In Memoriam: Cramer, 1992?-2008

I have no rituals for death, and don't want any. It would be my preference if death were exceptional, not universal, transitional rather than final. 21-gun salutes routinize tragedy and minimize personality, and better, it seems, are the flowers planted and picked than bought professionally arranged.

When I met Cramer, his name was Latte, which we considered a misnomer, one surprisingly ill-applied. We could see an inherent ferocity, even a dominance, in the essential nature of the beautiful, long-haired, all-black Maine Coon despite his neutered status. I was skeptical about Latte's arrival or continued presence; my girlfriend C. had a co-worker whose new boyfriend did not get along with her cat, and she asked me what I thought of taking it in. I provisionally assented, knowing her long history of cat-keeping, smiling on her intentions and figuring it might be innocuous enough. But I maintained a right of first refusal. If I didn't like the creature, it could look elsewhere for a home.

Being an itinerant creature myself, I'd had no pet of my own since a small turtle, George, crawled under the refrigerator or went lost down an air vent when I was 4, seeking shelter from my clumsy inspections. C. was a "cat person," but I had limited patience or understanding for animals who generally seemed rather stand-offish, entitled, having too high an opinion of their own intelligence. All true, from a certain perspective. I envisioned one day getting a dog, a big loyal one, possibly a Golden Lab.

Cramer arrived in a cat carrier, complete with his own supply of cat food, deposited by a bureau while we discussed his presence. As a stealth bomber confuses radar, so does his fur confuse light, absorbing almost all of it but for his green eyes, so it was impossible to get a good look at him in the carrier. Finally his owner opened the carrier's door, and a black torpedo instantly made its way low and fast across a dozen feet of floor, hopped up on the arm of the couch with alacrity, climbed my shoulder, and started nuzzling, purring, licking, and biting my left ear. He had made his decision, and mine, and there wasn't much way of backing out of it. I was his human from then on, and he was my familiar, to the extent that C. was hurt and later expressed jealousy. When we broke up, there was no debate over the fate of the luxuriant long-hair, he who shed so much over the years I could have made a sweater, a blanket out of him, whose fur once dragged along the ground. Such hair, it would've been possible to harvest his wool like a sheep every spring. To wear him like he wore me, so often drooling on my shoulder.

The reason Cramer and his former owner's boyfriend didn't get along was clear. One night after their closer acquaintance, Cramer shat into the boyfriend's jeans while they were crumpled on the floor. In the morning, said boyfriend hopped into his jeans and pulled them up, with distressing results. A variation of "He goes, or I go," was bruited, and the cat lost that battle. Later, on helping that boyfriend move his stuff to her apartment, I realized Cramer was right about him, and that appropriate summary action had been taken. Before moving, due to his girlfriend's apartment contract, he had his Golden Lab put down, dismissing her as "just a dog."

My new companion was highly individuated, eccentric, intelligent, and prone to a certain clownish exuberance when not murdering prey, so I named him Cramer in recognition of the Seinfeld comic known for exquisite pratfalls, and also for a benignly rich venture capitalist I had recently met with, last name Cramer, The spelling was intended to be less derivative, and to allow for fortune in life, a position which he soon achieved. We kept him on dry food until he moved us on to smoked salmon, cream cheese, shrimp, crab, etc. He had a gourmand's nose for good food, his tastes running from tuna to vindaloo, from spaghetti to tortilla chips and salsa. He tried to like caviar, knowing it was a delicacy, but it just wouldn't take. My house, its location on a relatively quiet street, its ready access to its yard, its trees, was bought with Cramer fully in mind. I didn't take a waiting job in London because of England's quarantine policies, and somewhere along the way, I gained a healthy appreciation for the intelligences which dwell in cats, and learned that they were the only animals to ever domesticate themselves.

This cat manipulated his media. I once jumped in front of a van to save his life while he lolled in the street. The driver jammed on the brakes, the cargo collapsing like falling buildings inside. Cramer loved Japanese maple trees, there were two big round-full ones off the sidewalk in front of our house. He would climb up in them to wait for us or to ambush passers-by, the only warning of his presence a curious shaking of the red pointy cover of leaves. Then out would pop his head to trill or meow, and sometimes he would just leap onto my neck. He terrorized a large swath of neighborhood, a hard-nosed soldier who never lost a fight to another outdoor cat (yet restrained and reticent indoors). I once saw him leap five feet into the air from a stationary position to land, all-star wrestling style, on top of his tackle-sized orange tabby opponent. His only misfortune came by one or more crows when he was 4 or 5, always checking eaves and trees for the presence of crows thereafter.

He hated going to vet clinics. They hated having him. The last occasion, he had to be held down by two assistants wearing chain-mail gloves, with one very wary vet giving shots, each one precariously contested with a couple of violent near-escapes with ear-rattling, threatening, vengeful howls. So we got a house-call vet from then on, who came today at 1PM to mercifully end a grand life.

The weather was kind today, the winter sun full rare and shining, so Cramer's last hours were spent mostly outside. I carried him around the perimeter of all his former territory, pausing at each square, and when we got back to the property line he asked to be set down, where he defiantly marked his redoubt one last time. Then he basked with the sun's warmth in his favorite spots, surveying all that was his, purring, his head occasionally drooping down to a rest on a window sill or welcome mat. And then my old friend drifted off on a ketamine high, to a death more merciful and gentle than many of us humans are likely to find, held in the same place I met him, next to my left ear.

Death is unfortunately natural, and fully appreciating life is unfortunately not. Both are things I struggle with. Over time, I began to more appreciate the surprises one is thrown, and the lessons in them. So it is here. To a mere feline, I owe a debt of profound gratitude, a thing I never contemplated nor thought possible. Yet I was Cramer's human, and he changed my mind about not just himself, not just about cats. He changed my perspective about life and individuality amongst all creatures, be they great or small. He makes me think the Lord God made us all.

Barack Obama Won Nevada

That's right, contrary to every major news story, he won Nevada. I just happened to notice it over the weekend, in a Hawaiian newspaper story posted on the Drudge Report--Hillary Clinton will take 12 Nevada delegates to the Democratic Convention, while Barack Obama gets 13. I don't pretend to know how, nor am I inclined to research the Rube Goldberg state electoral procedures, during which the Clintons unsuccessfully sued to invalidate the votes of the largest union there, the Culinary Workers, which endorsed Obama. Bottom line, he won 13-12 in a state which Hillary Clinton led by 25 polling points 4 months ago.

Kind of interesting that the national press didn't focus on that fact, instead only reporting that he was defeated in the popular vote. If Corporate Media consistently dumps on a candidate, that's probably a good reason to take a closer look at them. The Howard Deaning of Obama continues, along with others who find even less favor. What coverage John Edwards has gotten makes people think he's either a) unctious or b) is the most right-wing Democratic candidate, Ron Paul is ejected by bouncers, Dennis Kucinich is crossed off the guest list. Pundits shake their compensatory shotguns in anger about liberal media bias, the lovely status quo is protected, and the elites keep on singing their anthem: "They Can't Overcome."

