Squirmelicious Insights On Men Behind The Dim Curtain

From blogger Squirmelicious:

The Gang of Four, a quartet of influential and rabidly anti-Clinton Democrats, are waiting for the perfect time to drive a stake through the heart of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions. The question is, with 72 hours to go before the Super Tuesday primaries, is time slipping away? The cadre—Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry—has vowed personally and collectively to do whatever necessary to keep the nomination from Clinton, each possessing compelling reasons to revile the former First Lady.

Kennedy and Gore have long hated the centrist ground staked out by Bill and Hillary, and were disgusted with the Senator’s support for the war in Iraq. Gore further resented the Clinton’s lack of support in his own presidential campaign of 2000, feeling crucial democratic resources were diverted to Hillary’s New York Senate campaign in that same year. As for Dean, it is well known that Bill Clinton worked feverishly behind the scenes in keeping fellow democrats from supporting Dean’s candidacy. Fearing that a Kerry win in ‘04 would choke off any opportunity for Hillary to run in ‘08, Clinton provided little support for that campaign as well, incensing John Kerry, and perhaps making the difference in George Bush’s razor like win that year. Obama’s campaign gained significant momentum when Ted Kennedy, on the heels of Obama’s sweeping victory in South Carolina, joined Kerry in endorsing the candidate.

Dean and Kerry Gore have held their preference close to the vest thus far. As chairman of the DNC, Dean’s work in promoting an Obama candidacy would likely be done behind the scenes leaving it to Gore, whose endorsement could truly define this race. The buzz in political circles is that Gore is waiting to see if Obama wins Super Tuesday and will then endorse, perhaps driving the final nail in Hillary’s coffin. Our question is, why wait? If Gore endorses, it could provide the final burst of momentum to insure an Obama win Tuesday. Recent polls show that Obama has closed the gap to 4 points. Can he make up the balance in the remaining hours? With Gore’s help it would be more likely. Go for it Al.

Found this searching on my hunch on a Howard Dean Vendetta against Team Clinton, one that could play out in back rooms well before the Convention. Interesting speculation, and I'll ask him about why the Kennedys publicly left their long association with B/Hill to endorse Obama.

Ashura & The Shiite Passion Plays

Naj, a friend and Iranian ex-pat who runs Iran Facts (link at right margin), has written an enlightening summary of the Ashura festival in Iran, one which bears similarities to Christian passion plays held around the world. As celebrations re-enact the martyrdom of Jesus, so Ashura commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, inspiration of the Shi'ite faith. Naj explains Ashura's significance, in particular the basis of the schism between Shi'ite and Sunni forms of Islam, as expressed in the street plays known as ta'ziyeh (lit. "compassion, mourning"):

As a dramatic form it has its origins in the Muharram procession commemorating Hussein's martyrdom and throughout its evolution the representation of the siege and carnage at Kerbela has remained its centerpoint. Ta'ziyeh has never lost its religious implications. Because early Shi'ites viewed Hussein's death as a sacred redemptive act, the performance of the Muharram ceremonies was believed to be an aid to salvation; later they also believed that participation, both by actors and spectators, in the Ta'ziyeh dramas would gain them Hussein's intercession on the day of the Last Judgment.

People, Sunnis much included, have criticized Shi'ism as medieval, gruesome, superstitious. Again, parallels between Shi'ite and Sunni conflicts are fairly comparable to those between Protestantism, expressive folk forms of Catholicism, and the body with claims originating authority over all things Christian. In the late 1700s, the Catholic Church banned passion plays in Europe, particularly Germany, as being too bloody, boisterous, and pagan-bordering. Oberammergau soon gained a passion play monopoly through a deal in which they changed their celebration's title, toned down the edgy displays, and charged for tickets, drawing about half a million visitors once a decade ever since (and for a one-time 350th anniversary in 1984). Outside Germany, the popularity of passion plays has spread, and are practiced in South and North America. Shi'ites are by no means alone in re-enactments of suffering, or in practices seen as beneath the dignity of other groups who supposedly share the same religion.

