“‘I can imagine what they’re going through,’ Frank DeAngelis, Columbine High principal for almost three decades, said in a telephone interview. ‘You’re hoping there would be lessons learned from Columbine but that’s obviously not the case’” (Bloomberg News).

One would have thought so (Photo by Alan Kim, Roanoke Times).

Not gonna lie, Mr. Fish, but you have gone too far with this one (above). Just brutal.

Finger-lickin’ good news.

From the London Guardian’s excerpts of Vonnegut’s final work, “A Man Without a Country” (2005):

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable. … George W Bush has gathered around him … psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences. … These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything. PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. … Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t….”

This analysis was rolled out at the height of their dominance; they’re unraveling and imploding not a moment too soon. You will be missed.

Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut. R.I.P.

The crucification of Don Imus has to stop. Free speech shouldn’t stop at the opening of anyone’s offense. Tasteless, yes; stupid, yes. Grounds for a barrage of punishment? No. Wasn’t he trying to riff off a Spike Lee movie? Where is Spike’s share of the blame? Imus is, or rather was, a shock jock; it is the nature of the profession to make ribald, provocative remarks that are typically directed toward, well, everybody. Don’t take him out of the context of his ignorant comments about Jews and women. It’s nothing new. The key part of racism seems to be hate; if you specialize in cracking wise, which was his attempt, that’s not necessarily racism. One would have the same basis to call Carlos Mencia, apparently a total fraud, racist — and you wouldn’t hear that from me.

This reminds me of a recent spate of papering around the residence halls here, which read, “Only 15 of the 137 faculty members identify as non-white. What are you going to do about it?” Um, nothing. If it is representative of the demographics of the surrounding community (in the case of Wooster, Ohio, quite so; the words “vanilla suburbs” from George Clinton come to mind), no issue. Why is the color of someone’s skin at all relevant? Only racists think like that, or instead crypto-racists grotesquely posing as champions of diversity. Anyway, hi, I’m back.

The overlords at Google had me fooled. (But I am seriously taking a break from this. Until later.)

Taking a break from this for awhile.

At long last, there is proof-positive that this blogger is psycho-physio-ethically damaged, according to a report in the journal Nature as cited in Thursday’s New York Times:

“Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations…” Okay, look, there’s no brain damage up here; maybe a serotonin imbalance, but that’s about it. But take a gander at the question that’s quoted.

It’s a hypothetical that leaves no room for uncertainty. Here it is, in the original italics with some useful comments in brackets: You have abandoned a sinking cruise ship and are in a crowded lifeboat that is dangerously low in water. [Okay, very frantic circumstances where people ain’t gonna think normally anyway, right?] If nothing is done — assuming quite a bit — it will sink before the rescue boats arrive and everyone will die.

However, there is an injured person who will not survive in any case [my emphasis]. If you throw that person overboard, the boat will stay afloat and the remaining passengers will be saved. So it becomes do or die. And according to the Nature article slightly over 20 percent of “normal” patients say yes, they would throw the poor guy over; and just over 80 percent of “brain injured” folks say yes.

Um, according to the very hypothetical presented, isn’t this a no-brainer (no pun intended)? Now, certainly you wouldn’t ask me to be the man to do it. Maybe that’s what a fair amount of the 80 percent of normal people who said no might have thought: Well, yeah, in principle, but not me. So either there’s some brain damage that’s gone under the radar on my behalf, or this was a totally loaded situation. Forget it.

Ran into Paul Bremer at the grocery today. Didn’t think it was him (at first), though the recognition was almost instant. Things didn’t go past perfunctory greetings, and it shouldn’t have been otherwise. Didn’t feel it appropriate to ask if the de-Ba’athification policies over which he presided as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority back in ’03 were too drastic or extreme, so didn’t go there. Seemed like a nice fellow.

Too dark?

The old captain died not a minute too soon (from the executive summary of an internal FBI audit released today, below):

“… we identified many instances in which the FBI obtained telephone toll billing records and subscriber information from 3 telephone companies pursuant to more than 700 ‘exigent letters’ signed by personnel in the Counterterrorism Division without first issuing national security letters [NSL]. We concluded that the FBI’s acquisition of this information circumvented the requirements of the ECPA [Electronic Communications Privacy Act] NSL statute and violated the Attorney General’s Guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations and Foreign Intelligence Collection … and internal FBI policy” (p. 41).

Until later.

Goodbye, Captain America (1941 - 2007).

Lest you thought you’d gotten me pinned down with the last post, here’s a sampling from another political philosophy that seems quite attractive to me as well (via Project Gutenberg):

“Society is indeed a contract… but the state ought not to be considered nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern… It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society … connecting the visible and invisible world… The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure…”

— Edmund Burke (emphasis added)

Referred to this topic in an earlier post, but this possibly could indicate why democratic socialism, at least by its immediate connotations, may not become a viable alternative in the U.S. for a long time, from Jason Schulman and Joseph Schwartz:

Hopes for a rapid democratic transition to socialism were shattered by the horrors of Stalinism and the failure of social democratic governments to discern a socialist road out of the Great Depression. After World War II, ‘democratic socialism’ increasingly became identified with the ‘Keynesian’ welfare state… with the crisis of the welfare state due to the end of post-WWII growth in the 1970s, the mainstream left … faced a crisis of vision and program.”

One could say that they’ve yet to get it back.

Alright, Scorcese! One word for the Academy: Finally.

The Dream: Banner of Coexistence (Toledo, Spain)

For this blog’s fourth birthday tomorrow, it might be fitting that sensationalist journalism from the New York Times deserves condemnation. (What else is new?) “In open defiance of the United Nations,” we read, “Iran is steadily expanding its efforts to enrich uranium, the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] reported…” Is this true?

The actual IAEA report, to which the Times provides a link, says something quite different. “The Agency has no information to report regarding the assembly of centrifuges…” The Times: “…the nuclear agency reported that Iran was now operating or about to switch on roughly a thousand centrifuges … at its nuclear facility at Natanz.” There is no mention of any new developments at Natanz; this appears to be complete fabrication.

IAEA: “As of 17 February 2007, no UF6 [uranium enrichment gas] had been fed into the process at FEP [Fuel Enrichment Plant].” Times: “If the country could operate 3,000 centrifuges continuously for a year, it could produce about one weapon’s worth of highly enriched uranium [HEU].” This gets buried several paragraphs later: “The report said that between Nov. 2 [2006] and Feb. 17, Iranian crews fed 145 pounds of uranium into the pilot plant for enrichment,” which “produced only about 15 pounds of low-enriched uranium — too little for anything but experimental analysis.”

The IAEA is more specific: “The environmental sample results thus far indicate a maximum enrichment of 4.2%…” (The threshold beyond which it becomes highly-enriched is 5%, according to the Depleted Uranium Management Information Network, a branch of the Argonne National Laboratory’s Environmental Science Division.) This is alarming; about that there’s no doubt. It seems, though, to be a far cry from catastrophe.

Some cause for concern, from the report: “Iran has not agreed to any of the required transparency measures, which are essential for the clarification of certain aspects of the scope and nature of its nuclear programme.” The Islamic Republic is being arrogant (no surprise), and we’re threatening war. The heart of the matter appears to be that “Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activites,” what the Times calls “open defiance” — omitting where the IAEA also says that “Iran has been providing the Agency with access to declared nuclear material and facilities…” Or it’s just playing cat-and-mouse about the stockpiles it’s keeping hidden, like Iraq did.

Maybe we all, the Times and its buddies in the White House included, should stop giving invaluable ammunition, and massive boosts of ego, to the madmen of this world — like Bush and Ahmadinejad — and their apocalyptic visions.

“… What a field day for the heat,
a thousand people in the street/
Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs/
Mostly say, ‘Hooray for our side’ …”

— Buffalo Springfield (1966)

So it’s finally come to this: There’s no discernable way to tell whether it’s the Washington Post or the Onion that’s joking. Crazy times.

