most other people in the world are not white? Even when it's satire?

Black politicians, celebrities, and business leaders alike agreed today that they are still by and large oppressed by The Man. Even though it is subtler and almost impossible to detect, racism still exists in every aspect of our society. Indeed, there is strong anecdotal evidence that we’re still living in 1950’s Mississippi. Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, for instance, knows a guy who knows a guy that couldn’t get a bank loan, then watched as a white man simply drove right up and loaded bags of money into his armored car. Oprah's white hairdresser constantly gives her an attitude, and my cousin’s best friend’s crack dealer was “dissed” at a Piggly Wiggly just this year. While he isn’t certain that it was racially motivated, it makes one wonder if society has progressed at all since Dr. King was gunned down by George Bush’s dad.

I think this would be humorous, again, if it wasn't so frighteningly ignorant, unaware and arrogant.

Oscar de la Rant-a

2006-01-16T13:08:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while I come across this little twerp, Ben Shapiro, a precocious, straight-haired conservative who still wets his bed and is just adorable enough to somehow warrant publication across the Internet. I always forget he existed until I find him again, shake my head and say, "Oh, too bad he hasn't had an acne explosion or a wet dream or something to shake that grin off his little neocon face."

No one said it would be easy to be a Reaganite like our friend Ben. After taking some time off from Hilary and Harry, Ben is back to bashing Hollywood for a miunute. As normal people, it's hard for us to conceive, but Hollywood poses a real threat to Ben and his ilk. Can you imagine how it must make these terrified, hyper-sensitive, xenophobic, pansy-ass conservatives feel to see a movie with two gay cowboys possibly up for an Academy Award? You don't have to imagine: Small Fry tells us he's not watching the Oscars this year because he's too scared. Like a little scaredy cat. Because Hollywood is Pro- everything bad and he is everything good and to prove it he gives a little history.

Then, our illustrious decade: With great films scarce and politically mainstream Academy voters even scarcer, 2000 featured the victory of repulsive anti-suburbia and pro-homosexuality hit piece "American Beauty." Of course, it beat out a film lionizing an abortionist ("The Cider House Rules") and another attacking the tobacco industry ("The Insider"). Most disturbingly, the Academy handed Hilary Swank a Best Actress Oscar for playing a transgendered biological girl murdered by a bunch of hicks. And 2002 was the year of the African-American honorary Oscars, when Denzel Washington took home Best Actor for his decent if overrated performance in "Training Day" and Halle Berry took home Best Actress for her highly touted simulated orgasms in "Monster's Ball." In 2003, homosexual agenda films like "The Hours," "Frida" and "Far From Heaven" grabbed the largest share of nominations.

Wow. That is scary. He goes on and on and on and on and on. And on about how many impure amoral movies have been given Oscars solely because Hollywood is out to destroy America. He praises then bashes Steven Spielberg. He cannot stand the idea of transgender individuals and he is oh, so scared. I happen to hate the Oscars. I do think it's political, but more motivated by the politics of commerce than anything else. Yes, they like a cheesy human interest. Yes, Million Dollar Baby was drippy. Yes, a lot of movies suck. But these people -- they believe everyone is to be reduced to special interest groups and that all these little groups are slowly creeping up the stairs to rip their money from their wallets and ass-rape them or worse.

If he wasn't so arrogant, I'd be tempted to feel sorry for what's-his-face. I already forget his name and it's not really worth remembering, is it?

Law

2006-01-16T00:25:00.000-05:00

As much as I wish the wiretapping, on top of Katrina and Plamegate and Jesus Christ Almighty everything else would actually stick, I doubt it will. It's nice that Arlen Specter mumbled the word impeachment recently, but that ain't enough. Bush is immune. He always will be immune because he's made immune in our imaginations. Even to those of us in the opposing camp, he is something else, an image, an idea, and you can't impeach images or ideas.

There's a lot of talk on the lefty blogs about what an idiot Chris Matthews is for saying that maybe it's part of the Presiden'ts job to break the law. While this looks like a ridiculous statement on its surface and it's difficult to see with the froth all in our eyes, in reality it's not.

Of course the President is above the law. He always has been, he always will be. Because power is wielded above the law. That is a fact of society and a rule in modern America. The laws are not for those who make them. They are to separate the powerful from the weak, to fill prisons, to maintain control over our lives and livelihoods and those privileged enough to be on the other side need not follow them. Let's not kid ourselves. We understand this. We've been raised to understand this. And, in another time, we may even tell ourselves that we'd want a Preisident who's not afraid to tweak and bend the rules, if he were a philosopher king and if we believed she was doing it for our benefit. It is part of the President's job to break the law to prove that he's president, that he belongs in the ruling elite, to exercise his right as such and to make the point that he is supreme. Power is image and the image must be maintained. All presidents are above the law until their political capital runs out or there's an opposing majority with a hair in its ass. And neither has happened here yet, not because it can't but because it won't. The image persists.

We do not live in a democracy and we never have. This is about history and power, not about wiretapping or some quaint little idea about the rule of law and representative government. This is the way people in power act and George W. Bush is in power. This is how kings act and George W. Bush is a king. In a romantic scenario, people would realize that things are not as they should be in America, but in real life, I think they already know. I think we're already programmed to be good workers and quiet, nonviolent members of our consumer society and I think that no one wants to think about it. Far from any epiphanies wrapped in red, white and blue, I think America is cautiously dozing off, groggy from a national dose of Zoloft.

Day 7

2006-01-13T20:54:00.000-05:00

All is well. Tired, but from not sleeping. Craving crab cakes, of all things. One of the first trips I'll make once back in form, will be to get some crab cakes, by Jove.

Bullshite

2006-01-13T16:41:00.000-05:00

Never been to Red State Son before, somehow, but he has a nice piece on the freedom of the press today.

Surf any site where endless war and nationalist frenzy are celebrated, and chances are good that you'll bump into this:

It is the Soldier not the reporter, who has given us Freedom of the press. It is the Soldier not the poet, who has given us Freedom of speech. It is the Soldier not the campus organizer, who has given us the Freedom to demonstrate. It is the Soldier not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial. It is the soldier, who salutes the Flag, who serves beneath the Flag and whose coffin is draped by the Flag, who allows the protester to burn the Flag.

Columns of drums beat as a solemn white male voice -- Bruce Willis? -- recites each line, indicting those who fail to fall to their knees at the sight of a camo-painted Hummer, or the image of George Bush in his flight suit, or a cluster bomb cleansing some Haji-infected neighborhood.

Pretty stirring stuff. Gets the wood nice & stiff. Only thing is, it's bullshit.

He backs it up. In his own way.

Founding Brothers

2006-01-12T10:49:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading this fine book by Joseph Ellis. It's a portrait of the major players in the birth of our country and how they moved around the context of 1790s America. It's beautifully written and assuringly authoritative. Ellis has drawn conclusions and speaks of them as truth but without the usual pedantic tone or the harsh judgment of other biographers I've read. It's more as if he knows the characters; and, indeed, this is the greatest thing about the book: it's a glance at these men as men, flawed, ambitious, confused, stoic. Men. (And, of course, Abigail Adams who, in some ways, was as important to US policy as anyone else of the time.) Having read some "revisionist" history, I understand that there were no cherry trees or altruists back in 1776; but this book also goes a long way toward humanizing this group that allowed for slavery and only entitled property owners with voting rights. They were products of their times, who struggled nonetheless with these questions. They were not evil, they were not good. They were human.

The final chapter, an analysis of the opposite minds of Adams and Jefferson -- the first of whom strived to cut through romanticism, the second being a lofty poet of it -- is a beautiful account of a less known jewel of American history: the correspondence between the two men which eventually bridged a great and painful animosity. Their letters are brilliant, especially as they face mortality with tender words and shared emotions. And the final page, in which the two men meet their end under extraordinary and undeniably romantic circumstances, had me on the verge of tears swaying on the L train.

(Incidentally, they made a documentary based on the book, I see, with none other than Brian Dennehy as the voice of George Washington.)

Day 6

2006-01-12T10:13:00.000-05:00

Today I feel great. Back on track after a good night's sleep. Decided to make the drink at work rather than package it in concentrate and siphon it out through the day. It tastes better that way.

Last night I went to trivia at our local bar, certainly the first time I've done it without partaking in one of the following a) drinking b) smoking c) eating one of their delicious pressed sandwiches. And it was not at all bad. It was, in fact, fun. We were in first place at the end of the first half but, after an especially challenging General Knowledge round and an audio cascade of some nineteen songs most of us were unfamiliar with, we fell to the team of eleven members. Alas. It didn't much affect me to lose the $25 bar tab, but the thrill of victory transcends free beer. Sometimes.

Alito

2006-01-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

This is the first I've really said about Alito. Truth be told, I cannot tell how these hearings will end. He'll surely get out of committee, but will the Dems have the gall to filibuster? They certainly should. Bork has been the gauge on what an unacceptable nominee is and Alito is at least as conservative as Bork was, from what I've read. However, this is a completely different time. The country -- at least the popular national image of the country, which is what matters anyway -- is even more conservative than it was when it was morning again in America; Democrats are not in control of the Senate; and a cloud of evil is lowering upon our house. BushCo means business, as we all know, and getting an ultra-con with a boner for a President-King on the bench is just part of the program to set up a new fascism, perhaps to be called a milito-corporatism. (I'm not good at coining phrases, by Jove.)