(Update: Open Left put it way better:

I've learned two things today. First, the Democratic presidential nomination system is not particularly democratic, since the system of delegate selection is different than the concept of one person one vote. Second, I have learned that the national media is not actually covering the Democratic presidential nomination campaign. If the media was covering the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, then they would have projected Barack Obama as the winner of the Nevada caucuses, projected New Hampshire as a tie between Clinton and Obama, and declared that Clinton finished second in Iowa. That is, after all, what actually happened in the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, which is based on delegates, not popular votes from states. Instead of covering the Democratic presidential nomination campaign, the media is instead covering who wins the popular vote of individual states. While what the media is covering is interesting and closer to the concept of one person, one vote, it isn't the Democratic presidential nomination campaign.

Until the national media declares that Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election because he won the popular vote, I will continue to assert that Barack Obama won the Democratic caucuses in Nevada. To agree with one statement without agreeing to both statements is to be caught in a logical contradiction. If delegates to the national convention don't determine who won a state in a nomination campaign, then the Electoral College doesn't determine who wins the Presidency in a general election. We all know, of course, that both of those propositions are false.)

Pro Football, Seattle Style

At the end of 'This Is Spinal Tap,' heavy metal band stalwart Nigel Tufnel contemplates retirement for the 57th time:

"Well, I suppose I could, uh, work in a shop of some kind, or … or do, uh, freelance, uh, selling of some sort of, uh, product. You know … like maybe in a, uh, haberdasher, or maybe like a, uh, um … a chapeau shop or something …"

At the end of the Seattle Seahawks season, coaching stalwart Mike Holmgren contemplates retirement for the 57th time:

"I've always wanted to buy a bookstore. You know, sell some of those muffins and a little coffee. I don't care if we make any money. I don't want to lose a lot of money, but we could visit with people and get books. People say I could never do that. The cynics in the world say if you've been in this business, to all of a sudden do that, you can't do it. I would say, 'Maybe, maybe not."

Mmm-hmmm. Let's see, an NFL ex-head coach running a book store...you can just see the customer relations possibilities. "Tolstoy? You're buying Tolstoy?? Jesus Christ in a sidecar, dumbass, that's for high school. Is that where you want to go? Maybe you need to start doing a better job in here! Aiming a little higher! Maybe you failed to notice our display, our prominent goddamned display of the past 25 Booker Prize winners. Which is nearly hitting you in the ass! Put down Anna Frickin' Karenina, let's get underneath your personal bullshit and get down to work. Here's a copy of The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. Get over to that reading desk and I don't want to see you move for at least two hours! We might make you into a halfway decent reader yet."

Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen, recognizing a clever negotiating ploy, put the kibosh on Holmgren's dreams of lattes and little muffins by forking over the Jimi Hendrix Museum, the San Francisco Reserve Bank, and an undisclosed country (rumored to be full of benighted savages waiting to receive chocolate chip cookies and the light of Christ) to keep Holmgren on The Farm for another year. And Mike, if you're serious about this bookstore thing and not just weirding us all out, I have the perfect place for you: it's just up the street, with the best books in town, wonderful coffee and muffins. It's called Third Place Books.

Opium Crops Started In Iraq

Should have predicted this one. It will no doubt be used as proof of close al-Qaeda ties between Iraq and Afghanistan:

The cultivation of opium poppies whose product is turned into heroin is spreading rapidly across Iraq as farmers find they can no longer make a living through growing traditional crops.

Afghans with experience in planting poppies have been helping farmers switch to producing opium in fertile parts of Diyala province, once famous for its oranges and pomegranates, north- east of Baghdad. (via Patrick Cockburn, The Independent UK.)

At this point, Al-Qaeda is the least of Iraq's problems. It's only logical that farmers are getting into opium, which if I think about it, is actually a positive step: people who live in failed states need money and jobs, and opium is a great cash crop. It does give some indication of how bad things have gotten for people in the Sunni Triangle. Michael Massing reviewed a book about the Iraqi journalists who work and write for the McClatchy Newspapers, which set up a blog they run called Inside Iraq. He summarizes that Iraq is what the end of the world looks like:

The overwhelming sense [from the McClatchy journalists' blog] is that of a society undergoing a catastrophic breakdown from the never-ending waves of violence, criminality, and brutality inflicted on it by insurgents, militias, jihadis, terrorists, policemen, bodyguards, mercenaries, armed gangs, warlords, kidnappers, and everyday thugs. "Inside Iraq" suggests how the relentless and cumulative effects of these vicious crimes have degraded virtually every aspect of the nation's social, economic, professional, and personal life.

Despite all the mortuary work and make-up, all the sartorial wonders of The Surge, the country formerly known as Iraq is a corpse. As in dead country, not walking. BushCo and Congress, the corporate media and the chattering classes regularly pull up a dolly and pop back a coffin lid, they point out that the thing inside has finely rouged cheeks, a nicely pinned-back business suit, that its limbs (lifted with a complex array of monofilament lines) move so as to appear amazingly life-like, and that it even plays pre-recorded speech. Two non-trivial problems: it's still frigging dead, and it makes everyone who looks too closely at it puke.

As soon as the Shiite and then the Sunni extremists who we paid to fight other Sunni extremists stop getting paid, they'll start blowing up Western troops with greater enthusiasm. Our crusaders are not welcome in Iraq, where opium production now looks like a smart way out. In context, it probably is. At least something is growing.

(With thank-you credits to Empire Burlesque, Inside Iraq, and Cryptogon.)

Adding Link To Chris Floyd's Empire Burlesque

Reader, sparring partner, and commenter Still Life Living suggested that I link to Chris Floyd, a former NY Times journalist who runs a high-octane blog. Generally, of course, my policy is to provocatively ignore or mock SLL's advice insofar as time allows, but in this case I simply want to go visit Empire Burlesque much more often. It's one of the best sources of international reporting and commentary, period. (SLL, you do realize, this bespeaks mere aberration, not detente. En garde.)

Sometimes we wonder if blogs do any good, if they can change anything. I suppose the ants harbor similar doubts when they're toiling along carrying grains of sand and what-not, following some trail of pheromones; yet bloggers like Chris Floyd left the New York Times, and are great reasons not to read the mouthpieces anymore. We may not yet fully glimpse the unfinished edifice, or care to know its full design, but we're building something, something large.

Priming The Pump

The next time you're using a Tektronix printer and some cotton parchment to print up $100 bills, remember, it's not counterfeiting. It's economic stimulus. Sixteen crisp new bills comin' atcha, hot off the press.

Jan. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The Bush administration is close to completing an economic-stimulus proposal that will include $800 rebates for individuals and $1,600 for households as well as tax breaks for businesses, people familiar with the plan said.

The proposal is subject to revision as administration officials consult with Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Washington, the people said.

President George W. Bush will lay out the "principles'' of the economic package tomorrow, though it's ``too early'' to unveil a final proposal, according to his spokesman, who declined to provide details. Congressional leaders say a stimulus package may be as much as $150 billion.

............................................................................................................