Winter Wonderlake (Chicago)

Okay, so this isn’t about YouTube. Enough’s been said about it, and the national obsession is starting to get embarrassing. But in a way, everything now seems to relate in some way; regardless, the issue is much larger and snags along a lot in its way. Lemme get right to it: we are living in a universe of media in which the traditional notions of copyright and even hallowed intellectual property are becoming irrelevant.

One could say that Old Copyright is in itself increasingly a form of theft in today’s environment. It might seem crazy to say that, but how do the provincial holdings of hard media not deny a freer, more open nebula of information that “new” media promise? There is a wholly novel understanding of media ownership that escapes the logic of a system struggling to keep up. Print journalism is already dead, for example. Not as in lifeless, but without currency.

Ideas that are the creation of an author still belong to him, of course. No one is taking away what rightfully belongs to anyone; there is no actual piracy when it comes to media/file sharing and associated trends because things like information, and even music, are more a part of the so-called public domain than the holding of barons who make intangible things like thoughts and notes their own. People should give credit where credit is due, and respect basic property rights, but there are natural limits and they have been crossed for too long. Yet, hopefully, things are starting to turn around.

FOOTNOTE: Earlier today, Apple chieftan Steve Jobs announced that the stranglehold of Digital Rights Management (DRM) should no longer be enforced. In “Thoughts on Music,” Jobs writes, “Convincing [the major record labels] to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace” that “Apple will embrace … wholeheartedly.” His message is directedly principally to “Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI,” which “control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music.” It’s a start, so keep fighting.

Old insights as the jabber-jaws continue prattling about ’08:

“Is it a trifling mischief, that our population, divided into two almost equal numerical halves, should be every four years … precipitated against each other, with all the animosity, bitterness, revilings, and resentments which now mingle all their bad elements to swell that huge evil of Party Spirit, which all deplore, yet all share, and all contribute to stimulate? That so much time should be wasted, so much capital squandered, so much energy misapplied, so much bad feeling mutually excited, so much demoralization, public and private, engendered?”

— from “A Much-Needed Reform” (April 1865), in the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review

Wikijustice.

Kudos to Garry Wills, from whom excerpts follow (below):

We hear constantly now about ‘our commander in chief.’ The word has become a synonym for ‘president.’ It is said that we ‘elect a commander in chief.’ It is asked whether this or that candidate is ‘worthy to be our commander in chief.’ But the president is not … the commander in chief of civilians. … When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, ‘commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’ That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just ‘commander in chief,’ or even ‘commander in chief of the United States.’”

“This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. … We must simply trust our lords and obey the commander in chief. … We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led — or were not in the past — by caudillos.”

To add, we’re also told that the United States is itself a “battleground” in the war on terrorism, to which the “war at home” is frequently alluded.

Does our beloved Coca-Cola, the “classic” “real thing” that always refreshes and is nearly ubiquitous in our land, hire paramilitary death squads in Latin America to assassinate bottler workers trying to unionize their plants?

There is ample documentation pointing the blame squarely on the supposed death merchants at Coke, as well as case after case of all-too-convenient murders which are alleged to be occurring up to the present day. If such a case proves true, the bare moral minimum would be to end all business and sever its ties. This could be prompted by a student-led boycott of Coca-Cola and its subsidiary brands, which includes Minute Maid, PowerAde and others.

The incidents are not widely reported in the mainstream — with the apparent exceptions of two respective reports in the New York Times from 2001 and 2003, alleging that the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known as the AUC) has, and continues, to slaughter unionists under the orders of bottling firms like the Panamco Industrial de Gaseosas, “the major Coke bottler in Colombia.” The Times also explains that the legal basis for filing lawsuits against these actions “interfere[s] with foreign policy and open[s] multinational companies to frivolous or irrelevant grievances,” according to Bush administration officials cited.

By that standard, the taking of human lives is either immaterial or — probably worse — completely necessary for the interests of corporate dominion, anywhere it looks to operate with impunity and with total sanction. Yet there are other, more substantiating accounts that bear mentioning. In the Nation (“The Case Against Coca-Cola,” 1 May 2006), free-lancer Michael Blanding quotes Javier Correa, the president of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos, which is known as Sinaltrainal, as saying that Coca-Cola policy is “to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers,” and stated that Sinaltrainal “membership has fallen from about 1,400 to less than 400” from 1996 to 2006.

Ed Potter, the labor-relations director at Coke, put up a seemingly good front that Blanding demolished as “at best irrelevant and at worst misleading.” It may be unfair, however, to blame Potter on that basis since he’s simply doing his job. It might also be worth noting that the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers Associations, thankfully abbreviated as the IUF, “condemned the anti-Coke movement” as “‘based on unsubstantiated allegations and empty political slogans,’” according to the National Review. On the other hand, the allegations seem far from unsubstantiated.

Yet in September 2006, the District Court for the Southern District of Florida ruled that the Alien Tort Claims Act, under which Sinaltrainal sued the Coke bottlers for human rights violations, did not give the court enough “subject matter jurisdiction” to decide whether the allegations were “in violation of the law of nations,” according to the docket signed off by José Martinez, the presiding judge. The court also ruled that “there is a risk that vague … allegations will allow individuals … to engage in unwarranted ‘fishing expeditions’ against corporate entities and to abuse the judicial process in order to pursue political agendas.” All outstanding charges against the Coca-Cola bottling companies were thrown out.

For the record, here are some of the names of the slain workers, in fact murders for which Coca-Cola appears to bear responsibility — and, by extension, ourselves as consumers — according to what has so far been recorded: Oscar Darío Soto, José Eleazar Manco, Luis Enrique Gómez, Isídro Segundo Gil, and dozens of others. More than a few other workers, including Luis Adolfo Cardona, Juan Carlos Gavis, Jorgé Humberto Leal and José Domingo Flores, were tortured by security forces — or captured, intimidated, brutally handled and lucky to escape alive.

Within all of this, boycotts are not guaranteed to be successful; about that no one should have any illusions. A vibrant, sustained campaign against Coca-Cola could have an important educational effect as well as shed more light on what continue to be largely hidden abuses, specifically those acts of brutality against the very lowest links of a long chain that reaches right up to cafeterias and hallways in college campuses throughout the nation. There looks to be both promise and peril in any kind of undertaking to stop man’s inhumanity to man. And it ought to be a common-sense position that no organization should have a legitimate reason to do business with a criminal outfit, even if by proxy.

The Doomsday Clock has been pushed to five minutes to midnight.

MORE ON IRAN: Dariush Zahedi and Omid Memarian, from openDemocracy, report that US-Iran relations are definitely going to sour further as this new year goes forward, thanks to the response of the reactionary fanatics at the helm in Tehran to the December municipal elections — and the coming “confrontation” with the United States, where (not by Zahedi and Memarian’s mention) the response of the reactionary fanatics at the helm in Washington to the November elections has continued to unfold.*

Zahedi and Memarian do point out the “ideological zealotry” of the Ahmadinejad clique that is threatening Iran, including whatever democratic prospects exist within the society; those aspirations look sort of hopeful now, but that could change. Nonetheless, any zealotry that aggresses toward peace and affronts historical memory must be condemned without equivocation. Extremism within and without Iran may cripple the hope of a democratic future, but not unless Iranians and Americans of good faith do a damn good thing or two about it.

*No hesitation will be drawn here to point out the critical parallels between the leaders that are bringing their respective countries ever closer to war. Much like Bush, Ahmadinejad has distracted Iranians from disastrous economic policies with bellicosity and aggression, thinly masked with diplomatic pretense. There is of course a major difference here; we have a much larger economy to ruin and we bear the guilt and shame of foreign aggression and invasion, which does not really apply to Iran. Their government sponsors terror groups for their strategic purposes; so does ours (Hezb’ullah and the Mujahideen-e Khalq, respectively, for one example).