At any rate, I haven't seen any of the hearings on live TV, but I read the updates when I can. I saw this morning that poor Mrs. Alito left the hall in tears after an especially charged personal discussion with the nominee.

Martha-Ann Bomgardner, who had sat behind her husband for hours of questioning over several days, left as her husband was being questioned by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

"Judge Alito, I am sorry that you've had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this," said Graham.

Moments earlier, the senator had asked Alito, "Are you really a closet bigot?" The nominee said no, and Graham said, "No sir, you're not."

Another classic Republic tactic, the "Oh, poor me, oh, poor you, how unfair." The unfortunate assailment of an innocent family. The boo-hoo partisan politics. As just another egregious display of their ultimate hypocrisy, debates of national importance are watered down to the personal feelings of an individual or the unfair and not-very-nice prodding of another. In an attempt to paint something as overtly personal and socially uncouth they glaze over the larger picture, thus pushing the emotional buttons we're all programmed to respond to, Oprah-like, clouding reason with emotion. It's right out of their playbook.

When Rush Limbaugh gets nabbed for popping pills it becomes a personal matter and a call to christian forgiveness; when Scooter Libby and Karl Rove commit treason, it's the Democrats who are criminalizing politics. It fits perfectly in with the media punditry's portrayal of national politics as an ice skating competition with larger-than-life individuals striving not to commit gaffes or look worse than their opponent. Nothing about policy, history, cause-effect: just the angling of personalities. And in that war, the Right Wing wins every time because they're louder, they talk meaner and they cry harder.

Day 5

2006-01-11T13:34:00.000-05:00

A little more gaunt, perhaps, and a little slower. I've had late nights this week and I think it's vital to get your rest when you're living on syrup and lemon. So last night I got to bed early, though my stomach woke me around five this morning. There's a slight feeling of floatiness? I have sort of gotten into another reality in which I am someone who doesn't eat food so I suppose this makes sense. I think about smoking in the future but still have virtually no cravings right now. Feel slightly weak, as if there's a slight fever or virus. This is meant to be the time, about, when those toxins just come pouring out, so I expect that. There's a slight headache, I think from lack of hydration, which is barely even noticeable but persistent nonetheless.

Great News!

2006-01-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

Where does it all start? All I can say is "They" will not go quietly into that good night. With all the sugar plums and Abramoffs we've been enjoying these past couple months, it goes without saying that something is bound to spoil the party. We've been talking for a while about Israel and Iran, and how the former would probably bomb the latter to save us the trouble and to get even on a few grudges as well. It looks like it may come this spring.

Israel is updating plans for a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities which could be launched as soon as the end of March, according to military and intelligence sources.

The Israeli raids would be carried out by long-range F-15E bombers and cruise missiles against a dozen key sites and are designed to set Tehran's weapons programme back by up to two years.
Pilots at the Israeli air force's elite 69 squadron have been briefed on the plan and have conducted rehearsals for their missions.

Germany is also warning that Iran had better remain in good standing with UN inspectors lest the risk "consequences," whatever those may be.

I was reading over on DU that some people think Saudi Arabia gave Israel the ok to bomb Iraq from their airspace, a charge I know nothing about and would neither doubt nor call likely. In this world of global dominance, where powers mingle across borders as never before, almost anything is possible: yes, we defend ours and our tribe, but when that new tribe is the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful, ehtnicity, race and nationality get trumped quick.

It's also timely that Sharon is so incapacitated -- though I can't say for certain where he would fall on this issue -- and with Netanyahu dying to strike as it is, anything can happen. This would spell disaster for Iraq and the Middle East program. But this presidency and this Administration want disaster, they want escalated violence, they want a bigger bogeyman to hunt down. We knew he wanted to be king and the Alito hearings are confirming that. How else but with a war that never ends?

Day 3

2006-01-09T18:20:00.000-05:00

I guess maybe I'm gullible? Persuadable? I don't know. I like to think I'm semi-rigorous in my analysis of goings on and something of a skeptic but, truth be told, I spent about a month believing the world is controlled by lizard aliens a few years ago and I want badly to believe in the Loch Ness Monster. I prefer to look at it as I'm open-minded, however. I'm willing to entertain possibilities.

So the point is I'm in Day 3 of this fast-cleanse routine embarrassingly named "The Master Cleanser." All I can consume, for ten days, is a drink mixture consisting of lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. I know! That's what I thought: the most obvious and sublime list of ingredients!

I know one person personally and several others anecdotally who have done the cleanse, which is designed to clear out all the toxins deposited in your body and rebuild your organs and cells from the inside out. Laugh. Go on, laugh! Judt like the rest of 'em! But these people spoke highly of its effects and I'd been meaning to try to fast for several years. (Nick and I tried once, a couple years back when we both worked at Burdick's. We looked like something from Marat/Sade by the end of the day and we broke the fast with Nuss torte. It's that good.) I've also been feeling a bit out of balance. I smoke and drink and do both regularly, and have found the pursuit of leisure perhaps too high on the list of prioroties, especially for someone who calls himself a writer (ok, I don't have the balls for that yet, but I've whispered it quietly to myself some evenings) and would like to create something to back it up.

So I look at this as a test of will power. It is, after all, only ten days out of my life, and even if the direct health benefits aren't half so impressive as accounts claim, I will come out of it knowing that I can conquer craving, at least temporarily. I prepared myself heartily for it the night before I was supposed to start, last Friday. I didn't start on time, however, as I wasn't able to get the ingredients and got paranoid about doing it right and not dying. That night I was very nervous. What was I stepping into? Some kind of cultish ritual? Would this kill me? What about the shows I have coming up and would I be able to drink after them? What if -- God forbid -- something were to happen to me and I could never have another slice of brie or a chicken parm sandwich? Would it have been worth it? The answer had to be no. I was dangerously close to abandoning the whole program, but I repeated to myself, perhaps a hundred times in a row, the mantra "I want to do this, I'm strong-willed, it's good for me."

Doing this did get me into a sort of meditative calm about the whole thing. I found myself moving more slowly with a quieter mind. Strange but true. And I felt at ease with the fact that I had to put it off an extra day. I told a couple people about it (others I was too embarrassed to inform) and the one response I got almost universally was "Why?" Well, why not? It did help to outline it for people so as to solidify it in my head more, I suppose. Though I must say the health benefits in the health benefits strict sense is not that high on the list. I'm a fan of purging and I'd like to dump some toxins out. But it's more about a second chance, a starting over and doing something difficult for myself. Having confidence in myself. Living up to my word.

There is a kind of security switch that goes on sometimes when I decide to do something -- it's in all of us -- where I know that something deep inside the brain has been locked. No matter how much I slip and slide on the surface of my brain, the security code is in place and it's on lockdown. It's a nice feeling and I think some people refer to it as "discipline."

So. Days 1 and 2 passed remarkably easily. I was still in that sort of monkish I'm-floating-above-the-world mentality and I could not have been more content. Yes, there were pangs of hunger and urges for cigarettes, but nothing very threatening. I lounged around the house, wrote some, watched football, went for a walk, saw a movie and did the Sunday crossword. When I felt hungry -- which was surprisingly rarely -- I would just have a glass of the concoction. The drink, which can be compared somewhat to lemonade and hot totty, is remarkably good and hearty. It's a comforting thing, too, that I know I can look forward to and be satisfied by. I like it warm, just below the temperature of a cup of tea. So, bla bla bla, days one and two and I'm a swami.

Day 3. Today. Was harder. Everything smelled great My method up to this point has been to really, really inhale these great smells so that I can almost taste them and not try to deny it to myself. Today that wasn't working. Today, I wanted to eat those things, and I began to wonder why I was doing this to myself and how I could be such a fool. It's also Monday and so I returned to work where I have to stand in the same place for nine hours and I'm used to getting a break and, generally, breaking up the monotony. What's more I work at a fruit basket company where I'm surrounded by food all day. There was a close call with the rugelach which I don't want to talk about. People love to eat there, and the range of lunches runs from home-made chicken to Thai noodles with shrimp and everything in between. I do think my sense of smell is improved and it was almost maddening on a couple occasions to inhale these delicious vapors and to stare at people eating -- which is something you don't want to do for too long. It's disquieting.

Now that I'm home, however, and sitting with a drink, I feel better. Tingly, in fact. (Our houseguest just informed me that when you stop smoking, oxygen makes its way back up to your brain where it belongs, and the effect is something euphoric. Ok, I'm cool with that.) I have a show in a little while and I feel good. I'm ready for it. This also may be one of the longest posts I've ever done.

I'll try to maintain notes over the next week as I'm on this thing, more for myself, I suppose, and posterity. But you're welcome to call me a kook anytime you like.

Was the Ladder the Latter?

2006-01-06T10:30:00.000-05:00

Believe me, that's a terrible, horrible pun.

But the fact remains there's an interesting and long conversation going on at Nick's over which came first in civilization: stairs or bread.

"I am pretty sure the Anasazi were grinding corn meal for bread before they began building the cliff dwellings, which required at first the footholds and then crude but undeniable stairs.