The plan the administration is close to proposing includes a temporary elimination of the bottom tax rate, which is now 10 percent, and a consequent lump-sum rebate to all taxpayers, according to the people.

Businesses would get a tax break under the plan that would allow them to deduct 50 percent of the price of new equipment they purchase this year. Small businesses would be able to deduct as much as $200,000 in new equipment purchases, up from the current $112,000 limit.

Asked about the details, a Treasury spokeswoman declined to comment.

By the government's own measures, which include throwing yarrow sticks and consulting the I Ching, wholesale prices were up 6.3% in 2007. Now that's stimulus.

Little Big Man:

Kucinich asks for New Hampshire recount in the interest of election integrity

DETROIT, MI – Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the most outspoken advocate in the Presidential field and in Congress for election integrity, paper-ballot elections, and campaign finance reform, has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”

“I am not making this request in the expectation that a recount will significantly affect the number of votes that were cast on my behalf,” Kucinich stressed in a letter to Secretary of State William M. Gardner. But, “Serious and credible reports, allegations, and rumors have surfaced in the past few days…It is imperative that these questions be addressed in the interest of public confidence in the integrity of the election process and the election machinery – not just in New Hampshire, but in every other state that conducts a primary election.”

Also, the reports, allegations, and rumors regarding possible vote-count irregularities have been further fueled by the stunning disparities between various “independent” pre-election polls and the actual election results," Kucinich wrote. "The integrity, credibility, and value of independent polling are separate issues, but they appear to be relevant in the context of New Hampshire’s votes."

He added, “Ever since the 2000 election – and even before – the American people have been losing faith in the belief that their votes were actually counted. This recount isn’t about who won 39% of 36% or even 1%. It’s about establishing whether 100% of the voters had 100% of their votes counted exactly the way they cast them.”

Kucinich, who drew about 1.4% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote, wrote, “This is not about my candidacy or any other individual candidacy. It is about the integrity of the election process.” No other Democratic candidate, he noted, has stepped forward to question or pursue the claims being made.

“New Hampshire is in the unique position to address – and, if so determined, rectify – these issues before they escalate into a massive, nationwide suspicion of the process by which Americans elect their President. Based on the controversies surrounding the Presidential elections in 2004 and 2000, New Hampshire is in a prime position to investigate possible irregularities and to issue findings for the benefit of the entire nation,” Kucinich wrote in his letter.

“Without an official recount, the voters of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation will never know whether there are flaws in our electoral system that need to be identified and addressed at this relatively early point in the Presidential nominating process,” said Kucinich, who is campaigning in Michigan this week in advance of next Tuesday’s Presidential primary in that state.

Kucinich may have ears that stick out too far to be countenanced by post-modernity. He may never get another chance to say, "I read it," when asked why he voted against the Patriot Act. Though he may be small in stature, he has the heart of a tiger. He's a man. I wish we lived in the kind of place, like Denmark or Sweden maybe, where he could become President.

New Hampshire Recount

Dennis Kucinich is paying for a democratic primary vote hand-recount in New Hampshire, scheduled to start Wednesday, January 16th. The optical scan counts were performed by Diebold, and a comparison of the scanned Clinton/Obama votes vs. their hand-counted votes is rather remarkable:

Head to head comparison - corrected numbers
Clinton: statewide optical scan tally
95,843 52.73%

Obama: statewide optical scan tally
85,910 47.27%

Clinton: statewide hand-count tally
16,767 46.75%

Obama: hand count
19,097 53.25%

1/5 - 1/7 Real Clear Politics seven poll average (head-to-head pairing)
Clinton 43.9%
Obama 56.1%

The closeness of the match of the two candidates hand-count with the Real Clear Politics seven-poll average (1/5 - 1/7/08) - compared with the divergence of the optical scan tally - remains under investigation.

(via The River Blog, originally posted at News From Undergound, data from Election Defense Alliance.)

"We Used To Fry Squirrels In A Popcorn Popper"

Huckabee. The gift that keeps on giving.

After pulling an upset in the Iowa caucus, Mike Huckabee has now placed a respectable third in two northern primaries, New Hampshire and Michigan, but he has hopes of doing much better in South Carolina.

Huckabee spoke to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough from Columbia, SC, saying enthusiastically, "South Carolina's a great place for me. I mean, I know how to eat grits and speak the language. We even know how to talk about eating fried squirrel and stuff like that, so we're on the same wavelength."

"Mika, I bet you never did this," Huckabee went on, addressing Mika Brzezinski. "When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper, because that was the only thing they would let us use in the dorm, and we would fry squirrels in a popcorn popper in the dorm room."

Full article here.

Bush World Tour: Bombing Auschwitz

Now that doctors aren't using it anymore, "First do no harm" should really be a motto for heads of state, even elected ones. POTUS 43's visit to any furren country is always an occasion for hi-jinks which can run the gamut from amusing gaffe on to casual sexual harassment, then straight to casus belli. His recent visit to Israel left a rich vein for historians to mine, along with a bunch of very unimpressed Palestinians rolling their eyes and pantomiming self-abusive gestures.

I mentioned in a previous post that Bush was moved to say at the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, "We should have bombed Auschwitz." In this case he meant as a way to save lives, not to kill more condemned people, but this statement can cause some confusion given his enthusiasm for capital punishment, and a grandfather who funded the first eugenics center in the US (at Yale, 193x.) As a holographic trademark of all that is Bush, this one's hard to top. It's gangrene burlesque, and distills a whole lot of misguided, drunken, pathetic, fumbling, insane, violent ignorance down into just five words. We should have bombed Auschwitz. It's a nearly perfect representation, not just of Himself, but of the entire murderous Bush family.

Let's just say that his revanchist wish had been granted. Heck, throw in Sobibor. Bergen-Belsen. Dachau. Treblinka. Throw in the other 190 camps, too. True, I admit, concentration camp inmates would have had the privilege of dying cheerfully from the explosions and concussions of Freedom Bombs, knowing they were sent down by the good guys. But what else would have happened? Would the German guards have put up with it? "How dare zose Amis," they would have said in the ensuing movies, "zey haff no right to kill our prissoners. Vee vill show zem. Line ze Yuden uppen and shooten zem at once!!" Extreme? Unlikely? The reaction would've been right in line with the deadly farce and legal dada-isms of what Germans still refer to as "die Kah-tzet," the German proununciation of the letters KZ, short for "concentration place."

It is a matter of record that Jewish authorities asked the War Department to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz, that the request was rejected, and that there has been a raging debate over the "whether or nots" ever since. George McGovern, once a bomber pilot based in Foggia, Italy, later said we should have bombed the gas chambers at Auschwitz to slow the killing. Holocaust docents consistently condemn Roosevelt for not bombing Auschwitz. To these good people and kind sentiments, I have a few respectful observations:

1) while I agree it would have been good symbology, how exactly would bombing the rail lines or the gas chambers have helped? Lives would not necessarily have been saved or prolonged.

2) the Auschwitz Protocols on which many assumptions are now based, were written by two escapees in 1944 who quoted rumors as fact, as is apparent from the report itself and from later contradicting statements. While the rumors may have been true, military operations, some history notwithstanding, are usually not launched on hearsay.