UPDATING IRRELEVANT POST (Jan. 11): According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a surge carries the nautical sense of “strain,” which evokes the stress and strain, and fracturing and breaking, of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thanks, chief.

“And if I’m wasting my time,
then nothing could be better/
than hanging on the line,
and waitin’ for an honest word forever”

— Jack White

JUST A NOTE: Don’t really want to talk about this at much length, but there are interesting things about the idea of a surge, linguistically. Bear with me.

Dictionary.com is not authoritative, but it has something useful here for surge. The principal definition is “a strong, wavelike volume or body of something,” in this case several armed brigades storming into the boroughs of Baghdad. Fine; that’s the main image.

In meteorological parlance, a surge can be attributed to “normal diurnal changes,” as in the back and forth of the seas as dictated by the impersonal forces of lunar gravity. What goes up goes down. As a electrical term, surges are irrational spikes of voltage that “oscillate violently,” with unpredictable results. You cannot channel a surge constructively. Nautically, a surge refers to the slackening and “slip[ping] back” of rope, indicating retreat, going backward.

Not the New Way Forward we’re promised, then. Finally, in terms of mechanics, a surge is “something driven by an engine,” therefore without appeal to reason. To me it suggests a shift in the gears of the war machine, panicking and squealing out of control as it approaches the edge of a cliff. Don’t forget that surge is central to insurgency. Maybe the United States is better off with some surge protection.

Probably won’t be able to make it to the Young Democratic Socialists* conference this February, which also coincides with the fourth birthday of this ’blog. Anyway, looks interesting and maybe a good place to meet some people; you know, those naïve idealists folks hear so much about.

The focus, according to some of the literature they have and including their bare-bones flyer, is the usual anti-corporate, anti-imperialism stuff. The phrase “anti-capitalist” does indeed sound scary to many an American ear; suffice it to say the idea of anti-corporatism is genuinely pro-market, or at least that’s my crazy thinking.

But for whoever does have a car or whatever, and actually has some money and the time and the interest or what-have-you, check it out. Why not; this country is worth saving. (Then report back to me. Nah, that’s alright.)

*The term democratic socialism (DS) simultaneously sounds threatening and contradictory. But from what passes as my awareness of it, DS sounds well in keeping with the spirit of our Founding Fathers and the Republic they created, and therefore totally benign; but maybe there’s my naiveté. Regardless, democracy and socialism don’t inherently conflict (except for the communist off-shoot, which can rot in hell).

On Sunday, the Washington Post printed up a staggeringly complex graphic blaring out the corporate campaign contributions — per sector — to the House and Senate chairmanships, from the outgoing to the incoming people, etc. (Karen Yourish and Laura Stanton, “Congress Changes Hands — or Does It?” 7 January 2007, B2) The rhetorical question: “… is the 110th [Congress] really all that different from the 109th?” (No.)

According to my ’rithmetic, just taking the difference between the figures of the old and new in aggregate, out of the total contributions from each place (the Post uses data from the Center for Responsive Politics), you get: two percent less piggy-backing in the House and three-tenths of one percent less in the Senate (where you have the biggest offenders, notably Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden).

Oh, how politics is such a horrid game.

You know what’s a great movie? The Front Page. (That’s all.)

Guess this is a sort of fixation of interest lately, but here’s some more about the Iranian nuclear threat, except one could say it’s less of a threat than what’s otherwise imagined.

For instance, in a March 2006 address to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Generals, director-general Mohamed ElBaradei declared that “the Agency has not seen indications of diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. Regrettably, however, after three years of intensive verification, there remain uncertainties with regard to both the scope and the nature of Iran’s nuclear programme” (my emphasis). That’s a big qualifier, but my suspicion is it won’t be changed by threatening war.

According to a November 2005 report entitled Implementation of the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] Safeguards Agreement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, “The Agency has continued to monitor installations related to the uranium gas centrifuge and laser enrichment programmes, and has not observed any inconsistency with Iran’s voluntary undertaking not to carry out any enrichment activities” (my emphasis once again).

John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies explained in a 6 September 2005 report, “Iran has submitted to extensive investigations by the [IAEA] since 2003 to verify Iran’s acknowledgement of undeclared nuclear activities extending back over nearly 20 years. … Although a number of uncertainties remain about past and current activities, including the history of Iran’s enrichment and reprocessing efforts, we judge it is unlikely that Iran is hiding significant stocks of fissile material or production facilities for such material.” According to the Chipman dossier, “Public estimates for how long it would take Iran to acquire nuclear weapons range from only a few years to at least a decade.”

Ten years would put us in 2016, very close to the time when Iranian “revenue from its oil exports” might “virtually disappear” and another energy source would be needed — as “economic geographer” Roger Stern of the National Academy of Sciences just reported, according to an AP wire in today’s Washington Post (“Iran Oil Revenue Quickly Drying Up, Analysis Says,” A9). One finding from the Stern report declares that “there could be merit to Iran’s assertion that it needs nuclear power for civilian purposes.”

Without going on a limb, one could argue somewhat forcefully that canceling the economic sanctions we’re enforcing, at great peril to the Iranian people, would strip the regime ruling roughshod over them of any plausible reason to continue developing nuclear energy — much less any potential for acquiring weapons.

(from my [poorly-written] post on a recent openDemocracy forum)

The Iranian elections signal a good measure of hope for the country and the region. Ahmadinejad campaigned (to a narrow win in 2005) on a populist platform and spent it all on embarrassing Iranians with his belligerent rhetoric and antics that, I think, draw instant parallels vis-à-vis the United States and Bush.

It is clear that the Iranian people want to defang their renegade president and hopefully steer their future toward a more moderate standing viz. the U.S., if not outright reform. There is still room for good-faith negotiations; there is also still plenty of time. If they have no (perceived) reason to acquire a nuclear deterrent, they probably won’t have one.

Iran, to be sure, is not a free country. But the youth there are said to be quite pro-Western and pro-American, and that’s very good. A crucial mistake would be to further isolate the country, including signs like that as well as the now-defunct reformist movements that can be jump-started, by screwing this up with further steps of aggressive threat and covert war-plans. Iraq is a basket-case next to this.

At least there’s some sanity in Tehran. (From a recent anti-Ahmadinejad demonstration at Amir Kabir University, courtesy Hasan Sarbakhshian of the Associated Press.) DEATH TO THE DICTATOR indeed. So I guess “death” is another way of saying “down with”? Not “down” as in “cool with,” but… nevermind.

WAR OF CIVILIZATIONS UPDATE:

Well, not really, according to Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist whose admonitions to stop the Darfur slaughter have gone totally unheeded. But he’s talking about Muslims this time. No, not Arabs, he is quick to add. (Not all Arabs are Muslim, not all Muslims are Arab; in fact, most are not.)

Here’s a passage — or, borrowing from Sullivan’s lexicon, the ‘money quote’:

“The Koran and Bible alike have passages that make 21st-century readers flinch; most Christians just ignore sections on slavery or admonitions to kill a disobedient child. Likewise, some Muslims are reinterpreting Koranic passages on polygamy and amputations, saying they were restricted to particular circumstances that no longer apply. [For great analysis from an avowed Islamic humanist going by the moniker Ali Eteraz, check out the archives of his now-defunct site which is listed under my links.]

“Frankly, I don’t see that any religion’s influence is intrinsically peaceful or violent. Christianity inspired both Mother Teresa and pogroms. Hinduism nurtured Gandhi and also the pioneers of suicide bombings. [True, true, although I didn’t know about the Hindu suicide bombers thing; and Hitchens has some questions about Teresa’s saintliness.]