Of course, bread and stairs had probably been invented elsewhere earlier. My argument would be that you don't build dwellings with stairs while you're still hunting/gathering and nomadic (dragging the deer up there would suck), so only once an agricultural society is established, with things like bread, are people going to want a high and defensible living space that's semi-permanent. Crops are not something you have around all year, and you have to know that you can eat the dried/ground form of your crops for longer than just the harvest month before you settle into that area. So I vote bread."

My thinking is somewhat the opposite, but part of the problem is that it's so hard to define just what stairs are. I say a semi-permanent structure designed for multiple uses. It seems natural to me that someone, sometime, used stones or mounds and shaped them to get up a tree or into a cave or to get to higher ground. Is a ladder stairs? I don't think so. Is a naturally occuring stump? I think... no? Because it should be a piece of technology. If someone moved that stump, on the other hand, you have a step stool, I guess, and that's still not exactly stairs, is it?

I mean, I just don't understand how anyone even came up with bread (or math or glass or computer chips) though stairs I think I could figure out.

Jeb Can Vouch For It

2006-01-05T12:51:00.000-05:00

New Hampshire and Florida do not have much in common except an excess of hicks. But on the topic of funding education, their respective Supreme Courts are bucking the system - somewhat. A couple years back, NH took up arms over the disparity across the state in property taxes that pay for public schools. The legislature came up with a (far from perfect) system whereby richer communities spread some of their funds across the state to the less wealthy schools. This is tantamount to communism in a state whose motto if "Live Free Or Die," but at least there's some movement on this. I've long thought that the system for funding schools is actually unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, but I've not heard anyone else make this argument and I'm not very smart to begin with.

BushCo, under the Grover Norquist banner of conservatism, are actually and really out to destroy the public education system (as part of a larger social program that's been going on since, oh, 2000 BCE to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak) and the voucher idea is the warm-and-fuzzy first attempt.

So back to Florida, where their Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, huzzah.

The Florida Supreme Court struck down the voucher system that allowed some children to attend private schools at taxpayer expense, saying Thursday that it violates the state constitution's requirement of a uniform system of free public schools.

The 5-2 opinion struck down the Opportunity Scholarship Program, championed by Gov. Jeb Bush, which was the nation's first statewide system of school vouchers.

Under the 1999 law, students at public schools that earn a failing grade from the state in two out of four years were eligible for vouchers to attend private schools.

The War On Schools?

Balla Walla

2006-01-04T16:16:00.000-05:00

My friend Bala maintains a very nice photoblog. You really should look at it. I was thinking about him and so did what any distant friend would do and googled his name, and this pleasant surprise came up.

I've been looking at a lot of photoblogs lately and, for me at least, I think they're the perfect fit for the webmedium

Thought?

2006-01-03T11:52:00.000-05:00

I don't think I think anymore. I used to be very thoughtful. Thoughts would fly through me like crazy and some of them I could reign in and put down on paper or so forth. Draw. You know, speak about. But now there's almost nothing. It's dull and still in there. I read books about interesting topics and as soon as I close their covers my mind is silent, those carefully chosen words all but forgotten. Tumbleweeds. No sparking synapses, no insights, nada.

What happened to the boy who used to lie in bed and seriously contemplate infinity? Jesus, what happened to the man who, a year or two ago, was able to sit down and write out jokes? The guy who could comprehend the Upanishads relatively well? Geesh.

Is my mind muddled? Is it over-mediated? Maybe I'm dumb now? I don't know. Aw, geez, I need a colonic, maybe. Yeah, that'll do it.

Beard!

2005-12-29T21:39:00.000-05:00

Hi! I have a beard! So do these people! Or mustaches! Guess who they are!

I know it's hairy, but keep your chin up and you might... just... facial hair. So. Yeah.

Barr None

2005-12-28T16:30:00.000-05:00

Some nice, interesting news from Bob Barr's bizarre brain.

Former GOP Congressman, Bob Barr of Georgia, has penned a second op-ed column condemning Bush's illegal wiretap scheme. It appeared in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This time the former US Attorney explains how Bush will try to avoid a well-deserved impeachment proceeding. It's a good primer for what to expect as the coverage progresses.

Barr covers the expected plan of lying, word-parsing, stonewalling, smearing the accusers and utilizing partisanship in defense of his "illegal spying on American citizens" that has already begun.

You truly are innocent when you dream.

Nawt Smaht

2005-12-28T16:13:00.000-05:00

There are really few politicians in New York with such a fine and shiny armor as Eliot Spitzer. Yes, it's true that if you walk near the Williamsburg Bridge on a clear day you can smell his ambition drifting across the river; even so, he's come at his job with a bull's horns and what appears to be a clear integrity. He is one of the good guys -- or so it seems at this stage of his career -- and he's made his bones taking down corrupt Wall Streeters, something we're all meant to be happy about. Now, apparently, he's gotten a little too uppity for some in the club and the GOP is making the very bad move of going after him.

The state Republican Party is asking for an investigation into a claim by a former Wall Street executive that Attorney General Eliot Spitzer threatened him in a private conversation, an accusation Spitzer has denied.

Last week John Whitehead, the appointed chairman of the state Lower Manhattan Development Corp., wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he accused Spitzer of having threatened him by telephone eight months before. The conversation wasn't taped and there were apparently no witnesses, but Whitehead cited what he said were his own notes of the conversation.

He quoted Spitzer as saying: "I will be coming after you. You will pay the price" for publicly criticizing Spitzer's investigation of an ally, insurance magnate Maurice Greenberg.

Now. Well. It certainly looks like they're trying to put a some chinks in the ole Spitzanator's armor before an almost-certain run at Albany. And I think this is a bad idea. For one thing, Spitzer comes out on top in almost any contest with a Wall Streeter and especially the guy in charge of the nightmare that is the LMDC. Second, I don't know the full details of the story, but telling someone you're coming after them doesn't sound worthy of an investigation. What it sounds like is you should take your balls out of your grandma's purse and build something on Ground Zero you cock-smooch.

Et voila.

Remember Lady K?

2005-12-23T02:02:00.000-05:00

This guy or gal blogger is one of my favorites, and here is a very acute analysis of the way we saw the Hurricane.

Beautiful, right? Right?

Paris Strike, Uh...

2005-12-23T01:56:00.000-05:00

Here's the way I chose to feel about things this morning, hoofing past Grand Central Station, after I saw the pedestrian mess that NYC had actually become (before this morning, I had taken cabs (for $25) or been picked up by cars right off the 59th St. Bridge; and when I went home, at 10 pm, the roads were relatively clear. Today, however, I walked the full four miles, all the way down the East Side, which was like Macy's on the Friday after Thanksgiving. And furthermore, when I came to this conclusion, oxygenated, happy, it was not known whether this thing would end this afternon or sometime in January. It was a metaphysical war zone.): The inconvenience I personally endured is worth it for thirty-thousand-plus people to have a slightly better life, with a more reasonable retirement age and decent medical care and a better future (sigh, but true) for their children. I cannot say the same for the other 6, 999,999 people and the 800 Billion dollars lost in no way whatsoever. I'm only talking about my experience, and that's what this is really about, it seems to me.

After much more than this, however -- say, no transit till Monday -- I'm afraid my liberal supermind would have checked out and the more practical pig-roasting baby-slayer would have emerged. And I think the rest of the city -- that hadn't already come to this reality -- would have felt the same way. And the riots would have filled the history books. And it all would have happened much too fast. But this is what it is. And, if nothing else, we have seen and felt in our knees just how important the transit workers are to the everyday functioning of the world's capital.

More (On)

2005-12-21T15:32:00.000-05:00

One of the nice things to observe lately is how the media is beginning to emerge from its cocoon and, with the tentative first steps of a newborn foal, explore the unfamiliar landscape of a now -pervious President. Given this and assuming (read: pointlessly hoping) that Democrats can craft a loud and clear message, we may see some preemptive work by the good guys so the RW talking points aren't so predominant.

For example, they'll try to exploit the fact that Rockefeller and Pelosi were notified and paint them as hypocrites and cowards for not doing anything way back when. Even though they are hypocrites and cowards, in this case, there's nothing they could have done.

Rockefeller could have publicized the existence and actions of the program, but if he or any of the other members of Congress briefed on the program went public with their opposition, they would have been breaking the law. To fail to acknowledge that anyone briefed on this program essentially had no way to oppose or publicize the existence of the program without breaking the law is bullshit.

Nice.

This About Says It

2005-12-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

It seems like it's almost scandalous not to have a scandal these days. Tee hee!

We have a President here who is making a claim of unlimited power, for the duration of a war that may never end. Oh, he says it’s limited by the country’s laws, but they’ve got a crack legal team that reliably interprets the laws to say that the President gets to do whatever he wants. It amounts to the same thing.

I am not exaggerating. I am really and truly not.

September 11 started the war. When will it end? Maybe never. Where is the battlefield? The entire world, including the United States. Who is an enemy combatant? Anyone the President says is an enemy combatant, including a U.S. citizen–no need for a charge, no need for a trial, no need for access to a lawyer. What if they’re found not to be an enemy combatant? We can keep them in prison anyway, and we don’t have to tell their families they’re alive or their lawyers that they were cleared. What can you do to an enemy combatant? Anything you want. Detain him forever, for the rest of his life, because this is a war like any other and we have always been able to detain POWs for the duration of the war. But you don’t need to follow the Geneva Conventions, because this is a war like no other in our history. And oh yes–if the President decides that we need to torture a prisoner for the war effort, it’s unconstitutional for Congress to stop him. They took that position in an official memo, and they have not backed down from it. They have said it was “unnecessary” but they have never backed down from it.