3) President Roosevelt, the Pope, and others did effectively intervene, diplomatically prevailing upon Admiral Horthy to stop the deportation of Hungarian Jews on July 9th, 1944. These parties used the Auschwitz Protocols to convince Horthy and his prime minister in their decision. Those who were saved surely appreciated these efforts more than bombs.

4) a serious investigation into the gas chambers leaves their existence, location, and extent of operation in doubt. While this doesn't absolve the Nazis of their super-abundant war crimes whatsoever, it shows they did not require gas chambers to kill millions of victims, a fact which calls bombing as a solution further into question.

The US should have done much more, much earlier to save European Jews from the Nazi regime. The book 'The Abandonment of the Jews' explains why it didn't happen, how they were turned away. By the time the question came to bombing concentration camps, it was far too late, and I suspect had they been bombed, the same voices might now be condemning the brutality and idiocy of the perpetrators. It simply wasn't practical at the time, and had it been attempted, the unintended consequences would likely have far outweighed the benefits. Even the statement "bomb Auschwitz" is, philosophically, an oxymoron.

In BushWorld, however, in the special place, all bombs hit their desired targets. Bombing concentration camps would not cut wires nor destroy fences, bombs would not scare people into running away to find cover, which would not result in temporary break-outs, which in turn would not mean a massive security risk, so all the inmates would not have to be shot upon contact. In BushWorld, the German high command would not be effervescing that the Allies were willing to take time out of their busy schedule of strategic bombing to go after propaganda targets. They would have been greatly distressed that we were saving their worker-Jews by bombing them, and they might have even sued for peace. The world would've stood in awe, the Russkies storming westward ho would've said, "Aww, the hell with it. Let's go home," and Eastern Europe wouldn't have gone commie. Because we can control everything with bombs. Like magic. Just the right amount of bombing will always do the trick.

Petroliana, Part One

From the detritus of the past, little dots can be sifted up, bits by themselves which convey little meaning at the removes we may find our societies and souls. Yet they can often be connected into plots which yield meta-meanings, and by those, I mean empyrean meanings. These live in a netherworld with neither up, nor down, nor axis, but are the eternal forces which suspend in love and lightly gird a primum mobile, which watches down on the hubbub of our material heavens. They are best perceived from the perspective of eons, the kind of meanings which govern life.

Is it possible to back up far enough, to achieve perspective that sees truths in their less temporal forms? The only aid I know is history. I am thinking of a museum at Zaandam, a grassed-over industrial complex on the outskirts of Amsterdam, a museum made only of windmills. A quarter-millenium ago, on a dam squared off from Zaanstad by canals, is the birthing place of Europe's industrial revolution. Where there were once a thousand windmills packed tight together, four remain. One of the twisting, creaking propellor-houses, the one known as "De Schoolmeester," mixed the slurry for the very paper upon which the Declaration of Independence was penned.

The Dutch offered fine parchment at a bargain price. Their industry and empire was powered by the wind their coasts braced up in such abundance, geographically untethering makers from reliance on water wheels, while uncontracting the miserable muscles of many serfs and slaves. Rather improbably, the Dutch became an energy cult which ruled the earth by harnessing and learning the finer points of atmospheric dynamics, and with this lever they extended their lowlands out into the sea, using wind to pump out water, going so far as to transform their country's visage on maps. Such was the reach of their agency, and their royal symbol was and remains the orange tree. Dutch primacy would only be eclipsed by the hell-fires of coal, an alien substance to them, one which released far more energy, far more predictably, than wind.

What a regime was coal. I am thinking of southern Provence, where at a villa not far from the winter lair of Richard Perle, we were surprised by a bookish, bespectacled woman who had come down from Birmingham to study what were once the last functioning coal mines in Europe; the shafts at nearby Hely d'Oissel closed in 1962. As a scholar, she thought the mines' importance self-evident. She would explore them for herself, so she could transform their remnants into wisdom. To me, she put in mind all the rail and factory museums in England, where the next major expansion of the industrial revolution ensued after its breeze-kissed delivery in Holland. The copious red brick of the professor's native Birmingham once enclosed naught but teeming machines and workers, blacked with carbon. Over that period, her country transformed the world, tormenting much of it and burning half the coal on earth.

English industry was so amazingly productive, its products so awesomely ubiquitous, so restlessly scientific, that it would bend world language itself with its force. While the reverend Adam Smith walked near the factories of Glasgow, gazing at slag heaps and contemplating the nature, causes, and repercussions of wealth, other natives were swinging cheap sturdy steel blades to hack trails through jungle vines a half-globe away, but every blade bore the stamp of Manchester. It's where the word "machete" came from. Britain's vast wealth and fluency with coal brought mastery over pan-Arabia, the richest source of coal's more potent liquor. Oil. Yet its imperial destiny was wedded to coal, and oil was a mistress it never really mastered or particularly delighted in. England was burdened with an infrastructure almost exclusively configured to burn coal, and at the start of the Second World War, 90 percent of its homes were still heated by it, its trains still ran on it, as many would be right into the 1970s. If coal stoked hell-fires, oil was the scorching fire itself, sunshine liquified and sunk back into the earth, and it was to be the province of another culture with special affinity.

In 1771, George Washington bought 250 Virginia acres because they held oil and gas springs. Blessed affinity, and I am thinking of my favorite gas station in the world. It was under a 50-foot high 'Atomic' sign, set down a side embankment across the highway from the south end of both Sacandaga Lake and the Adirondack Park, where my grandparents had met and, after the War, built a lakehouse they called 'the camp.' It was about a half hour's drive away from their house, which I grew up in, and their hearts were in the Adirondacks. In summers, the Atomic station was a natural spot to fill the tank of my grandparents' conveyance, a Mercury Comet, with its gasoline. The pumping smelled distinct, intoxicating, and permeating in a pleasant way, and I was not afraid, not then, to breathe the hydrocarbon vapors deep. I almost savored them, as I savored being with my grandparents, going to the large reservoir where they could relax into softer versions of their selves. To me, gasoline was freedom and discovery, even unfolding possibility, and the station's store would greet me with the sheltering cold of its ice cream freezer, its garishly colored plastic toys, and the delicious, complex menage of candy smells coming through their bright plastic wrappers. My favorite candy, once I was old enough to fit it into my mouth, was the cinammon-hot ferocity of the Fireball, which I would pop out of its wrapper and into my mouth while still under the looming sign.

The United States of my birth was a self-sufficient energy culture still brimming with oil, a net exporter to other countries, and the gusher was still the defining characteristic of American power. Oil defined everything about twentieth-century America, and it was arguably was the country's true uniting force. Oil took a population already far more mobile than its overseas forebears, in fact vocationally, inherently, and geographically mercurial by comparison, sat them on explosive devices, and set them out onto open roads to have fun. Is it any wonder that, as a people, we're nostalgic for Route 66? That one of our favorite literary decodings is called On the Road? Even amongst my father's father's generation during the time of Ford Model As and Ts, before Kerouac imagined tossing back a drink in a roadhouse bar, the favorite vacation was to get out and see the country, roam the wilderness, and scale the mountains. With a car, and preferably a fast one.