“These days, ferocious anti-Semitism thrives in some Muslim countries, but in the Dreyfus affair a century ago Muslims sided with a Jew persecuted by anti-Semitic Christians. And the biggest sectarian slaughter in Europe in modern times involved Christians massacring Muslims at Srebrenica. [Um, if we’re counting “modern times” … oh, sectarian slaughter; regardless, the Holocaust should be included in that category.]

“The plain fact is that some Muslim societies [point of confusion: when is it Muslim, versus Islamic or Islamist? These have almost become interchangeable] do have a real problem with violence, with the subjugation of women, with tolerance. But the mosaic of Islam is vast and contains many more hopeful glimpses of the future.

“There is a historic dichotomy between desert Islam — the austere fundamentalism of countries like Saudi Arabia — and riverine or coastal Islam, more outward-looking, flexible and tolerant. Desert Muslims grab the headlines, but my bet is that in the struggle for the soul of Islam, maritime Muslims have the edge.”

Ah, okay. Those damn desert A-rabs are the ones getting us in a pinch, Mr. Kristof; I see. Of course that is just irony. What’s interesting here is that he takes pains to differentiate the Muslim populations but has no problem grouping the ‘sand monkeys’ together as one homogenous, threatening group. Subtly racist of that distinction, no?

I don’t pretend to any expertise or field experience, so this is just from what’s been reported and the situation as I’ve followed it. But enough with the disclaimers; they’re redundant and therefore unnecessary, and perhaps annoying and … I guess that’s disclaiming the disclaimer.

The need to express an opinion on things of pressing importance and consequence seems high for a lot of people, especially for those (myself included) who are neither directly involved nor actually knowledgeable. Sometimes things are better left unsaid, as they may simply add nothing new to the dialogue. But this blogger is not here to determine that, because for someone to say “That’s nothing new” smacks of elitist presupposition.

Yet that’s exactly the problem. An elite of commentators and analysts digests reality for us nearly constantly, too rapidly to either absorb or reflect on what we see and hear, enforcing some memes and throwing out others. The idea of being overabundantly interconnected with the world and yet so disconnected from it emerges, no longer so paradoxically. We want the real-world picture, with the fuzzy ambiguities sharpened, the murky subtext dredged out onto the microscope slide for powerful focus, all and everything chopped up, packed away and sold en masse.

What about the cynical, absolutist and simplistic lenses wielded at times by our self-appointed opinionists? I’ll of course admit my membership in the “blogosphere,” something that remains unclear in what it is or what it’s doing, or contributing to. It certainly cannot be a coherent whole, and therefore not any kind of sphere. (Maybe, instead, it’s a sphere in the sense of a gaseous ball of fire, which has no real surface but is rather pulled into its shape by the force of gravity.) Whatever it is, the blogs themselves form a sort of disjointed group that has plenty of opinionists, commentating aggregators, etc.

The world may be totally insane, but I think a lot of promise exists in many places. One hope of mine is that the collective power of human thought (in any medium) will eventually break apart the forces of evil that the surface of these media keep reflecting, masking that hope with overwhelmed notes of resignation and pretensions of understanding.

I give thanks for this too...

(from the 1956 Defense Dept. Coolidge Committee Report on Classified Information, via the Memory Hole)

Even if he got out of his bizarre denial, as The Onion imagines, Ahmadi-Nejad would still be an asshole for having denied it. (Death to Iran?)

“While some on principles baptized to strict party platform ties, social clubs in drag disguise outsiders they can freely criticize/Tell nothing except who to idolize and then say God bless him …

“My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards/False gods, I scuff, at pettiness which plays so rough/Walk upside-down inside handcuffs, kick my legs to crash it off/Say okay, I have had enough, What else can you show me?”

(R. Zimmerman, 1965)

Borat is not going to be released in Russia (except by bootleg), which seems odd because if the Kremlin were so concerned about offending religious and ethnic minorities, why the wars on Chechnya and the economic battering of Georgia?

Just a thought.

I’d hate to pontificate, so instead an old chestnut from a simpler, bloodier time is in order. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That house, as it was then, is the United States. Civil war no longer greets us here, but the climate feels somewhat similar, if something in the old history books bears truth. It seems that elections are a form of parlor game, so the only mention of this week’s will go in the way of instrumental, passing remarks that — without resort to cynicism — illustrate the larger state in which I think we’ve become entrapped. Tuesday should give Americans pause for hope, as it does represent a small step forward, or at least a step backward from the abyss. The ideological chasms must be bridged and we have to stop putting the worst of our nature into our politics.

In some circles a pundit or two observed that a Senate split right down the middle, with the Vice President enabled to cast the tie-breaking vote, was a possibility. Currently at about 52 percent, the House (as was expected) has a slight majority for the opposition party. Either way, the dominant party can plausibly claim victory. The President can veto whatever he likes and, regardless, can resort to a signing statement that absolves him of enforcing any law as he has done hundreds of times before. It took the collosal failure of their policy, and not much else, to propel the former minority back into the lower chamber. Victory is also to be credited to the entrenched system of patronage and gerrymandering, which may have held off much of the popular will.

Andrea Cukor, in a letter printed in the Times, says that the American people have “got to stop the political tribalism that has taken over the democratic process of our Republic!” It is indeed something to exclaim and proclaim, but unlike her I wouldn’t understate it. That tribal mentality, which appeals only to emotion and superficially-important matters, is tearing apart our nation. A political science professor explained in my freshman year that we are headed in a “fascist” direction, with the focus less on governing the country and more on electioneering that toys with the citizenry on the bases of “fear, anger and division,” to borrow the characterization of the supposed Newspaper of Record last week. I hope the professor’s prediction is wrong, but it looks like we have not had a government for some time now and will not have one regardless of what happened this week.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Sunday that our “political structure … seems impervious to big partisan swings — thanks to a 50/50 electorate, the advantages of incumbency and the scarcity of competitive congressional districts.” In October, econopolitical analyst Paul Krugman wondered whether the oppositional “wave” — however great — could actually “overtop the levee” that the dominant party has built, given that “in close elections many Democratic votes … simply add to huge majorities in a small number of districts, while the more widely spread Republican vote allows the G.O.P. to win by narrower margins in a larger number of districts.” Roll Call opinionator Morton Kondracke agreed, writing on Nov. 2 that the vote was shaping up to be “tempered by some Republican structural advantages.”

National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru commented back in September that a loss for the then reigning partisans could be a net gain. “Freed from the obligation of cobbling together thin majorities for watered-down legislation,” Ponnuru wrote, “Republicans would be able to stand for something attractive.” That is preferable to the mess of things with which Americans have been surrounded. Upon seizing the mantle again, the Democrats’ “left-leaning ‘net-roots’ may grow more enraged still,” as the newly ascendant party “would … have the illusion of power without its reality.” These musings reflect on the longer-term picture, in which it can soon enough be claimed that nothing is going to get done and the corrosive polarization will maybe intensify.

The party that lost its dominance, at least its majority by narrow margins, has appeared to be riven over tactical disagreements about how to most effectively secure our rapidly fading hegemon status. However, the party that just ascended to power, more of a splinter association than anything else, lacks an overarching vision or strategy. This is a problem if Americans want their representatives to roll back the damage wrought to our country, in all of the anti-constitutional and anti-republican forms inflicted. There are no guarantees, nor do any quick fixes pretend to appear; whatever does unfold holds some confident measure of promise. That hope, however, is not up to the political system that has wholly failed the people for whom it purports to speak and, more absurdly, to lead.

“The politicians, special interests and the media are in a spate of high excitement over next week’s elections,” writes Bob Herbert (New York Times, “The System’s Broken,” 30 October 2006, A27). On the other side, there is “an increasing sense of disenchantment and unease … Big money and gerrymandering have placed government out of the reach of most Americans. … It’s time to bring the intelligence, creativity and energy of the broader population into the quest for constructive change.”

Amen.