They are not only entitled to do these things to people; they are entitled to do them in secret. When Congress asks for information about them, they can just ignore it. And they are entitled to actively deceive the public about all this.

They've been hit with three major scandals in four months: Katrina, Plamegate and now this. For how much longer will the public stand by him (if they ever are now)? The only thing Bush has been able to say is that it's neecessary for national security and that it's wartime. The only thing is, he's got failing marks on the first and the tide has turned on the latter. It's wartime, yes, but he got us into the war by lying and now a majority of Americans want us out and disagree with it. Yes, by fuck, I wish they were thiking about this three years ago, but, hey, you take what you can get.

Duh

2005-12-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

I was too tired and too busy at work yesterday to get on here and talk about the strike. But, you all know about it. Most of you are in the middle of it. I think, too, that I was drained and stressed and fatigued and so it seemed frightening out of all proportion. Sitting around late last night, after taking a $16 cab home, my liberal mettle was certainly being tested. The people interviewed on the news -- ethnic people with accents -- were upset, incredulous, enraged that they were being forced to pick up the transpo tab out of their own pocket. They said the Union was selfish. They were righteous and they were cold.

And it's a tough question: on the one hand, you want to stand by unionized workers in most cases, and especially when they work for an agency like the MTA which, despite it efficiency, manages to screw a lot of stuff up; but you also want to support and empathize with people like me and people in worse situations and more children than me, who have to walk from the Bronx or pay $45 for a car service, whose employers aren't as understanding and generous as mine. (My boss was handing out $20s to anyone who needed a ride hom last night. I wound up cabbing it home and my guy, Leroy, was driving during the 1980 strike. That one lasted eleven days, something that will be met with riots in the street if it happens today.)

After a good night's sleep, I'm a little more firmly on the side of the union. This cannot go on much longer or it will be completely selfish, but, after reading this, I can see a bit more clearly where they're coming from.

The authority improved its earlier wage proposals, dropped its demand for concessions on health benefits and stopped calling for an increase in the retirement age, to 62 from 55.

But then, just hours before the strike deadline, the authority's chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, put forward a surprise demand that stunned the union. Seeking to rein in the authority's soaring pension costs, he asked that all new transit workers contribute 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, up from the 2 percent that current workers pay

Yet for all the rage and bluster that followed, this war was declared over a pension proposal that would have saved the transit authority less than $20 million over the next three years.

It seemed a small figure, considering that the city says that every day of the strike will cost its businesses hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenues. But the authority contends that it must act now to prevent a "tidal wave" of pension outlays if costs are not brought under control.

The union kinda got shanghaied and on what seems to be an out of whack principle in the first place. To save $20 M they cost the city, what, $500 M? It's tough to feel sorry for the transit workers since the demands of 15,000 people is really screwing over four million people. But this is what unions are here to do and it's kind of nice to see people on bicycles and roller blades. New York loves being put out because it gets to maintain its image as resilient. Etcetera.

This morning I walked with Nick all the way to the QB Bridge, but some yuppies picked us up to get in the HOV Lanes. It was interesting and I'd like to do more of that if this goes on.

Any good stories?

*On edit* the rest of the story gives the MTA credit for foreward thinking in terms of revenue and cost of pensions. And Anthony highlights some fine points in the Comments Section. I'm just not smart enough to know what to do here, so maybe I'll be on the union's side today and then back against them tomorrow.

Bullpoop

2005-12-19T10:08:00.000-05:00

Today is total and utter bullshit. Up way too late, with too much borrowed Pernod, talking about too much King Kong. One of those mornings when you wake up almost completely by accident and realize you would have slept another three or four hours, well beyond your wake-up time, were it not for fate. One of those mornings when the first thing you think about is going back to bed as soon as you can.

Monsters

2005-12-18T19:51:00.000-05:00

Hic Kongus. That's stupid.

I just got back from King Kong. And I'll be back out for Asssscat in a moment (I tried to link to the appropriate web site mentioned above, but, through the url guess game, came first to this, which I didn't have the patience to browse but which is probably worth it for those of you with a steel-willed sense of humor), but a pop back home for a slice and a smoke is just the thing on a cool Sunday night. 'Tis the kind of night that makes you want to run. To sprint past cars and streetlights till the breath flees ye. I didn't, but, still, I felt the urge. The urge to run.

May have had something to do with King Kong. It was assuredly an event. I find that I actually only pay money to go see the kinds of movies my righteous voice would rail against. (In print, railing comes more naturally than in mind, I think.) But this was nice. It's so interesting that the state of CGI is not yet seamless but near to it, so that half your consciousness is dedicated to analyzing the artificial attempting to look real and the other half is panting about the action, and some strange, spiritual third half is integrating the two. Movies themselves are artificial trying to create real, whether in the "Remains of the Day" fashion or in the Fellini way or in something else in the middle. King Kong is a fantastical story made realistic and, further, made to look like a realistic modern version of something created first in another time. It was almost as much a spectacle to see the recreation of 1930s New York -- something we're supposed to know through news reels and films of the time, but really don't know any more than anything else we've never lived through -- as it was to see the invention of Skull Island and all the oversized creatures that prowl there. Dinosaurs, spiders, you know. Overall, these were great and some of the most disturbing monsters were the "uncircumcised worms" that leapt from the river to suck up men by their heads. And the creepy crawlies that moved so disgustingly across the surface of things.

The movie itself is a world unto itself, and, though there was sap aplenty, I'm generally forgiving of a film that lives within itself. I think this did that. It was corny and sometimes overwrought (Hayes and Jimmy have an almost uncomfortable mentor-student relationship that is, generally, laughable) but it had enough steam behind it to kind of propel one's suspension of disbelief even beyond the melodramatic. You have to take it for what it is. And the action sequences were some of the most frenetic and inventive I can remember seeing. Though our sophisticated movie sense -- which was birthed with Star Wars but yet remembers stop-motion animation as the most advanced effect of its time -- is constantly on the lookout for chinks in the computer generated world, there were occasions when all that is swept away. (I think this may be why cartoons and total computer animations like "Toy Story" still complete themselves and their world better than the Titanics and Pearl Harbors of today, and will probably live on as more timeless than these show-offy affairs locked into the peak of their time's technology.) In another time not far from now, say with the kids born today, they'll know almost nothing else, and special effects won't be so special as they are, well, the way things are. Specifically, King Kong's face and expression and simplicity of movement is impressive. The kind of impressive you realize after your heart sinks with his anguished grimmace. That's good. That's movies. And to come back around, these are the most moving and alarming moments because they are the most human. And they are the most human because they used advanced technology to exactly replicate the expressions and simple movements of a real human. So there's a dog chasing its tail thing here that is worth exploring more than I have the time or brain power for.

At a certain point and for a certain amount of time, it will become all the rage to make movies done completely with motion capture, with real people playing fake people that are made to look again like the real people, slightly enhanced or altered, that played the part in the first place. Integration and smooth surfaces in an age struggling to get ahead of itself in order to look back on what it is constantly trying to get away from. Plus the T-Rex is friggin' cool.

Big Balls

2005-12-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

How could someone even do this?

British police hunted for three men on Saturday who stole a huge bronze Henry Moore sculpture worth up to 3 million pounds ($5.30 million) and a spokesman said they feared the piece would be destroyed for scrap.

Police said the 3.5 meter long (11 ft 5.8 in) sculpture, "A Reclining Figure," was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, north of London, on Thursday night by three men who drove it away.

It makes me think about great heist movies and the illegal underground of the superrich. Someone will own this and keep it hidden away, owning it only for the fact of owning it. Because they can. And they'll take their ultrarich friends out for a walk across the lava pools one fine evening, eating tiger steak, only to unveil this massive, stolen sculpture. Then they'll hunt a human being from the Bronx.

Christmas In New York

2005-12-17T14:20:00.000-05:00

It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank, when an old man said to me, "won't see another one." And then he sang a song - the rare old Mountain Dew - I turned my face away and dreamed about you.

Or somesuch. It's never 100 percent when it comes to Shane McGowan and words. But the idea is right.

I feel like Christmas has already come and gone. Talking with friends at a Christmas party last night I can say that I'm not alone. I don't even know exactly what it is and, if I think about it, I'd probably remember feeling this way most of the last decade. But, shit, we still have another week before it's overwith.

I'm not one of these devout Christmas haters. I like the snow in the streets and the bustle and the fogged breath, etcetera. I like spending time with my family. I even like finding nice gifts for people (even if it winds up being a Peruvian woodwind from the Union Square craft fair on the 23rd) and receiving thoughtful gifts.

Nor am I about to launch into a polemic over the War On Christmas and the OverCommercialization of the Holiday, the vapidity of the American soul, etcetera. I think all of that has been covered and the result, like the result from every other angle of assault in this country, is fatigue. And maybe that's my point: all of this, the Christmas ads, the Christmas songs, the Bush Administration, Fox News, prescription drugs, all of it, is very fatiguing. I'm past being upset, even. It's just, like, you know, I don't know, it's just, WHOA. Ok. I get it. Enough. Just let me be.