The whole country's built around speed, and that's not going to change. It's right on our national self-selected D4-7 allele, a spot at the DNA drive-in that's a marker for mania. No, it doesn't seem like the system could change if it wanted to, with Congress bought like rouged whores milling around sailorpreneurs. Smart writers I link to and read, smart people I know and spend time with, they largely don't buy that it can change. They say it largely doesn't matter who winds up running this Financial Services Cruise Ship next. Well, now, Merrill Lynch and Citibank selling their bodies to Singapore and the Arab Emirates, that's change without much choice, a deflowering certainly not on kind terms. Not the kind of change we want. Change isn't always a choice. Sometimes it's an empyrean dictate, a verdict from the seraphim regarding the fate of the nephilim.

If there isn't a difference between candidates and possible futures, why is the whole world watching, expectantly waiting on whom we will choose? If there is not such a thing as good government, then why must we have one? This post is long enough already, so I'll follow with a Part Two. Right now, I am thinking about taking off on a beautiful day from Schipol airport, the jet climbing and curving gently over the Zuider Zee. I'm looking down at fields of glinting diamonds on the shore, forty square miles of solar panels like windmills squashed flat, black, and shiny, catching the sky and all the colors of its prism, and sending it into my eyes.

The Idiocy Of Hope

"Hope" is conspicuosly derideable catch-phrase, almost as chumpy as "Change." Why would anyone who wished to be taken seriously choose such words?

"America is just a country, and Obama is just a politician," says ueber-blogger IOZ. Comedy writer Jon Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution even quotes him in the context of criticizing the liberals:

American liberals understand the invasion and occupation as a terribly aberrant, uniquely un-American act foisted on a frightened country and unprepared world by the avatar of awfulness, notre dauphin, Gee-Dub Bush. Their liberalism is essentially personality-driven—ironically, given their loud disdain for the Bushite personality cult. It is the liberal-progressive conviction that the necessary component for good government is good people. People, you know, like them.

Yeah. True enough. We're all idiots, all in denial of our worser selves. Yet maybe there's a basis for wanting people more, as Jon and IOZ say, like us. I'm as skeptical as they come; disillusions have piled up on me like six feet of snow. Schools, cities, churches, friends, nations, sanities, businesses, bodies. I'm wanted in four countries, and know it's all lies, and I know evil, too, up close and personal, in places IOZ or Jon Schwarz will be lucky to never get near.

The only chance at redemption is borne on faith. Faith requires hope. Hope is the lottery, the little lies you tell yourself to keep moving, striving for something better. Hope is "I believe, O Lord, please help me in mine unbelief." Hope needs goals, things to live and take that next tired step for, and it doesn't take a genius to know that a "necessary component of good government is good people." When you're freezing and dying and wondering what's the point, every step becomes a harder choice, and that's where our country is at. We are ruled by robbers, murderers, and corporate rapists who know they are poisoning us. Let us now come out and speak the unspeakable, my friends: America is dying, and may be past hope.

Great leaders study possibilities, and know how to nurture hope to coax out the best hope. Tyrants simply destroy these qualities and rule on fear. And what have we lived under for the past 7 years but tyrants so craving and ghastly they'll cheerfully kill their own people as a ruse? Smart people keep telling me the election doesn't matter, that there's no policy differences between Clinton and Obama, and McCain is on the same kabuki stage anyway, nothing will change. I say "Bullshit!" Answer me some questions on this day, and tell me leadership and goals make no difference:

1) Would having John Edwards as Attorney General instead of Abu Gonzales have made a difference in the Justice Department's actions, and to the poor bastards we've tortured and threatened across the world in the name of gilded freedom?

2) Would having Dennis Kucinich as Secretary of State make a difference when dealing with other countries, versus dealing with hissing oil wraiths who fly in on their Nazguls?

3) Do you want to have lived for 36 (8+4+8+8+a possible 8) years under White Houses continually occupied with Bushes and Clintons, and do you think Hillary Clinton will throw her precious lobbyists over for you? (Of whom she says, "Lobbyists are constituents, too.")

4) Will you want to call yourself an American after Bomber McCain's elected?

5) What would the rest of the world think if they see America has elected a black man? Might that not send a message that the American people can CHANGE?

Yeah, I'm playing the race card, and it's a bad-ass ace, one who is the successful disciple of a populist radical. Symbology is paramount; why do you think Ronald Reagan chose a fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered, to give a "states' rights" speech in August, 1980? What was he symbolizing when he later laid wreathes on the graves of SS soldiers in Bitburg? I'll tell you a secret: it wasn't "Up With People." Yet as Peggy Noonan said yesterday, she who wrote the speech for the thousand putrid points of light, "Barack Obama isn't Bambi. He's bulletproof." She also said the democratic party doesn't know what it's got with him. I used to link to Peggy Noonan, even though I despise everything she stands for, because she's an oracle of the Other Side. And she's right. Most Democrats don't know just how powerful and radical Obama is. Most have even forgotten that he demonstrated on the streets of Chicago in October 2002, and stood to speak against the coming invasion of Iraq.

Only one remaining candidate actually has goals for this country, goals like single-payer health care. For one possible motivation, he said, "On the very day she died of cancer at the young age of 53, my mother's biggest worry was her health care bills." Is that somebody too LIKE US, IOZ? Does that strike you as manipulative, pro-lib cult-of-personality shit to you, Jon Schwarz? Whereas, let's examine the Clintons' goal for health care...having previously failed, they think the only path is to alleviate corporations of the burden of paying for benefits, and keep the insurance companies happy. But that's a goal for corporations, not for people. Does that goal matter?

In studying how to keep uppity countries under foot and thumb, intelligence agencies in the 20th century codified a principle which was intuitively obvious, yet highly profound: the most resource-efficient way to suppress opposition is to eliminate its reasons for hope. In fact the doctrine was called Killing Hope. All through a system, you must allow your opposition no chink easily exploited through non-violent means. Control the unions, break the strikes, control the ballot boxes and the vote-counts. Usually, this will frustrate the opposition into violence, and once they resort to it, you have them: you can call overkill down upon them. Get them to give up hope, to despair, and all you'll have to put up with is the bitter laughter which takes suppression's hand out for an occasional dance. It worked all over South and Central America, in the Caribbean, in Africa. Getting people to despair on voting and collective action worked.

Lord Wife and I are heading out the door to go caucus for Obama. We don't even have to hope. We don't have to live in a country that airs the gangrenous sins of the Bush Administration. We just have to admit that every other actor whoe remains to wear a mask on the annoying, dissonant, decrepit kabuki stage is a ghoul, a carrion-eater who will work with immortal entities called corporations to kill our hope and our children. And Barack Obama might not be.