Sometime this Tuesday, Oct. 17 (7:45 in the morning or thereabout is my guess), the U.S. population will hit 300 million. According to figures reported in the Wall Street Journal, it will reach 400 million in about 35 years. I think everything is gonna be fine. No worries, demographers. Honest. (From the ranting fellow who has no idea what he is talking about.)

Grim Numbers

Bulletin: (Maybe) 600,000 Iraqi dead from the war we launched three years ago, out of their population of roughly 27 million, according to a Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study as reported in today’s New York Times.

600,000 is the mean estimate, and said to be by no means exact. Our “coalition forces,” it is sad to say, are to blame for much of the carnage though not all.

Taking the very mininum count — which is reported to be 426,369 — as a percentage of the Iraqi population, the equivalent American count would be 4,651,299. Would you put that on page 16?

A Note on a Great Betrayal

From a letter to the editor; the New York Times, printed 29 September 2006 (A22):

The Rev. Connell Maguire, Navy cpt (ret.), puts the recent shameful repudiation of the bedrock legal principle on which the U.S. stands (English Common Law, of which a major part is the right to habeas corpus) in a solemnly eloquent way:

“The day the detainee bill is signed will be a day that will live in dishonor in our history. The practices that appalled us in the past when used by sleazy regimes will be incorporated into our legal heritage.

“If we do not reject the responsible party in power, we will indict ourselves as accomplices before decent world opinion.”

Americans are a good, decent people. We must demonstrate this in a few weeks and throw out the outlaws dominating — and destroying — the principles for which our patriot ancestors bled and died.

Happy New Year/Shana Tova - 5767

When it comes to politics, there seems to be a fine line between urgency and hysteria. The WORLD CAN’T WAIT! campaign promises October 5 to be a “day of mass resistance” against the reviled “Bush regime.” I do not know whether to say right on or slow down. Honestly, it seems like a tough pick.

Sure, these fuckers need to be driven out of office as soon as possible, for the good of the nation — if not for the good of the Nation. Even if the November elections don’t prove a watershed for the (nominal) opposition party, the hope still remains with the American people who, I think, have put up with much more than anyone ought to deserve, faced with a government that seems to care little about their interests or, at least, campaigns on solid contempt for them.

All said, if this ‘mass resistance’ turns out to be some misguided, ineffectual protests at whatever designated ‘centers of power’, to hell with it! Too lame. What kind of mass resistance would that be? Not that I at all recommend this, but they’re not talking about storming the White House for God’s sake, which would never work anyway. These people intend to keep it nonviolent, and that’s good; but with a logo of the Earth on fire, that … um, fiery urgency could well turn into hysteria, which is no good for anybody.

P.S.: I wrote the above about one month ago, though I think the planned uprising is still planned to go underway. Whether it will be reported in the mainstream press is of course another issue, but I am going to try to keep hope about it. You know, we really shouldn’t keep waiting any longer. Five years is far too long; much of America has probably been destroyed. But not by al Qaeda, which did take thousands of our people from us five years ago last week.

We are five years, unbelievably half a decade, past the morning in our history when a horrific trauma impacted our collective psyche; the public discourse has yet to fully heal, though we’ve moved on. Also we’ve moved forward to a state of affairs (it pains me to say, so deeply I regret this) that has left our country in a nearly unrecognizable shape.

Albeit for a brief, clear moment, the skeletal carcass of the monuments to our financial prowess, the grevious damage upon the nerve center of our military might and a smouldering hole in a Pennsylvania field were immediately packaged like a commercial brand and spoken with a cynical tongue to the end of dividing a united citizenry.

Truthfully, I fear we have begun to forget how September 11 has long since been stripped of any physical meaning, its shocking and terrible immediacy supplanted by a slogan for perpetuating the atrocious violence of that autumn day, indeed a GOP trademark stamped onto the embers of nearly 3,000 of our countrymen. It demonstrated a remarkable contempt for the American people, bearing witness to such eager politicization of the tragedy.

This has been pointed out elsewhere, but it is important to mention that Bin Laden’s scythe killed 2,973 Americans (CNN’s statistic), and our President’s led to the deaths (by the Washington Post’s count as of August 29) of 2,944 Americans in Iraq, 330 in Afghanistan and 1,836 in the Gulf states (cit. Wikipedia).* This toll exceeds bin Laden’s 1.7 times, nearly by a factor of two.

So much has changed, and there are positive developments. It is never all gloom and doom; that way lies pessimism, one of the worst of humanity’s inclinations. Look at Lebanon: its people just recently suffered the equivalent of an Sept. 11 attack every day for one month. That is inconceivable. Of course, the Lebanese have their own problems to deal with, namely their (rough) equivalent to our Klan.**

I keep hope that we Americans will stay fast to hope, that not only will we someday heal ourselves but also that we start fighting the jihadis and cease strengthening them. For the sake of the victims we remember today, in fact for the sake of my beloved country and the world, may justice yet be done for them.

*I do not of course blame Katrina on President Bush, as that would be ludicrous; I do point out that his administrative response, that is the lack thereof, of his subordinate executive agencies magnified and amplified what was the natural consequence of the hurricane’s impact, as is amply documented.

**Naturally that is speculation; I think it is legitimate to draw an analogy between their Hizb’ullah and our Ku Klux Klan, which until it was largely marginalized by the victories of the civil rights movement had an impressive pull on our southern territories, viz. Lebanon’s south, championing similarly racist terrorism.

NOTE: The maximum toll posted as of today from Iraq Body Count is roughly 46,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. As a percentage of the U.S. population, this is about 552,000 Americans; the toll from the Civil War, by comparison, was 558,052 (the Louisiana State University Civil War Center).

That figure is roughly 235 greater than what befell us five years ago today. It is, to make a crude estimate, the equivalent of a September 11 attack every week for the entire span of time that has passed between then and now.

Enterprising blogger Beep Beep tagged (remarks), who in turn tagged the Center. So here it all is, keeping to the format. [Even the part about the crying, as in books that make you do so. Not shyin away. Not here.]

A Book That Changed My Life

Handily, this goes to Nineteen Eighty-Four by the venerable George Orwell (Eric Blair). My God, what an unthinkable dystopian picture of the future. None of it ever came true.

A Book I’ve Read More Than Once

Probably Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, but I’m sure there are others. Have to dig it.

The One Book That Would be Goin’ to a Desert Island

’Tuff question. How about Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews. Not to pass the time per se, but rather to reflect on familial heritage going back to ancient times. And, yes, incidentally it would pass the time. Big ’ol book.

A Book that Made Me Laugh

Nothing recently, but if The Onion’s “Complete News Archives Volume 16” (or Embedded In America) counts as a book, most definitely.

A Book that Made Me Cry

Well, I’m no sentimental windbag, but several years ago there was a book that at the end of it left me with, say, a raindrop a-fallen on my head. It goes to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, an integral part of literary Americana. Or, on the other hand, I was so tired of the book that, as I closed its last page, was just so happy it was over. But that was a long time ago.

A Book that I Wish had been Written

Richard B. Cheney’s classic, comprehensive tome Iraq: Its People, History, and Customs. Not a best-seller.

A Book I Wish had Never Been Written

Mein Kampf does rank high in this category, but I’d pick Jayson Blair’s scheme to get-rich-off-my-shame-of-plagiarism that his publisher titled Burning Down My Master’s House. To add insult to the injury of staining the reputation of one of the world’s finest newspapers (the New York Times, that’s right), it seems he played the race card. Sure, no one died, and I do not intend to compare him with the former in any way, as it is obvious that Mr. Blair’s book did not lead to the unconscionable horrors of human history. And to be fair to the disgraced journalist, I did not read his book. Nor do I intend to.

A Book I Have Been Meaning to Read

The Knights Templar by Stephen Howarth. My father recommended it highly.

Currently Reading...