My holiday brain, the little bundle of nerves between the equilibrium center and the emotion capicator, is all fucked up. There's only so many hormones and enzymes in there, meant to be released to interact with the other parts of my body that make holiday cheer. But, because the biorhythms are so thrown off by the commercials and the songs and the zeitgeist of evercoming future, they were all released too early. My holiday brain can't tell the difference anymore. Somewhere around the 9th, all those chemicals got dumped into the bloodstream and I hugged people and drank cider and enjoyed coming in from the cold. But now, I don't know, now it's all gone. When is it? Next Sunday? Ok. Fine. Whatever. That'll be nice. I'll get to eat stuff. I don't know.

I Can't Even Believe

2005-12-16T11:38:00.000-05:00

Why is there still a slightly more pathetic but still finite number of visitors to this page every day? I haven't written a damn thing in over a month. What is the matter with you people?!

I don't know.

It takes a lot of energy to read, daily, the lies and deceptions and the etcetera of this horrific Administration and the schizophrenic psychology of these United States. The tide, O, the tide, turning though it may be, pushes on with the inertia of ten thousand years of history. I'm not even a flake of driftwood bark. And that's terrific. But you know what I mean.

Lately, that's been my sort of attitude. Well, you know, we have nuclear weapons now and, yes, the ice caps are melting, but, for the most part, nothing is all too very much different than the days of Ramses or of Vlad the Impaler or of Nixon. In fact, things may be a bit better. Bah, it's all a matter of degrees, anway.

Given up, I've not (I don't even know what the struggle is), but I'm certainly on a reprieve from so much daily energy expenditure.

Addendum To Below

2005-11-11T13:18:00.000-05:00

They're on the defensive which means shit and vomit and blood comes out. Look out for stuff like this:

"I point out that some of the critics today believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said Thursday at a news briefing. "They stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat to the American people. For those critics to ignore their own past statements, exposes the hollowness of their current attacks."

Easy enough. Ok, first off, Hadley's a lying fuck, always has been, and all they have to say is "Well, the White House lied to us!" Even though I don't believe that: almost everyone's got their dicks out on this one. And if you're a Democrat and you can't defend yourself, too bad, you should have had some courage when it actually mattered.

Nonetheless, they LIED LIED LIED LIED. That's all they need to be saying right now. We were ALL LIED TO by these LYING LIARS. Let God sort through the Democrats who sold us out later.

Fuck McCain. Really.

2005-11-11T12:33:00.000-05:00

For such a rogue, he sure does suck balls with enthusiasm.

McCain warned that proposals for withdrawing forces next year "are exactly wrong" and called for the American military presence to grow by 10,000, to 165,000.

"Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up, with more civil-military soldiers, translators and counterinsurgency operations teams," he told a packed audience at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research institute.

Mr. McCain said a proposal last month by Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to reduce American troop level by 20,000 in coming months would be "a major step on the road to disaster."

Certainly more of a disaster than losing 2,000 more Americans and countless (literally - they don't count them) Iraqis. This amounts to treason and brutal inhumanity and it's not worth considering someone this willing to sell his spine off in little bits. He backed this war from the get-go and knew then what some people are starting to learn now: that it was bullshit from the start. I can't respect someone like John McCain. I can't even call him a man.

Mo Money

2005-11-11T09:30:00.000-05:00

It's a charming indicator of the age that so many nerds engage in nerdy crusades -- like a fight for social justice -- on behalf of this or that open source software, platform or time machine.

Nerds!

Man, I'll never be a nerd like that.

So.

Oh, yeah, have you heard of, uh, Firefox? Huh? It's really great and, well... here are a few reasons you should consider switching.

2. Your kids will only see porn when they want to.
Sorry, buddy... the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

9. Ritalin is fun, but A.D.D. is not.
Tabbed browsing, ad blocking, and pop-up blocking make it a lot easier to stay focused. Better for epileptics too: with Firefox's ad blocking ability, there won't be as many large swaths of flashing, pulsating colors on the websites you visit.

10. It's like switching from dating a 14-year-old to dating an 18-year-old.
...for a 16 year old, we mean. You know, it's a win-win.

I began hating Internet Explorer years ago, and first came across Firefox at a hippie cafe in Cambridge, Mass. Those days it was only Mozilla and it was a bit clunkier and goofier, but they had spirit, dammit. I've never been happier than with Firefox and that includes the week and a half I dated Carmen Electra in France.

Actually, that week really sucked.

Old Phospho

2005-11-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

Hey, hey there! We all know war can be pretty goofy and pretty fun, with lots of fun, zany terms for fun, zany weapons and techniques. We all know about bunker busters and daisy cutters, but have you heard of shake and bake? It's the new sensation that's sweeping the nation!

"WP [i.e., white phosphorus rounds] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."

Tee hee hee! Cartoon enemies hit with this crazy stuff catch fire and run around "woop woop wooping" all the live-long day as they clutch their hats and high step in circles! Their eyes pop out comically and their lips curl to impossible lengths. After a while, they head for water, but the burning won't stop and as their skin flakes off in black masses the red curtain falls over Porky Pig's head and the battle is over and we are totally awesome and funny and everyone learns a lesson about freedom!

Snore

2005-11-08T18:36:00.000-05:00

The dromedarian republicans in congress are getting all cute now, looking to put their own spin on criminalizing politics.

Top U.S. Republican lawmakers are seeking a congressional investigation into leaks of information used by The Washington Post in an article on the
CIA's secret global prison system, congressional aides said on Tuesday.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House of Representatives Speaker
Dennis Hastert in a draft letter asked the intelligence committees to "immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information."

Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott told reporters he thought information for the story may have come from a Republican Senate staffer.

I mean it's adorable and everything to use words like bicameral and feign patriotism (nothing new there) and I'd like to be fairminded and say, well, if it really did compromise national security than it ought to be investigated, but let's face it: these guys are shameless, without ethics and desperate and this is nothing more than a pissing match, albeit a potentially expensive one. Harry Reid and company need to keep on the ball here and stay one step ahead while they still have the advantage. They should even try to co-opt the investigation, find some people to testify publicly, condemn any leaking of information that impedes national security while staying on the attack with PlameGate and the fact that these prisons are illegal, even though Bush continues to deny torture exists and refuses to accept the bipartisan anti-torture amendment.

And while we're at it, let's break open Bill Frist's and Tom DeLay's backs and see how much water leaks out...

Shoot

2005-11-08T14:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was one of the longest days I can remember -- so long that I first typed "Tomorrow was one of the longest days," which sounds almost like a Goldfinger song.

It started, of course, at work. Where I am habitually five-minutes late, no matter what I do. You may suggest I just set my alarm clock for, say, five minutes earlier or something equally logical, but then you wouldn't understand the saboteur that is my sleeping mind or its conspirator the alarm clock which sometimes unsets itself.

That's all a little too cutesie, non? Who cares about my waking up, really?

A full day at work, at any rate. A day in which I wanted to arrive an hour early, but instead arrived fifteeen minutes late, and then had to leave early to perform in what my lady-friend calls "The Gay Dance." In fact it was not gay at all, nor was it dance, though it did go up at the Dance Theater Workshop's 40th birthday thingy, and it was packed with people. I actually got to see a lot of interesting stuff: they had 40 artists installing and moving and doing all manner of cool weirdery scattered throughout the space.

I saw the wonderful Paul Lazar and his Big Dance Theater do a very funny excerpt. Saw some women in white suits slink on some glowing skylights. And saw Cynthia Hopkins lean and sip scotch and croon in her very strange, very beautiful voice which naturally seems to sound as if it's eminating from an old Victrola.

And we all ran around on a rolling box through green light. I found a very fun and creepy thing to do for our Entrance, when the ensemble creeps along the bank of giant windows the audience is staring out -- the beauty of "site specificity" in theatre: I sort of looked furtively at the window, cocked my head, and blew warm air against it as I moved across, leaving, obviously, a trail of fog. Then I kissed the window. It must have looked pretty weird. Or maybe I'm just lame. Certainly not avant garde as you can tell after hanging out with my for five minutes; one of those rangy actors mouthing his lines to himself in the corner and mumbling, "red leather, yellow leather," over and over again.

Maybe not that bad.

Then -- and we were done at 8 or so -- then I had to go to a shoot for this independent TV show pilot I got a very small part in. The shoot started at 10. They had no coffee for me. There was no place around to get any. And I was to be there till 4 am. With no coffee. Having to work the next day. I got to know a couple of the extras who were playing busboys. Oddly, there was an immediate parallel dynamic, as there is in real life, between the busboys (them) and the waiter (me). Not that I would approve of that, but they were extras, and I had a speaking part.

There was a thickly-accented hair dresser from Mill Basin Brooklyn who was just so tired and needs the work for her book. The rest of the crew, who were all very professional and generally looked to know what they were doing, was running around trying to set up shots -- their prior location, which they had scouted and blocked, pulled out at the last minute so this was their first look here (and all the while the owner and his pseudo-glamourous wife looked on from a bench in the dark corners of the room) so they were a little behind. When someone finally did show up with coffee I watched him through slit eyes as he poured the coffee out into plastic cups to be better split amongst the crew. I asked, finally, if I could have some since I was scheduled to be there till 4 am and, you know, not at all getting paid, and he kind of looked at all the cups, hesitated, sighed, and then said, "Yeah, fine go ahead."

Oh, ho ho! My apologies good sir!