Lou Reed And John Cale: Style It Takes

Taking the last SwissAir flight from Heathrow back to Basel, I was one of the few people going through the airport after landing. Things shut down early in Switzerland, even on a Friday night, so I drove back to my apartment through what might as well have been a combined curfew and blackout. Dead beat but unable to sleep, I turned on the TV to see John Cale singing this piece. It was catchy, and the setting was strange. It took a minute to sink in that the founding members of the Velvet Underground had gotten back together for the first time and were performing a requiem for Andy Warhol at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Warhol had played mentor and barb, promoter and stifler to the band. Like a surreal Colonel Tom Parker, Warhol introduced, showcased, pushed, and had "creative differences" with them. Eventually they had a falling out and never spoke to each other again. But after Warhol died in 1987, Cale and Reed, who also weren't speaking to each other, got together to go over their scrapbooks and start writing Songs for Drella. ("Drella" refers to a nickname coined by one of the actors in Warhol's interminable films, Ondine, who had pegged Warhol as a perfect cross between Dracula and Cinderella. The nickname stuck.) Though not always an unreserved fan of any of the artists involved, I was pleased to witness an artistic achievement. The song and album really capture Warhol's artistic energy, optimism, and determination, and he really did want to put the Empire State Building on all our walls, so we could watch the sun rise above it in our rooms. The lyrics:

You’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.
You want your freedom, make your freedom mine;
’cause I’ve got the style it takes--
and money is all that it takes!

You’ve got connections, and I’ve got the Art.
You like my attention, and I like your looks;
And I have the style it takes--
and you know the people it takes!

Why don’t you sit...right...over there?
We’ll do a movie portrait;
I’ll turn the camera on, and I won’t even be there--
A portrait that moves, you look great! (I think.)

I’ll put the Empire State Building on your wall.
For 24 hours glowing on your wall;
Watch the sun rise above it in your room--
wallpaper art! A great view!

I’ve got a brillo box and I say it’s art.
It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket;
’cause I’ve got the style it takes--
And you’ve got the people it takes.

This is a rock group called the Velvet Underground.
I show movies on them, do you like their sound?
’cause they have a style that grates--
and I have art to make!

Let’s do a movie, here next week.
We don’t have sound,
but you’re so great,
You don’t have to speak!

You’ve got the style it takes (kiss)
You’ve got the style it takes (eat)
I’ve got the style it takes (couch)
We’ve got the style it takes (kiss)

Weird Blogger Error

Wasn't allowing comments, not from me anyway. So Jon and Caitlyna, sorry for not answering earlier on the Law of the Sea thread. Nothing like typing into a void! Will get back ASAP.

Bush On Israel

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it."

Ok, ok, that was intentionally out of context. Bush said the above while visiting the Holocaust Memorial. Humans are supposed to have the capacity for self-reflection, but sometimes they don't get that far, with ironies tending to sail past the heads of paranoid megalomaniacs. On the same day, he said the allies should have bombed Auschwitz. Sigh. Even when he right talk the English, he screw up it.

Iranian Speedboats, US Warships, The Straits of Hormuz

The US has just filed an official protest against Iran for the actions of its coastal patrol speedboats, which are alleged to have crossed the bows of warships passing through the Straits of Hormuz, dropping boxes into the water in front of them. Iran has denied the allegations, said the US videos used footage from an earlier incident, and released its own video, the second attached above. An examination of the videos will find that the US version is irrelevant to its claims legal or otherwise, and the Iranian video provides a clear-cut basis for complaint.

When CNN first reported the story, my impression was the White House was caught flat-footed, with no prompt statement, no press conference, no apparent preparation. If the incident had not been genuine, one would expect much quicker reaction times; perhaps Iran used the occasion of Bush's first visit to Israel to do some buzzing of Navy ships. Over the next days, both the Pentagon and Washington got on the story and pushed it into "harassment," a "clash" and a "skirmish." Opportunism and orchestrated outrage begin to seem more likely. From the videos and counter-claims, a careful viewer can't really tell what happened, how non-routine the behaviors were on either side, or how close it came to acts of war.

With a formal protest lodged by the US, the incident will be taken seriously, yet the case against Iran is a loser. In the second video above, the Iranian patrol boat captain hails vessel 73, which replies to his hail and identifies itself as a coalition warship. The Iranian then requests the vessel's course and speed. The warship replies that it is "operating in international waters," and gives the same reply to repeated requests for clarification of course and speed. The warship's reply is false, since the Straits of Hormuz are only 21 miles at their widest, and much narrower for large-ship navigation. Ships can't pass through there without being in territorial waters claimed by either Oman or Iran under the transit passage provisions of UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

In the second video, regardless of time authenticity, the US Navy violated the Law of the Sea. Technically, Iran's territorial water limit extends up to twelve miles off shore, and vessels including warships can take "innocent passage" through it, and the Straits of Hormuz. Yet nations have the right to temporarily suspend innocent passage in specific areas of their territorial seas if doing so is deemed essential for the protection of their security. Therefore, if the coalition warship were on Oman's side of the ill-defined territorial border, it should have answered as such, claiming right of passage granted by Oman; if it were in the very well-defined shipping lanes exercising innocent passage on either Omani or Iranian territorial waters, it should have expressed that right (as it did in the first US video). If the ship were on Iran's territorial waters, transit passage law grants the Iranians every right to demand information on course and speed. Additionally, they could also unilaterally deny innocent passage under UNCLOS, and approach and demand to board vessels inside their territory which they deem a threat to their security.

Given past US actions in its waters, and its recent hostile stance, there's abundant basis for Iran to cite the US as a security threat. On 18 April 1988, the U.S. Navy waged a one-day battle against Iranian forces in and around the strait. The battle, dubbed Operation Praying Mantis by the U.S. side, was launched in retaliation for the 14 April mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58). U.S. forces sank two Iranian warships and as many as six armed speedboats in the engagement. On July 3, 1988, 290 people were killed when an Iran AirAirbus A300 passenger jet was shot down over the strait by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes. There is still lingering controversy about the event, considered among the most controversial tragedies in aviation history. On January 10, 2007, the nuclear submarine USS Newport News, traveling submerged, struck M/V Mogamigawa, a 300,000-ton Japanese-flagged large oil tanker just south of the strait. (Wikipedia credit for links in this paragraph.) The tanker had suddenly slowed before impact, indicating the US submarine was attempting clandestine underwater passage in its prop wash. Hardly innocent transit.

Does legality matter in the Persian Gulf? Not yet, and Iran may have reason to feel contemptuous of the UN's impartiality. Ultimately, however, legality could become very important, and knowing how laws regarding coastal sovereignty are supposed to be handled calls the competing official versions out into clearer, less bullshit-clouded light. Coalition Vessel 73's claim that it was in international waters was intentionally idiotic and insulting. A US Navy spokesman said that the speedboats were "a heartbeat away" from being blown up two days ago, that may be so, and it's impossible to precisely assess what happened in this incident. In contrast, it is not at all difficult to assess that the routine passage of US warships through the straits is an act of war should Iran choose to define it as such, and is inherently dangerous. Iran's daily restraint indicates very high levels of patience and discipline on the part of its Navy and government, as well as on the part of the coalition warship crews. Otherwise, a far worse "clash" would have already occurred.