A few books right now, first of which is Karen Armstrong’s Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World. Then, shifting gears, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (Gar Alperovitz).

TAGALONG

Ali Eteraz

David Masciotra

Jane Holland

Andy Dunn

Jill Stevenson

End of the Generation

Confidently not a dystopian forecast after all, but simply an evolution of social fabric into technotribalism, along with increasing isolation between people and pixelated stratification and fragmentation of human thought. Less things to talk about, but more to destroy. Nothing to buy; everything to sell.

In fact I see a generation aching for purpose in a seemingly nihilistic world where nothing appears to matter. But this assumes that generations still exist, and they do not. It is clear enough, in the midst of such opacity and madness, that they no longer do; no one understands the past while events of the present cripple the future.

This whole world is just hanging in limbo. Everyone is afraid to judge, and when they do it is often hysterical. We have left Utopia, and we will always fear Hell. The mission may prove to be whether we have the will to do what is best for the common good, or even ourselves. Until that proving ground is struck, may there be no decision. Only indifference, perhaps a conclusive shrug, then silence.

The Slow Death of an American City

New Orleans, one year out, remains largely unrebuilt. The lower-income areas, for example, seem to have stayed devastated. The negligence, corruption and indeed the criminality that have been associated with this tragedy have gone unanswered.

Judging by relevant reports I have come across, the massive levee failure that wrecked a home to millions, and a monument to our culture, was not only systemic but preventable. Eminently preventable.

No one person deserves sole blame for the entire chronicle of horror; rather, it is distributed among several actors, whose actions — and, crucially, inactions — magnified the scale of what Mother Nature wrought twelve months ago.

“Katrina,” not Hurricane Katrina, has become a political slogan, a rallying cry of the militant anti-Bush organizers, even “REMEMBER KATRINA!” — as if it were the Maine. But the event cannot be dissociated from the causal chain of events, and the context out of which they happened.

Yet the basic fact remains that our government failed the people of New Orleans, therefore all Americans; last year millions solemnly watched the city’s poor without means of escape packed into shelters, among the dead and scavenging for food. Last year we bore witness to the televised accounts of refugees in our own country.

The American people did a hell of a lot to help, immensely more than the government, which proved sickeningly dysfunctional.* The whole episode did indeed go a long way to show just how good and decent Americans are. In spite of it all, one year removed, an American city had been left to die.

Rebuild; Restore; Renew. That is the way, and that is the hope. No idea when it will happen, but until it does this will be a shame on our national conscience, for which someday we will eventually forgive. But not forget. May a dead city be reborn.

(Note: Do not know why I am feeling so personally affected here, as the above words suggest. But then I think about, as I have before, my father’s ancestors who came to Louisiana from Sicily and the Old Country back in the 1820s; and of my distant relatives living in Baton Rouge, thankfully far from the brunt of the damage. Never got to meet ‘em, though.)

An ugly myth has apparently circulated for awhile, in which the dastardly Army Corps of Engineers purposefully flooded the black Lower Ninth Ward, among other tall tales; I think that mirrors the story about the Maine’s sinking at the dastardly hands of wicked Spainards.

*Indeed the New York Times described the inaptly named Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as “an international symbol of dysfunction and incompetence,” and since the Katrina disaster “little has fundamentally changed” within its bureaucratic structure.

UPDATE: CNN reports, “Nationally, 67 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush’s handling of the Katrina disaster, according to an AP-Ipsos poll earlier this month.” This seems to match past poll results ever since the very beginning of the crisis. It adds, “The death toll in Louisiana from Katrina is close to 1,600, including nearly 300 who died in other states after fleeing from the hurricane” (Aug. 29, 2006). If I may, on top of the 2,600 brave souls who have perished in Iraq, the criminality and negligence of our government has topped bin Laden’s murder of 3,000 of our people by over one-third, whose fifth-year anniversary arrives soon.

(Re-post from July 5)

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
And let us destroy the Enlightenment together ...

In light of ever-present ‘media overload’ (or M.O.), Wikipedia has long been an interest of mine, ever since it launched into my consciousness a couple of years ago. Science has rated it exceptionally accurate, regarding its scientific articles at least.* The attacks this self-described public encyclopedia has undergone are conclusively baseless.

To a large extent, as a previous post echoes, Wikipedia is a fundamentally democratic medium and is pointedly populist in its form. The content, to which my contributions have been few and far-in-between — given that, minor changes/fixes, does not deserve the overly critical reception it gets, for instance, from CNN — which once sarcastically described the Wiki as a source that “anyone can edit,” ignoring the stringent filtering process.

[Anyone can edit, true, but edits are peer-reviewed — P2P — by hundreds, indeed thousands, of people: fellow contributors, observers, etc.]

Marshall Poe, in the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly, notes that Wikipedia “has the potential to be the greatest effort in collaborative knowledge gathering the world has ever known,” while in its origins the collaborative ethic was jump-started with so-dubbed “‘wiki magic,’” which Poe writes is “the mysterious process by which communities with common interests work to improve wiki pages by incremental contributions” (p. 91), so the serial additions became parallel.

The number of Wikipedia articles increased from 100- to 500-thousand, from January 2003 to March 2005; by March 2006, it had doubled, as the Monthly explains (pp. 90, 91). Founders Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales set up a framework in which “authors were enjoined to present the conventionally acknowledged ‘facts’ in an unbiased way, and, where arguments occurred, to accord spaces to both sides,” Poe writes, lest the entire project “slide into a morass of unproductive invective” (p. 91).

He opines that “Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth” from the standard, objective… encyclopedic one. Continues: “The community [of dedicated Wikipedians and fellow path-takers] decides that two plus two equals four … by consensus. Yes,” Poe exclaims, “that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five.

“The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing,” he adds, “but it has the ability” (p. 93). Sure, true enough, as Merriam-Webster has the same “ability” to define democracy as an empty slogan, or a commodity for export (preferably at gun-point).

Mr. Poe concludes that the network “is well ordered and … very useful” and “is laying claim to … a territory we might call ‘common knowledge,’ … the place where all nominal information about objects of widely shared experience will be negotiated, stored, and renegotiated” (p. 94). Oh, almost forgot; it’s all for free, as any decent store of information ought to be.

*As is typical, I am mistaken; the journal Nature, we read, “compared [Encyclopedia] Britannica and Wikipedia science articles and suggested that the former are usually only marginally more accurate than the latter” (ibid, my emphasis), not Science.

Also, Poe refers to an IBM “study [which] suggests that although vandalism does occur … watchful members of the huge Wikipedia community usually swoop down to stop the malfeasance shortly after it begins” (ibid). Very true. In fact, the day after satirical troublemaker Stephen Colbert — while riffing on “Wikiality” — called on people to edit the ‘Elephants’ page to read that the number of elephants has “tripled in the last three months,” sure enough someone (out of who know’s how many) added in caps at the top, THE NUMBER OF ELEPHANTS HAS TRIPLED IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS! It was gone a few minutes later. (I was kind of disappointed that I hadn’t had the chance to write it myself.)

To be sure, I am not a committed ‘Wikipedian’ by any possible measure, but I am thoroughly committed to the idea of such an open-source, democratic body of knowledge. As I’ve said before, keep it alive. And I fuckin’ meant it.

MEDIA OVERLOAD?

Cannot think of a better way to describe it, but it definitely seems like we are not only looking at information overload but media overload. Whole blocs of overwhelming, instantly-analytical-perpetually-updated chunks of posts, bulletins, comments, diggs (patent pending, right?), et cetera. Not only can one not keep up, but a clear picture of the world, or of anything, is denied. How can any decisions be made in an environment like this?

Further, we have a really self-conscious media culture. People talk about ‘self-parody,’ and that is part of it but there’s more to the mix than the reflections at the surface. Granted that this culture has become increasingly complex and accelerated, and in the interests of simplicity and clarity (but not oversimplification and hypercoherence), we need to either break away from it or break it down. I am not talking about destruction; there is too much of that already.