Ok, I'm tired of complaining, because it was not all that bad and I had fun and what not. But basically I waited around till 3:30 am, completely exhausted and utterly out of small talk, when I was thrust into the kitchen for my big scene, allowed one rehearsal, not made up, and then whisked away and thanked profusely in a three-second burst by everyone else who had to wrap shooting before the location shut down in fifteen minutes.

Showbiz!

Too Easy

2005-11-08T13:40:00.000-05:00

In Africa, where evangelicals seem to understand even less about the most basic world concepts than they do here, this anti-gay preacher, who may or may not have his own latency issues, says the anus is best left alone, because it is Holy.

[Dr. Peet] Botha is a well-known speaker on the unacceptability of homosexual acts and in his book, Die Sinode en Homoseks (the synod and homosex), he warns that the church should stick to its stance on homosexual behaviour.

Now a debate is raging on the Kerkbode website about a section of this book in which Botha - based on physiological reasons - argues that people's bodies are not suited to sex with someone of the same gender.

The section is entitled The Anus is Holy.

One participant said the title illustrated "in a comical manner, the anti-gay lobby's fixation, and even fascination, with the sexual act between two men", and another believes it shows that heterosexual men think homosexual relationships concern only sex.

I don't even-- I mean, who would disagree, ultimately?

Neat!

2005-11-07T13:23:00.000-05:00

You know you're a whack job when even the Catholic Church thinks you're nuts.

THE Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly.

His statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners in the US, who see evolution and the Genesis account as mutually exclusive.

"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".

I know the Catholics are infidels and outcasts to the fundies, but does anyone else find this pretty remarkable?

Cat Killer

2005-11-03T16:58:00.000-05:00

I already linked to this in an earlier post, but this is a fun analysis of Bill Frist through quotes and photos. I've gotten in the habit of reading Bag News Notes pretty regularly, and on some occasions it's remarkable.

Torture Tangles

2005-11-03T14:31:00.000-05:00

It's no secret that we do not know whether we know about secret prisons. But if secret, would laws -- not secret -- banning torture apply to them or would they secretly not apply? And who's to say whether they exist or not if the secret's a secret? Assuming they're a secret, can public laws be secretly ignored?

Who Cares About Romania, Anyway?

2005-11-03T14:24:00.000-05:00

The EU cuts its teeth.

he European Commission said today it will investigate reports that the CIA set up secret jails in eastern Europe to interrogate al-Qaida captives.

Separately, Europe’s top human rights organisation, the Strasbourg, France-based Council of Europe, said it too would try to see whether the claims were true.

According to the report, a covert prison system was set up by the CIA nearly four years ago which at various times included sites in eight countries, including Afghanistan and several eastern Europe nations. It quoted current and former intelligence officials and diplomats as sources for its story.

Several European nations issued firm denials about the existence of such prisons.

“I repeat. We do not have CIA bases in Romania,” the country’s prime minister, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, said today. EU member Hungary’s foreign ministry said it was never approached by the CIA and therefore there was no need for the government to carry out any separate inquiries.

I mean, what a bunch of babies. Puh-lease! Would someone please explain to me what business it is of the European Union's whether or not we set up extra legal torture camps in and around their continent?!

The Center Cannot Hold

2005-11-03T12:33:00.000-05:00

As we all understand the new political paradigm to be, Right is Center, Radical is Right, and there is no Left. Nonetheless, labels are fun and easy to use^TM, and Fat Men own media empires and, well, that's just the way it is.

Which brings us to the Gang of 14, the bipartisan group that agreed they'd work together to keep Republicans from disbanding the filibuster, one of the foundations of senatorial procedure for centuries. A couple members of this camp have already defected with the nomination of Samuel Alito, and the declawing has begun.

"I'm very favorably disposed toward" Alito, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., "but the process that we set up, the 14 of us, is going to be followed, and that's periodic meetings and evaluations."

But two senators — Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. and Mike DeWine, R-Ohio — already have said they will join with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to eliminate the filibuster for judges if Democrats launch this delaying tactic simply because of Alito's conservative record.

I am amazed more and more that these people can even walk and eat, being totally crippled, as they are, by arrogance and myopia. It does not seem like a good time to use the nuclear option (braining the filibuster), what with the spearhead being investigated for fraud and the President's approval ratings at one degree above shit-canned.

But, this will not stop them. In fact, they're more likely to invoke it since they can, I believe, sense their own demise, smell it like sulphur on their fingertips, drip-dripping small splashes of urine almost imperceptibly down their chalky white and hairless legs, and they feel the urgency in placing a conservative on the bench.

I'm talking about Republicans here.

My favorite syntactical/ironical part is how the Gang of 14 agreed somehow that it would take "extraordinary circumstances" around a nominee to prevent the nuclear option, which is, inandofitself, a very fucking extraordinary circumstance. Just how bad a nominee warrants these circumstances? (I promised someone not to parallel bad people with baby-eaters, so I'll leave the rest to you.)

Balls

2005-11-01T16:33:00.000-05:00

Maybe it's just the timing of things, but Harry Reed so far seems to be exceeding my expectations. And, with his decision to call a special, closed session of the Senate today, we see he's got much better media chops than Tommy Daschle ever did.

Invoking a rarely-used rule, Democrats temporarily shut down television cameras in the chamber, cleared galleries of tourists and other onlookers, forced removal of staff members and recording devices and stopped work on legislation.

"At its core, this is about accountability -- congressional accountability and White House accountability," said Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Republicans, it goes on to say, were indignant.

Well that's fucking terrific! Get indignant! Just saying you're indignant isn't going to get you very far, not when your President is pissing his pants, your majority leader is under investigation and your leadership in the House is out on bail. I'm afraid there's not much sympathy available when you're threatening to abolish a cornerstone of Senate procedure, the filibuster. I'm afraid your -- here come two big H words -- hypocrisy and hubris are starting to eat away at your underwears.

I also read on Democratic UNderground that Reid intends to hold closed sessions every day until Republicans agree to open an investigation into prewar intelligence. Go, Harry, Go!

PS. I've been busy editing a short for Channel 102, and have been pretty busy these last few days. I'll be sure to keep you updated.

Bullshit

2005-10-25T12:48:00.000-04:00

Paul Hackett may not have the organizational structure or the fundraining capabilities to unseat Ohio senator, but a lot of democrats like the cut of his jib -- he's a progressive Gulf War vet who isn't afraid to go blue in his frank arguments against BushCo.

[Hackett has] called George W. Bush "chicken hawk" and "son of a bitch" with regard to the war -- Hackett's strong showing fired up Democrats nationwide.

[In an interview with Salon, Hackett talks about the Iraq invasion - Interviews's questions are in bold]

We've been there two-plus years and there's nothing objective this country can point at and say, "This is what we've improved since we've been over there." The infrastructure is worse -- the electrical grid, the water grid, the sewage grid, the road system. All that infrastructure is worse today than when we got there two-plus years ago.

The Bush administration says there's progress.

Bullshit. I've been there. There's no success unless you call painting schools success. We've painted a lot of schools.

Bullshit, he says. A senatorial candidate said bullshit!

More:

[What do you think of] the right-wing uproar over Terri Schiavo?

Outrageous. Absolutely outrageous. And most Americans agree with that. The only Americans that don't are religious fanatics. They've got more in common with Osama bin Laden than I've got with them.

He reminds me a little of Howard Dean, and he's just one of a bunch of great candidates wooed by Chuck Schumer to put more seats -- in the House and Senate -- into play. And with the dam breaking, frank talk will be and an actual embracing of progressive views (or, at least, alternative views to Right Wing zealotry) will become more and more commonplace. Let's hope Hackett wins, but even if he doesn't he's a sign of better things to come.

Oh, Sweet Memories

2005-10-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

Those who have read the guidebook to interpreting public statements out of the White House know it's time to worry about this.

President George W. Bush said military action was a last resort in dealing with Syria and he hoped Damascus would cooperate with a probe into the killing of former Lebanese premier Rafik al-Hariri.

"A military (option) is always the last choice of a president," he told Al Arabiya television in an interview aired on Tuesday when asked about a U.N. investigation that implicated Syrian officials in the killing of Hariri.

"I am hoping that they will cooperate. It (military action) is the last -- very last option," he said. "But on the other hand, you know -- and I've worked hard for diplomacy and will continue to work the diplomatic angle on this issue."

Ahh, those comforting words, spoken again so gently by our president in the midst of one of the biggest White House scandals in history. So reminiscent of another, simpler time, before the two-thousand dead troops and the torture and the car bombs and the civil unrest and the hurricanes and the Supreme Court deaths. Call me a big-hearted romantic, but I miss that old chestnut -- the last option -- almost as much as I miss the one about there being no war plans on the President's desk.

They were on the Vice President's desk.

Is It Wrong

2005-10-21T16:10:00.000-04:00

That I kinda have the hots for the governor of Michigan?

What's that governor? Come closer? You have an executive order you'd like me to follow? Oh. Ohhhh...

This Makes Me Happy

2005-10-21T14:41:00.000-04:00

Outside the Travis County Courthouse. He's wearing a cowboy hat!

Yey!

Slammer

2005-10-20T14:19:00.000-04:00

This pig, like so many others, is getting his comeuppance.
And here's his mug shot, courtesy of The Smoking Gun.