Pseudoantidisestablishmentarianism: Clinton, McCain Win New Hampshire

The Clintons live to fight another day, the bitter cold of non-inevitability dispelled for the moment in the balmy January weather of the "Live Free or Vote for Mitt Romney" state. As one voter said to an NPR interviewer, "This is New Hampshire! If you tell us we should pick A, we pick B. If you tell us to choose C, we choose D."

The biggest loser in New Hampshire was John Edwards, whose support shrunk to 17%. The biggest winner was John McCain, who had laid off much of his staff two months ago and was a political zombie. He repeated his 2000 Granite State hat trick to beat former Massachusetts Gov. Romney by 7 points in a second-home state. Huckabee surprised with 12% despite barely campaigning and having only $2 mill cash in the bank. If you add his share to McCain's, and to Ron Paul's, Romney was thumped by over half the Pug turnout, which is also clamoring for change. Huckabee now leads national polls for the first time, by 1.5%.

As Lord Wife insightfully observed, McCain took a lot of independents away from Obama, likely the biggest reason he lost to Clinton when having polled by +13 the previous day. New Hampshire, for some reason, is inordinately fond of McCain, and has an open primary where Independent voters with a decidedly Puggish streak are key. Clinton also won relatively more women than in Iowa, and her stronghold amongst over-65 females proved telling. She has reclaimed momentum. For McCain, victory in NH is a delightful, satisfying blip which can't be carried through. Politico.com's exit poll observations on Clinton/Obama:

Here are the groups in which Obama enjoyed a significant margin over Clinton: men; young voters (18-24); voters making more than $50,000; voters with post-graduate education (a good indication of professionals); independents; first-time voters; voters without religious affiliation; men without children and single men; voters who said they were getting ahead financially; voters who thought the war in Iraq was the most important issue; voters who wanted change; and voters who wanted someone who could unite the country.

Here are Clinton's groups: women, particularly married women; voters over 40; voters making less than $50,000; voters without a college degree; union voters; Democrats; Catholics (an important constituency for the Democrats); people very worried about the economy; voters who thought the economy was most important; voters who valued experience; and voters who evaluated candidates on whether they "care about people like me."

There were anomalies. Voters who thought the war in Iraq was the most important issue favored Obama, 46 percent to 33 percent, while voters who favored our withdrawing all troops "as soon as possible" favored Clinton 40 percent to 36 percent. That may reflect Clinton's higher rating as a potential commander in chief, or it may just be a statistical anomaly. Clinton's support by 38 percent to 20 percent over Obama on the question of which one of these candidates "cares about people like me" is also interesting and suggests that Obama has a different kind of charisma than Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

For Good Measure: Nut Job Party Fields Wacko Candidate

Warm cinnamon donuts, just out of the oven. Every time Mike Huckabee's name is mentioned, that's the feeling I get. Why? Oh, only because he's on the Republican Party's back like the toothless hillbilly was on Ned Beatty in the famous man-rape scene in Deliverance. And because I just want a little revenge for the last 6 years. Is that so wrong?

I'm thankful for every extra day Huckabee doesn't blow up and bellow "I will destroy you!" at an audience, for another week which passes without him sending a critical reporter one of the three-page long insult-a-thons he's famous for in Arkansas. Every day is a gift. It's like getting up in the morning, opening your door, unfolding your Wall Street Journal and seeing a headline which says, "Nut Job Party Fields Wacko Candidate." How do I describe the wackosity level? I can't. But, Bruce at The River Blog put up a good synopsis written by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi:

As president, Huck would support a constitutional amendment banning abortion and would give science a back seat to religion. "Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries, and God doesn't," he says. "So I'll stick with God if the two are in conflict." Huckabee's well-documented ­disdain for science was reflected in the performance of the Arkansas school system when he was governor; one independent survey gave the state an F for its science standards in schools, a grade that among other things reflected Huckabee's hostility toward the teaching of evolution.

Huckabee at most times is gentle and self-deprecating in his public address, but when he talks about religion, he gets weirdly combative and obnoxious, often drifting into outright offensiveness. At one appearance, Huckabee — who's been known to make fart jokes in front of the state legislature — said he would oppose gay marriage "until Moses comes down with two stone tablets from Brokeback Mountain saying he's changed the rules." And he recently scored a rare offend trifecta, simultaneously pissing off immigrants, Jews and the pro-choice crowd when he ludicrously claimed that a "holocaust" of abortions had ­artificially created a demand for Mexican labor.

The D.C. Pug establishment has their undies in, well not even a bunch. Huckabee has them so intensely humiliated they're not wearing undies. See Ned Beatty, above. ("Ah sayed squee-uhl lahhk a peeg!") Every day, they're asking themselves, "How should he die? Let's see here...plane crash? Squashed by a bus? Suicide bomb? Somebody call Richard Perle." The Neo-cons hate him worse than any leading Democrat. For starters, let's compare Huckabee's foreign policy advisors with the other Pug candidates:

Rudolph Giuliani:
Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Stephen Rosen, Peter Berkowitz, Ex-Senator Robert Kasten.

John McCain:
Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, William Kristol, James Woolsey, Alexander Haig, Max Boot, Bud McFarlane, Brent Scowcroft.

Mitt Romney:
Cofer Black, Mark Falcoff, Roger Noriega, Dan Senor.

Fred Thompson:
Elizabeth Cheney

Mike Huckabee:
Nobody

There isn't enough Prozac to keep the Pugs going. For as long as it lasts, the greatest thing about the gaseous bible-humper is that, not only does he merit his own DSM-IV entry, he's also the logical conclusion of every backward, bad, buggering thing the Republicans have ever successfully mobilized or have pandered to. What they've wrought on our country is finally coming back on themselves.

There's a very real possibility Huckabee will be able to keep the venom of god's wrath bottled up for long enough to take his Party's nomination for the Presidency. In Iowa, where Huckabee got all medieval on Mitt the Mormon, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards each got more votes than he did. I hear banjos twanging in the distance, and every day is gravy.

(Inspirational thanks to Bruce and Jesus.)

Why Do They Not Attack Canada?

Hello, choir. We have a guest preacher in today, who hails from at least three unlikely places: the Republican Party, the US Congress, and Texas. Ron Paul (via Church and Empire):

...9iu11ani saved his most forceful comments for religious extremism in the Muslim world:

"They've perverted their religion into a hatred of us. Our foreign policy is irrelevant, totally irrelevant, if you read what they write, if you bother to listen to what they say, this comes out of their own perverted thinking."

Taking up his repeated role as a thorn in Giuliani's side, Rep. Ron Paul took great umbrage with the former New York City mayor's assertion:

"Why do they not attack Canada," he asked, "why don't they attack Switzerland?"

Giuliani talks about 9/11 so much it seemed time to integrate it into his name: 9iu11ani. He should have the numbers branded onto his head. When I Googled the term, I found that Democratic Underground had already started using it. No good graphic has been done yet, so I Googled "beware" and found the Far Side cartoon above.

More Winning In Iowa

"This feels good. It's just like I imagined it when I was talking to my kindergarten teacher."