Some dissonance is good. But I think too much is out there, anyways. For instance, How can the world’s most feared nation (and its most necessary) understand the world it has come to dominate? It may be an insane question, but it is posed here nonetheless. By this I do not mean the media cultures, and subcultures, that both connect and divide Americans have a purely political outlet. But how we perceive the world, much less each other, is undoubtedly important in any sphere; what we do to act on it moreso.

Zapped!

“Well I’m about to get upset from watchin’ my TV, been checkin’ out the news until my eyeballs fail to see/

“I mean to say that every day is just another rotten mess, and when it’s gonna change my friend is anybody’s guess/

“So I’m watching and I’m waiting, hopin’ for the best/

“Even think I’ll go prayin’, every time I hear ‘em sayin’ that there’s no way to delay that trouble comin’ every day ...”

(THE MOTHERS OF INVENTION, 1966)

Snakes-a-Comin' (Real Soon)

Re-postage (from January 13), with different words and different picture ... but same spirit:

Snnnaaaakes! 3-Day Weekend $100 mil blockbuster? Can Jackson get those motherfuckin snakes off his motherfuckin plane??

Rumble-Jumble, Parte Trois...

The Post’s Metro section printed up a piece on “freegans”, or “free vegans”, who dumpster-dive but don’t actually need to. These kids have a point, if they’re not also sort of insane. Indeed there’s a lot of overconsumption and waste in our society when it comes to food.

But they’re running a risk, at least health-wise. And it is naïve to attack a system from the waste end — you’re working backwards.

Besides, to make a last (but not least) point, what about the people who actually have to bum food out of the dump to survive? It is selfish on principle, and we read that such freegans seem to be principally-motivated at some level, to act in such a self-illusory (and likely pointless) way — especially if it deprives ... panhandlers. You know, homeless.

(The people most often ignored, or best simply invisible; more often than not, they don’t get the front-page of a major newspaper’s Metro pages.)

Crunchy Cons: Sounds like something I’d want to be a part of at first look, at least to be a kind of honorary observer. They’re a motley sort of freewheeling, unconventional right-wingers. To be clear, not an orthodoxical Right, but probably conservative in disposition instead of an ideological sense, a tricky stand to which I have much sympathy — and some attachment.

I’ve often been styled, cast or even pigeonholed into a number of ideo-set designations, be they “ultra-liberal” by those who really don’t know who I am, even “reactionary” — by people who really have no idea. (Although I’m not comfortable with such place-markers and ideological thinking in general, and for the most part ideology as a practice is bullshit, ‘left-wing conservative’ seems comfortable.*)

*Then again, social libertarian seems fitting, too; essentially, anything that isn’t extreme, intolerant or irrational — if it blossoms within those bounds, chances are I might go along with it.

ISRAEL/LEBANON update: The fire has largely ceased for now, as far as I can tell from the far-outside, so at month’s end it looks like this...

If the guns were reversed, with the proportions kept, the Israeli and Lebanese civilian deaths (respectively) are 1,840 and 24. To deny the obvious tragedy that has befallen Lebanon, from within and without and with the help of several actors, is to deny the equal moral weight between Israelis and Lebanese.

The Post published an op-ed by the Secretary of State, who writes (“A Path To Lasting Peace”, A13) that “we have increased our immediate humanitarian assistance to $50 million” (my italics). Increased to 50 million dollars? The paper, on page 10, reads that “Losses to infrastructure” in Lebanon have thus far totaled $2,400,000,000. The 50 mil is 1/48th of that; in proportion to the Israeli infrastructure damage, that comes out to 27 mil.

“For our part, the United States is helping to lead relief efforts for the people of Israel, ... we have increased our immediate humanitarian assistance to $27 million.” You would not see that sentence, especially by our State Secretary, and for good reason. The idea is simply insulting to Israel; such little funds for so much damage.

For the U.S., again keeping the proportions, if we take the place of Israel, is 1,860; if the place of Lebanon is taken, 87,630 ... which is about 29 9/11s (over the course of a month, roughly one every day), whose fifth anniversary looms quite soon. [Suppose a far greater power promised financial aid for our reconstruction? It would be (by my count) a transparently paltry $3,947,305 for our $1,894,736,832 in damages. Maybe my math is wrong. But it would be a start.]

Realist Decries 'Unrealism', Delusional Idiocy

I’ve had, and continue to have, plenty of respect (and occasional disagreement) with conservative commentator George Will, who in today’s Washington Post (“The Triumph of Unrealism”, A13) is right on the money about the recent MI-5 disrupt of the liquid-bomb plot.

He writes:

“Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement ... has validated John Kerry’s belief ... that ‘many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror.’”

Will adds that “a ‘senior administration official’ ... denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point,” informing the radical Weekly Standard that, with a straight face,

The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, loveable, God-fearing people if it weren't for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It’s like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn’t work.”

As the staid, reasonable columnist concludes, “This farrago [wtf?] of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike ‘the law enforcement approach,’ does ‘work.’

“The official is correct that it is wrong ‘to think that somehow we are responsible - that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies.’ But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere [hey!] think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy — and domestic politics — unrealism.”

(I don’t appreciate the cheap swipe at bloggers, but then again some among us can reach heights of paranoid fantasy at times, on any range of topics. We’re not robots, Bow-tie.)

Crazy Thought (Again)

Ummm... should we actually negotiate with these people? Lookat the salute for God's sakes! Why are we even thinking about doing that? Look at them! Just fucking dangerous.

God forbid I demonize the official enemy, in this case Hizb'ullah (the Party of God). God forbid I choose to demonize demons. God forbid I react negatively to what appears to be a Nazi salute.

But, go ahead, hammer out a negotiated settlement with these folks. (I am talking to you, Kofi!) Of course I want this war to stop, do not get me wrong. (I often get myself wrong.) But do not lose your heads. I am trying not to lose mine. A wise man said, Do not cut what you cannot untie. That implies the Lebanese government, at a last option, must cut it off with these so-called Holy Partisans or whatever the else these murderous thugs want to name themselves. If it cannot, sorry Mr. Siniora, but the bullshit has got to end.

Both states must respect the territorial sovereignty of the other; as I have consistently advocated, a cease-fire must be enforced by the relevant multinationals or what-have-you, and by the by such a call to lay down arms has begun as of a few hours ago; reparations by Israel and Lebanon must be paid immediately for their respective collateral damage; and the political structure of Lebanon must be re-made from within, toward the effect of leaving a disarmed Hizbollah and, instead, a political party without recourse to violence, a choice that is entirely up to the Lebanese (at that an acceptable one for Israel, as top Israeli officials have in fact indicated).

No more for now. On a personal note, may this ceasefire have lasting value, indeed a semblance of permanence; may Israel and Lebanon find the peace their people both seek; and may rogues like Hezbollah and their thuggish minions be stamped out once and, hopefully, for all.

What?!

The enemies of free people are the temptations to be naïve, embrace cynicism to suffice for a lack of spirit or common energy and turn ourselves into fatalists only trusting an invisible predetermined Higher Plan.

These are not abstract words, nor are they slogans in the hope of rallying some deeper cause, a target hidden from the piercing light of day that drives out the fog of contradiction and confused, interpretive talking-head shout-match referees who radiate from lofty perches of assumed expertise.

What am I talking about, hell, if I only knew. Power is out of the hands of people like me, we’re just left to comment and rant and ceaselessly opine, presuming there’s anything useful to say that hasn’t already been said. Lacking qualities in our collective experience, maybe to simplify and generalize beyond the scope of which is surely legit, are Honesty, Trust and Respect. These are taken for granted to not exist practically anywere outside the realm of the imagined or aspired.