So take that. Jerk

In the (Dot) Matrix

2005-10-20T12:32:00.000-04:00

Good old Bonnie. Always at the edge of the Electronic Frontier.

She finds this little bit of disquieting information:

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

"We've found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

"Underground democracy movements that produce political or religious pamphlets and flyers, like the Russian samizdat of the 1980s, will always need the anonymity of simple paper documents, but this technology makes it easier for governments to find dissenters," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?"

I mean, Double-you Tee Eff? It comes from places you'd never even expect! Who'd expect this? Gosh d-d-dang it! What if Thomas Paine had had a Xerox? It's the insidiousness of this that angers me, the complicity of these companies to participate in something so undemocratic; their shortsightedness, not understanding (or not caring) how it compromises everyone for a long while to come. Bah, forget it. And don't print this out.

Part of the Problem

2005-10-18T10:25:00.000-04:00

Boy have I been actively avoiding any articles having to do with the Avian flu. I don't want to know very much about it, where it is, how it works. In this regard, I'm definitely not part of the solution. Which only leaves one option.

Yes, I'm part of the problem.

Call me old fashioned, but I'm the kind of guy who'd rather be surprised by a sudden and violent plague. What good will it do us to fret and worry about the next catastrophe if there's nothing we can do about it, anyway? No, I'd rather obsess over the petty, political wranglings of petty, political people. At least I have a grasp on this, being a person. And petty. These things seem within our control, as people, even if they're ultimately uncontrollable, steered, as it were, by the momentums of history. At least we can laugh at our own folly.

A disease the fells birds like some biblical curse, that ain't folly. That's the bitter retribution of Mother Nature. Or god. Either way, ain't much we can do about it.

Yes, it'd be nice if our government was more concerned and prepared. I'm sure there's some vaccine they can develop and give to us all, but let's be realistic: our jig is almost up. When the Big Thing comes, it's gonna come, and no amount of American ingenuity will be able to stop it.

So I'll continue to concern myself with the Giants loss and Plamegate and the overuse of CGI in studio films these days.

If Only People Cared

2005-10-18T00:51:00.000-04:00

There's a new Downing Street memo, it seems, that, when paired with the other two, paints a picture of the grand designs BushCo and their partners at WorldDom Unlimited has for the greater middle east and the rest of the globe.

George Bush told the Prime Minister two months before the invasion of Iraq that Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea may also be dealt with over weapons of mass destruction, a top secret Downing Street memo shows.

The US President told Tony Blair, in a secret telephone conversation in January 2003 that he "wanted to go beyond Iraq".

The revelation that Mr Bush told the Prime Minister Iraq should be seen as a first step comes in the American edition of Lawless World, a book by the leading international lawyer Philippe Sands QC, who is also a professor of law at University College London and senior barrister at Matrix chambers, which he shares with Cherie Blair.

"The conversation seems to indicate that Iraq was not seen as an isolated issue but as a first step in relation to a broader project," he said. "What is interesting is the mention of Saudi Arabia, which to the best of my knowledge had not at that time been identified particularly as a country with WMD. An alternative view is that the mention of Saudi Arabia indicates that the true objectives were not related exclusively to WMD."

The only thing shocking to me about this is that people at such high levels of government within the UK and the US should be shocked. Are they that naive?

That aside, this memo, if taken to heart -- which, given BushCo's tendency to, you know, bomb the fuck out of people, it will most likely be -- should cause some angst in countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan; countries which, though dastardly, have been our allies, lending us their airspace and oil. Though the people at the very, very top always make out ok no matter what country they hail from, the governments under tham have cause for alarm, and this could very well prompt diplomatic indignation or worse. Just who did BushCo think was going to have our back? Only England, that tiny island in the North Atlantic that can barely handle Europe, never mind the rest of the world?

It just goes to show the dangerous arrogance this country has been ruled by these last five years. The good new is that as the bricks and mortar start falling, the real structure beneath comes to light. And it's not built on very sturdy ground.

Jesus, my poetry needs work...

(Found through DU.)

What Are They Planning...?

2005-10-17T13:07:00.000-04:00

The US and the UK have long held a special relationship. Tony Blair bowed to it, hollow-eyed and vacant, when he helped invade Iraq. Sure, there are occasional differences on matters of the environment and affairs closer to Europe, but for the most part, it's been follow the leader.

Now it appears Blair is looking to birth a new generation of nuclear weapons in direct defiance of a longstanding policy of nonproliferation -- just like his stable jockeys here across the pond.

Tony Blair is facing a political backlash over his decision to order a new generation of nuclear weapons to replace the ageing Trident fleet at a cost of billions of pounds.

Rebel Labour MPs will meet tomorrow to coordinate their fight against his plans, which seem set to provoke one of the biggest shows of opposition to Mr Blair from inside his own party since the start of the Iraq war.

Opposition to an updated version of Trident goes far beyond MPs who object to nuclear weapons on principle. It includes senior figures in the military, who question whether this is the best way to spend a tight military budget.

With so much time and energy already invested in the End Game in Central Asia and the Middle East, and palpable trepidation about a rising China, it can only lead a paranoid observer like myself to wonder What Are They Planning?

Funny Awesomeness

2005-10-17T11:46:00.000-04:00

Most of us have seen the Walken '08 web site (and many of us were fooled by it...) but, for the love of all things holy, why couldn't I have thought of this?!

(Through Eschaton.)

Gutsy

2005-10-17T10:51:00.000-04:00

For a lot of reasons, I think Clint Eastwood kicks ass. (Mostly, all you have to do is watch Unforgiven to figure this out...) He's been involved in some of the best of American cinema, and as a director he's shown a restraint and meticulous care for the craft of filmmaking that a lot of modern movies lack.

Still, something tells me the guy is a Republican: his Dirty Harry movies, along with Charles Bronson's vigilante flicks, spoke to what was the beginning of the conservative rebirth here, a discontent with the government's inepititude, but also a fatigue for liberal sensitivity, defense attorneys, stagnant economies and a favortism toward the "underprivileged" at the cost of society's safety as a whole.

That said, he never puts his politics -- so far as I can tell -- into his movies. In fact, now it seems he's bending over backward to be as fair as possible.

Next fall, Clint Eastwood will simultaneously release two movies telling the story of the battle of Iwo Jima – one will be from the American perspective, and the other told from the Japanese perspective, TIME’s Richard Schickel reports in TIME’s What’s Next special issue (on newsstands Monday, Oct. 17).

Beginning next February, Clint Eastwood will start shooting the companion movie to Flags of Our Fathers, tentatively called Lamps Before the Wind. Typically, Eastwood is not able to articulate fully his rationale for this ambitious enterprise: “I don’t know—sometimes you get a feeling about something. You have a premonition that you can get something decent out of it,” he says. “You just have to trust your gut.”

And, yes. I am tired of WWII movies, triumphs of the human spirit and rah rah Americanism. I hope this will add a different flavor. At the very least it's ambitious as all hell, akin to the risks Steven Soderbergh is taking lately in hopes of reshaping the movie industry. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that Eastwood and the studios have two shots at pocketing change from this...)

Sinful!

2005-10-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

I used to work at a very high end chocolate shoppe in olde Bostone Towne, and my friend/ coworker at the time and I would always privately ridicule the middle-aged scarf-wearers who waltzed around the place in crazy-eyed ecstasy, going on and on about how sinful it all was, how absolutely sinful. Oh, what trouble we were getting them in with these rich, delicious, sinful, yummy treats!

If they knew the scorn.

But now, as I read all I can about Plamegate, I find myself reacting in much the same way those lonely chocloate lovers did, just gasping and leaning and singing, starry-eyed and gorged on the prospects of deliciousness to come.

Today, I found this tremendous transcript from last night's Hardball through Fire Dog Lake, and it is a doozy. While the perfect storm bears down on Castle Bush, it's becoming clear just how messy the whole PLame affair is making everything. Gone from the White House halls are Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, the usual BMOC's. Could this explain why a lost and lonely babe-in-the-woods President Bush chose Harriet Miers as the next Supreme Court Justice? I had never considered this possibility, and yet...

WOLFF: ...something‘s happening. I mean, he‘s—it‘s an altogether different M.O. than [Cheney]‘s had for the past—for the past five years.

He‘s—is he hiding? Is he sick? Is he up to something, some other Cheney-like thing? One can only speculate.

MATTHEWS: Has the president already made the—has he already, as they say in the stock market, discounted the calamity to come? Has he already discounted the probability that, at best, the rosy scenario, if you will, is that the top aides that have been mentioned in all the press leaks about this in the leak case are going to get shot with a very vicious kind of indictment or some kind of public report that humiliates them publicly and politically, and, therefore, he‘s relying more on Andrew Card and Dan Bartlett than the vice president‘s office or the chief political man?

FINEMAN: Well, that‘s my sense of it, Chris.

And I think, if you look—if you roll back the videotape of the days leading up to Katrina, if you look at the Harriet Miers nomination, Karl Rove is conspicuous by his absence.

MATTHEWS: As is the vice president.

FINEMAN: As is the vice president. So, I think that whole wing, so to speak, is one that Bush has been flying without for the last couple weeks.

How awesome is THAT? Though I have read that Rove was out selling Miers hardcore, so this may not be an exact explanation, but isn't it so sinful to imagine a White House bus whose wheels have come completely off? A White House in chaos? A White House in which George W. Bush, absent his usual tutors, is making his own decisions? Ha, ha, ha! Delicious!