-- Sen. Barack Obama, quoted by the New York Observer, on his new status as Democratic frontrunner. Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign has claimed that Obama has been plotting a presidential run since he was in kindergarten.

(Pic via Cat in the Bag, on right margin. Quote via Taegan Goddard's political blog.)

Winning In Iowa

Hillary Clinton finished 9 points behind Barack Obama and 1 point behind Edwards. A 30-year old machinist explains why, in bold quotes:

The caucuses marked the culmination of a dispiriting week for the Clintons as a series of polls presaged a possible Obama victory -- so long as a projected massive turnout of young and first-time caucus-goers materialized. And so it did with an estimated 212,000 Democrats showing up to caucus, almost twice as many as in 2004.

The caucus at one northwest Des Moines precinct seemed a microcosm of the political drama that rattled the entire state on Thursday night. Residents of Precinct 9 waited patiently in line to caucus as poll workers were overcome by the sheer scope of the turnout. As the 125 Iowans in the room dispersed into separate groups supporting different candidates, a visibly striking generational gap slashed the room.

With a mixed group of about 25 Edwards supporters in the middle, on the right side of the room sat about 40 mostly white-haired and subdued Clinton adherents. On the left side of the high school classroom, about 60 decidedly much younger, boisterous and ramped-up Obama supporters gathered in noisy clumps. "I've never caucused before but I like everything Obama has to say," said 30-year-old machinist Chris Augustine. Typical of exactly the kind of voter the Obama campaign had hoped to mobilize, he added: "For me, Obama is the un-politician. If it comes down to Hillary Clinton versus a Republican in November, I would rather vote for the Republican. There's nothing Clinton could do to prove she's really different than the same old, same old of the past."

(via HuffPo)

Psyche's News Roundup

Iowans are about to start caucusing, consorting, or something one hour from now.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | This is the most important election of our lifetime

20080103_032258_IOWA_caucus copy.jpg

New York Times Blog: Two-Buck Huck (driving the royalists crazy)

caustic acrostic | MetaFilter: The Iowa Scam

Iowa’s Undemocratic Caucuses - New York Times

Where the Iowa caucuses went wrong. - By Jeff Greenfield - Slate Magazine

Geek About » Top 17 Most Bizarre Sights on Google Earth

A Death in Edmonds - Features - The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper

Hillary Signals Free Pass for Bush | The Smirking Chimp

Move to Impeach Cheney Gains Support in Congress - Salem-News.Com

Oil Futures Rise to $100 a Barrel: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks

Clinton errs on Pakistan - Ben Smith's Blog - Politico.com (not sharpest knife in the drawer)

Hullabaloo: Divisive Dems (Obama running against his own party)

A Can Of Worms (Dems complicit in war crimes - Pelosi knew about waterboarding in '02)

Iraq, Then And Now: The Evolution Of A Revolt

Then...T.E. Lawrence writes from the perspective of a successful Iraqi insurgent against the Ottoman Empire:

"It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts. It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent. active in a striking force, and 98 per cent. passively sympathetic. The few active rebels must have the qualities of speed and endurance, ubiquity and independence of arteries of supply. They must have the technical equipment to destroy or paralyse the enemy’s organized communications, for irregular war is fairly Willisen’s definition of strategy, “the study of communication” in its extreme degree, of attack where the enemy is not. In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

Now...PFC Damien Corsetti, nicknamed "The King of Torture" and "The Monster" by his compatriots for his enhanced interrogations in Kabul, gave an interview to the Spanish paper El Mundo, describing part of the repertoire:

"They tell them they are going to kill their children, rape their wives. And you see on their faces, in their eyes, the terror that that causes them. Because, of course, we know all about those people. We know the names of their children, where they live, we show them satellite photos of their houses. It is worse than any torture. 98% of the prisoners had nothing to do with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In Abu-Ghraib and Bagram they were tortured to make them suffer, not to get information out of them."

T.E. Lawrence was tortured and sodomized in Daraa, Syria while in Turkish custody there. His claim has been disputed by people focused on his unknown sexual practices, yet the treatment he reports was commonplace. Lawrence said his captors were so inept and and sadistic they didn't realize his significance, and let him go. He later assaulted the Turkish-held port of Aqaba from the rear, capturing it in 1917, then was instrumental in throwing them out of Damascus in 1918. He was given every medal in the Empire, but refused a knighthood.

The map pictured above is of Lawrence's personal design, submitted by him to the British War Department at the end of World War One. It hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London. It was drawn with the subtle realities of local topography, history, tribes, trade routes, and cultural peculiarities uppermost in mind. Armenians have their own state, for example, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria are given to Feisal, Irak to Abdullah, with a second Arab state to Zeid. Things might have worked out differently had the Brits paid any attention to it.

The Face Of A Terrorist

Cute women from Iceland want to destroy our Homeland.

Erla Osk Lilliendahl, pictured above, flew first-class to New York City with her girlfriends before Christmas, "to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." Sure, lady...sure. Just like Mohammad Atta went to a strip club and ordered champagne with his co-terrorists the night before 9/11.

Back in 1995, Erla came to the US and went undercover, out-staying her visa by three weeks, then coming back the next year to case the joint further. But this time Homeland Security caught the fugitive potential murderer at passport entry in JFK. After babbling incoherent lies about those fateful missing weeks 12 years prior, she was taken away, handcuffed, chained to a wall, interrogated, and left in detention to cool off for awhile. Later, she was marched through the airport in chains, driven to a shit-hole jail cell in New Jersey, shaken or shouted awake when she tried to sleep, and given no food or water. That'll teach her!

She took a longer vacation than was allowed by law, and that required justice. But you see, some of these foreign terrorist women are uppity. After being held for a mere 24 hours and deported back to Iceland, a.k.a. The Axis of Evil Farm Team, Lilliendahl wrote a blog post about her Big Apple caper and called it "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected." She then complained to the Icelandic Foreign Minister, who met with some minor U.S. ambassador to demand an apology.

The DHS was forced to announce a fictional investigation to "review its work procedures" and to express "regrets." Now, why did she have to go and do that? What a spoil-sport! And she wasn't even tortured. Maybe next time.

Eine Kleine Bush Bashing

Live Free or Vote For Mitt Romney. I was once in New Hampshire in the thick of a wedding party. It had reached the ungodly hour of 10 PM when the wait-staff started asking for my ID and cautioning people against dance. Then, at about 10:45, we were warned to not make too much noise, as we were only two miles from an expensive private liberal arts college. (My ID? Sure. Here ya go. Sorry, I just shat myself. What about Alzheimer's do you not understand?)

Yet in New Hampshire, after midnight, the voting polls are simmering. Certain recalcitrant, bark-eating towns already started at 12 AM Eastern Time. It's time for perspective, a good Bush Bashing, and looking to the Bright Side. Contained in the YouTube vid above is a "best of" from the Berlin Wall of Bush Malapropisms. And even if Mitt the Mormon becomes Prez, we'll still not have to suffer verbal fratricides like this:

"As yesterday's positive report card show, childrens do learn."