There’s your summer reading. (Goodnight.)

Re-posting (from May 26), with some updates...

A team of UCLA researchers under the direction of one Donald Taskin is reported to have found, contrary to malicious Drug War agitprop, that inhaling the haze of Mary-Jane, “even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.”

Intaking the toke, according to Tashkin’s work, may — perhaps — even have “‘some protective effect’” on the lungs.

The Post adds that past studies Tashkin conducted had pointed to toxic agents in marijuana akin to those which are understood to be cancerous in tobacco. However, “the chemical THC [TetraHydroCannabinol] … may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous,” Tashkin asserts.

Unlike the wacky tobacke, the other leaf is highly addictive thanks to nicotine; likely, there’s the greater health threat — with the accepted, massively subsidized cash crop and not the demon-plant sown into the black market.

NOTES: (Researchers of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program, in 1997, tentatively “concluded that … marijuana use and cancer were not associated in overall analyses” in their study.

(Ahmedin Jemal and Kenneth Chu of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute write that “a contribution” to overall trends of “lung cancer mortality” post-1950 among people under the age of 45 “from marijuana smoking cannot be ruled out.”

(L.E. Hollister of Pharmacological Reviews, however, pointed out in 1986 that cases of “emphysema or lung cancer have not yet been documented.”

(Yet according to a 1998 Lancet study, “chronic” smokers — and this is portrayed as by no means certain — may suffer “bronchitis and histopathological changes that may be precursors to the development of malignant disease” [p. 3].)

Who knows? I don’t, certainly.

ON HIATUS (in case I haven't noticed).

Almost Beside the Point

The issue of “disproportion” re Israel/Lebanon is almost beside the point.

15 Israeli civilians are already dead. According to Lebanese Health Ministry figures cited in Ha’aretz, the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon is 342 as of the latest count.

To put this horrifying tragedy (for Israel and Lebanon) into a proportion-wise perspective, the respective populations of Israel and Lebanon are roughly 6.3 and 3.8 million.

If we reversed the guns, this is the picture (again, keeping the proportions) that emerges: 9 Lebanese civilian dead, 567 Israeli civilian dead. Every life is of equal worth; a Lebanese civilian is of the same moral weight as an Israeli civilian. I shouldn’t have to say that.

For the U.S., the picture is wickedly frightening, lest we not pay attention to the events as they unfold: 720 dead (if we take the place of Israel) or 27,000 (if we take Lebanon’s place).

[The latter number is, then, about equivalent to nine September 11ths.]

I continue to pray for the people of Israel and Lebanon, hoping that the bloodshed will end, that the forces of extremism and the blinded, hating souls it holds hostage will be defeated forever.

NEW DELHI: UNBLOCK THE BLOG.

India, the largest democracy in the world, did not suffer such an atrocity in Bombay to deserve this outrage against free people.

The latest bulletin reads that some ISPs in the country "began restoring access to some Web sites", though the government ban has "remained in place despite protests" there and abroad.

Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid reports that in Beirut, “politics are conflating with identity” — singularly troublesome when looked at in relation to the phenomenon of terrorist-militant-group-turned-political-factions like the so-named Party of God (Hizb’ollah).

In his survey of the common population’s outlook (“Barrage Reopens Wounds of a Fractured Beirut,” 16 July 2006), Shadid writes that Hizbollah “provided schools, hospitals, pharmacies and dental clinics, spending millions of dollars — made possible by Iran” and its theocratic machinations.

[Such ‘social services’ were allegedly key to the political ascendancy of Hamas — euphemistically dubbed the Islamic Resistance Movement — as opposed to the weak and reportedly corrupt Fatah.]

Personally, it is very interesting how Lebanon can be so deftly transformed from a supposed bastion of democratic heroism (as in the beloved Cedar Revolution) pitted against sinister Syrian occupiers, into an existential enemy of a fundamentally embattled Israel — which, in turn, is portrayed in Arab news media as a monstrous aggressor.

Thomas O’Dwyer, a former Jerusalem Post foreign editor and current contributor to openDemocracy, asks whether Hizbollah fatally “miscalculated” by abducting Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. O’Dwyer quotes Tel Aviv University political science professor Shaul Mishal as registering his own surprise that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — reportedly something of a politico-military novice — “was ready to take such a risk, (in) account of the fact that Israel was going to suffer from missile attacks against its population”, perhaps a predictable result coming from a roguish set of militants hell-bent on ‘resisting’ foreign ‘domination’ as Hizbollah.

The reactions abroad seem instructive. Israel is engaging in “disproportionate” use of force, says the European Union. Hizbollah, for its part, is roundly condemned by the Arab League for “irresponsibly” dooming the Lebanese to the might of the IDF. And only very recently has the U.S. sent out a State Department delegation to the region, though has so far rejected talk of any ceasefire, which ought to be mutual, unequivocal and immediate.

Ari Shavit, in an opinion piece from the premier Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, explains that laying down arms “would serve to redefine what is now mistakenly perceived as a savage war between two savage and bloodthirsty tribes” (“Start Over,” 17 July 2006). Shavit adds, without a hint of doubt, “We are killing and being killed for our border. We are killing and being killed for our liberty … for our very existence as a free society.”

The words of Knesset member Yossi Sarid are worth heeding:

Deterring capability [with which to fight terrorism] consists not only of military might, but also of moral might. After all, Bush himself, and not the defeatist bleeding hearts, often talks in the name of the Moral Majority and world morality and cites it as the culmination of his vision. … The president himself is violating human and civil rights by ordering mass wiretapping, by the wholesale penetration of private bank accounts and by unrestrained assaults on journalists who are faithfully doing their job. Most of these phenomena are of course not foreign to Israel, which encountered difficulties when, in the biblical metaphor, it did the deed of Zimri and demanded the reward of Pinhas.[*] This is … joining the evildoers and strengthening them and their arguments.”

As Yigal Sarena notes in Yedioth Ahronoth, “‘A cat pushed into a corner becomes a panther,’ goes the Arab saying.” From the first front, “The miserable Gaza panther fires its annoying tin-can Qassams as a call of poverty from those choking, those who lack answers.”

*This story (to the best of my understanding, anyway) refers to violent moments of zealotry, to which the antidote is clear, calm thinking. Scholarly, rabbinical commentary from Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom, a humanistic religious Zionist group, provides this interpretation. In “The Deed of Pinhas and the Breaking of the Tablets,” Pinchas Leiser puts it this way: “Even though Pinhas’s intentions were pure,” Israel protecting its people in Sarid’s analogue, “there is no guarantee that the zealot’s soul will emerge unscathed by zealous killing, even if that killing appears to be justified.”

GOD SAVE ISRAEL, GOD SAVE LEBANON

UPDATE: Professor Juan R.I. Cole, an Orientalist scholar at the University of Michigan fluent in Arabic, had written,

“People often ... ask me about this verse:

“[5:51] ‘O you who believe, do not take Jews and Christians as friends; these are friends of one another. Those among you who ally themselves with these belong with them.’

“This is actually not a good translation of the original, which has a very specific context. In the Arabia of Muhammad’s time, it was possible for an individual to become an honorary member or ‘client’ of a powerful tribe. But of course, if you did that you would be subordinating yourself politically to that tribe. The word used in Arabic here does not mean ‘friend.’ It means ‘political patron’ (wali). What the Quran is trying to do is to discourage stray Muslims from subordinating themselves to Christian or Jewish tribes that might in turn ally with pagan Mecca, or in any case might have interests at odds with those of the general Muslim community.

“So the verse actually says:

“[5:51] ‘O you who believe, do not take Jews and Christians as tribal patrons; these are tribal patrons of one another. Those among you who become clients of these belong with them.’ ...”

Thanks for clearing that up.

But who is responsible?

Prayers for Bombay, and our solidarity with Indian resistance to such barbaric atrocities as we have seen today.