Oh, shit.

Dick Being Dickish

2005-10-11T15:45:00.000-04:00

Over at Free Republic, they like to get all sarcastic about Halliburton and how it's the devil, in godless, anti-corporate commie-liberal eyes. While I don't think the corporation is evil, it does typify the kind of heartless greed, cronyism and interconnectedness of the military, the US power structure, government and corporations. The Military Industrial Complex. And furthermore, it points to Republican hypocrisy which, by this point, has become almost satirical.

Remember that they went after Hillary Clinton for turning around a relatively small profit in some real estate.

Then look at this.

An analysis released by a Democratic senator found that Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton stock options have risen 3,281 percent in the last year, RAW STORY can reveal.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) asserts that Cheney's options -- worth $241,498 a year ago -- are now valued at more than $8 million. The former CEO of the oil and gas services juggernaut, Cheney has pledged to give proceeds to charity.

“Halliburton has already raked in more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney Administration for work in Iraq, and they were awarded some of the first Katrina contracts," Lautenberg said in a statement. "It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it. The Vice President should sever his financial ties to Halliburton once and for all.”

These are the new Robber Barons. The Warbucks. The bastard sonsabitches we had to work so hard to put down or rein in. Cheney is the Vice fucking President. And he's making money off of war. So what if they're options, and even if he's promised to donate proceeds to charity, it's wrong. And there is no middle man here, no indirect conspiratorial tangential evidence. It's a fucking paycheck. Coming directly from the company his government is paying to set up and clean up a war he is almost directly responsible for waging.

Didn't we learn our lessons with JP Morgan et al?

And is there outrage? Concern, even? No. In fact, it's considered impolite for the press to mention this, to suggest -- in even the most gentle, furtive tones -- that there might could just maybe be a small issue of propriety here.

Except that BushCo is has been getting a new orifice torn into it as of late, what with Plame, Abramoff, DeLay, Frist, Katrina and Harriet. Maybe the tenor has shifted so that this issue can be discussed. In public. With proper accusations properly accused.

Yes, profit comes first in this country. That's difficult to dispute or change. But at what price? Are we really ready to accept that our Vice President can make millions of dollars on the very war he's waging?

Abramoff and Murder and Bad Stuff

2005-10-10T14:50:00.000-04:00

As the wheels start to come loose on BushCo and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, we're seeing more and more signs that the floodgates are about to bust, too. So that's two great metaphors for you to consider.

As for Jack Abramoff, there could be trouble around a little mob hit a few years back.

When three men were charged last month with killing [casino owner Gus Boulis] in 2001, the most familiar name on the indictments belonged to 67-year-old Anthony (Big Tony) Moscatiello, an associate of New York's Gambino crime family.

But even more well known is the figure with whom Mr. Boulis, at the time of his death, was locked in a bitter business dispute over the sale of his fleet of floating casinos.

Casino Jack, as Mr. Abramoff is known, has for months been under investigation by a federal grand jury and the Senate's Indian affairs committee after receiving at least $66-million from six Indian tribes to lobby for their casino interests; the tribes later said the fees were excessive.

But more recently, his difficulties multiplied.

In August, he and his former business partner, disbarred New York lawyer and fellow Republican fundraiser Adam Kidan, 41, were charged with fraud and conspiracy over their September, 2000, purchase of Mr. Boulis's 11 SunCruz gambling boats for $147-million.

Those charges accuse Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Kidan of faking a wire transfer that made it appear that they had put up $23-million of their own money in the SunCruz sale. Based on that transfer, two banks agreed to lend the pair $60-million, the charges allege.

And, this article deliciously goes on, Kidan wrote out two checks for $145,000 and $95,000 to two of the men now charged with the murder. For cartering services and security. Hmm. His defense: If he had ordered the hit, he certainly wouldn't have written checks to pay for it. Ha. Ha, ha.

I love it, I love it, I love it. Abramoff has spread his stank all over Washington, so when he goes down, others follow. Oh, delicious.

Opposites Attract

2005-10-07T10:24:00.000-04:00

It seems George W. Bush and al Qaeda are both concerned about the "Muslim masses." The hearts, the minds. Etcetera.

In [a] letter [to Big Boss Man Osama bin Laden], [second in command] al-Zawahiri warns that some of the tactics currently employed by the insurgency, including the slaughtering of hostages and the suicide bombings of Muslim civilians, may risk alienating the "Muslim masses," Whitman said Thursday.

Great minds. And all that.

Threat

2005-10-06T19:26:00.000-04:00

They're taking it with no small amount of irate flippancy over at DU, but I, for one, have to ride the subways in New York, oh, say, every single day. So my eyebrows go up a bit when I hear of specific bombing threats to that vast, subterranean marvel. Perhaps most telling, though, is this quote from the AP article.

Paul Radtke, 45, of Hoboken, N.J., said he has heard similar warnings before and found it hard to take them all seriously.

"Unless it's something dramatic that's happening, I've got to go to work," Radtke said after getting off a subway train at Penn Station. He said the only travel habit he is changing is trying not to make eye contact with police officers so they won't search his bag.

That's the spirit! Now does it indicate a certain naivete on the part of New Yorkers or the everpresent Law Enforcement Officials? Either way, it's got to happen sometime. But at least Mayor Mike says he'll keep riding the rails, baby.

Update

2005-10-06T16:16:00.000-04:00

Apparently Rover is gonna give some more hot-ass testimony to Fitzgerald et al. No indictment imminent..

Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th-hour testimony in the case of a
CIA officer's leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won't be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.

The persons, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of grand jury secrecy, said Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has not made any decision yet on whether to file criminal charges against the longtime confidant of President Bush or others.

So maybe it hasn't hit the fan just yet, but the bowels are definitely in a bit of a tiff.

Snakes! (Not On A Plane)

2005-10-06T15:46:00.000-04:00

Well here's a little fun fact about pythons: they eat fucking crocodiles now.

A 13-foot Burmese python recently burst after it apparently tried to swallow a live, six-foot alligator whole, authorities said.

"It means nothing in the Everglades is safe from pythons, a top-down predator," said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida wildlife professor.

Over the years, many pythons have been abandoned in the Everglades by pet owners.

Awwww. Cute!

From Spain to Indonesia

2005-10-06T12:42:00.000-04:00

If Muslim radicals have there way, we'll have nowhere to vacation anymore, y'all...

In a speech before the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush said Islamic militants have made Iraq their main front in a war against civilized society.

''The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia,'' Bush said.

Muslim masses? Not to sound like a broken record, but what was that stuff I've heard about some Muslims -- extreme and not so extreme -- being upset that Bush seems to look at this as a Holy War? As a Crusade? Not to say nothin or nothin. I'm just sayin...

The difference seems to be that the Muslims who see this as their own holy war are far fewer than those that don't. But the American version casts a wide and much more powerfully destructive net.

And then, Bush really keeps the hits comin,' really packs 'em in with this next little diddy.

Bush likened the ideology of Islamic militants to communism. And he said they are being ''aided by elements of the Arab news media that incites hatred and anti-Semitism.''

''We are facing a radical ideology with immeasurable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world,'' Bush said.

Awesome.

If Patrick Fitzgerald Gets Avian Flu

2005-10-06T10:43:00.000-04:00

...and dies, then things will start to make sense again. In America. In the world. We'll know that the neocons are not, in fact, showing the immmutable signs of stress fracture. We will know, with the surety and confidence of a Mekong Madame, that everything in TVLand is OK, that big problems are still easily solved (and with pzazz), that no step is too low, no deed too dastardly; that there is no fire that cannot be extinguished with a cathode ray fireman's hose. And, as a most reassuring reminder, we will know that Karl Rove is most definitely still in charge.

Because the shit --- sniff, sniff -- is on a pretty straight trajectory toward that there fan.

The federal prosecutor investigating who leaked the identity of a CIA operative is expected to signal within days whether he intends to bring indictments in the case, legal sources close to the investigation said on Wednesday.

As a first step, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was expected to notify officials by letter if they have become targets, said the lawyers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, declined to say whether his client had been contacted by Fitzgerald. In the past, Luskin has said that Rove was assured that he was not a target.

But then we read this little morsel:

President Bush's most trusted adviser, Karl Rove, has been absent from recent White House events, leading those close to a CIA outing case to speculate that he has been told he is the target of an investigation, RAW STORY can confirm.

The buzz on Capitol Hill is that Rove has received what sources called a "target letter," or a letter from the prosecutor investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson telling him that he is now a target in the investigation. To date, no reporters have been able to confirm this account. One lawyer says that at this point in the investigation it would be more likely any letters would normally be notifications of an indictment.

You know what is embarrassing to admit, but strangely liberating? Sitting here, looking out across my workplace, smiling about that last little quote, I realized what the phrase "shit is gonna hit the fan," actually means. (This happens to me once or twice a year, when the fundamental meaning of some numbingly common expression becomes crystal clear to me: "a stitch in time saves nine;" or "Leggo my Eggo," et cetera.) For I visualized it happening, and saw all the little poop particles spraying about -- as it's clearly an oscillating fan -- getting all over anyone within range. Everyone in range. Covered in little fecal bits.

The shit is going to hit the fan.

I'm ready for my next lesson.