Demographically, Shi'ites are the fastest-growing segment of Islam and already significantly outnumber Sunnis, a fact which gives the lie to the deterministic 'Clash of Civilizations' logic. (Which goes, in short: other religions are quickly out-breeding Christianity, ergo the West must attack while the chances for success are still high. Thus the Iraq grab and the Iran end game.) Naj again provides a quick history check:

In the first years of the sixteenth century, when under the Safavid dynasty, Persia, which had always been a strong cultural power, again became a political power, Shi'ite Islam was established as the state religion and was used to unify the country, especially against the aggressive Ottomans and Uzbeks who were adherents of Sunnite Islam.

All anecdotal evidence indicates that religions exhibit a strong tendency to schism over time, not to unify. Judah was but one tribe of Israel, and ten went missing somewhere. Islam is technically an off-shoot of Judaism, and recognizes Christ as an important prophet. (How about "United" Methodists? Ha!) Islam is about to schism further, and of course the Bush Doctrine is based almost entirely on the opposite assumption. Wahabist philosophers may have correctly diagnosed and exploited the West's weaknesses, but they overlooked their own glaring problems: their chances of unifying Islam are extremely low in the absence of a Western Crusaders, encouraging a personal relationship with the Koran invites the attendant dangers of differing interpretations, and Iran is a bigger threat to al-Qaeda than the US ever will be.

'Foreign policy' means getting other countries to do what you want. If a capable diplomat keeps the principle of religious disunity mind, much can be quickly done with little more than travel vouchers and a free hand to first extricate a mired foot from the Mideast, then a leg, then maybe two. Not to mention greatly improve relations with Iran, which shouldn't be further driven into Russian or Chinese embraces; Iran should be engaged and helped in their goal to generate nuclear power, unravelling their biggest knot of anxiety: depleted oil fields.

A policy of de-escalation in rhetoric and force re-deployments will work immediate wonders, eroding support for mirror-image radicals who stir the embers of conflict. Iran may have old vendettas with the US and fully share in Islamic enmity for Israel, but it hates al-Qaeda, and in the equation of Realpolitik, it can be a policy anchor, a successful, eventually friendly counterbalance for non-violent containment.

"Invasigration," Or How Rome Really Fell

We've all heard how Rome was sacked and burned by Teutonic armies. You may not have heard how angry, unpaid migrant farm workers took it over. How the last Roman rulers welched on their deals with Alaric (whose name in old German means "Ruler of All"), why he was Rome's protector and besieger, and how he mysteriously broke through the impregnable strongpoint of Porta Salaria in AD 410, which stood firm until urban renewal claimed it in the late 1800s.

Anyone who has lingered on history's frigid shores and recorded its tides like baseball scores will speak of the strange and spiny forms they poked upon in its slow-draining pools. It's uncomfortable in those places, but it's where you get the chance to know better. In 406 AD, after too many bitter winters, failing harvests and plagues, the Rhine froze solid over. Impoverished western Goths, tiring of a steady diet of starvation and fighting desperate Huns from the East, walked over the ice and headed to the ancient equivalent of California. Human floes made towards Rome, the source of power, engine of growth, the marvelous marketplace which could absorb all labor. At least it always had. Life may not have been grand for the lowest ranks there, but subsistence was delivered in its bounty, and if you worked hard, you could send some money home.

One empire is Before, another is Since. Precedent to conflagrations, their Falls are fertilized by economic refugees attracted from afar, by star-struck servants, by burrowing bureaucrats mumbling low, by slaves abundantly provoked. The classic imperial paradox lies in keeping one's gates open enough to attract brilliant influxes of diverse talent while closed enough to dilute your native-born middle classes slowly into overtaxed transparency. Empires must burn bright and preach perpetual motion, until in their final stages they start applying the salves and ointments of public relations perpetually to their burns, but provide neither self-interest nor integrity with fresh basis for vitality. Capital flees to a better engine, or at least to the next-best, and the torch is passed, most often by means of victory in battle. Sometimes, rare as Rome, there is no compelling substitute, no victory. Merely unending chaotic strife which achieves no order.

Empires are like prolonged, successful chemical reactions. They must expand until, facing hard choices of retreat or dispersal, they rapidly contract, or fall as hopeless romantics into entropy's embrace. Or perhaps: empires are more like families. To paraphrase Tolstoy, every happy empire is the same, every failed empire unique. Rome, for its part, fell after its Promise was over-extended and betrayed, hyped and hollowed into a gilded cage. What did Christian and slave mothers whisper to their Christian slave children? Even they must have whispered of deliverance from marauders, starvation, desolation, and wolves. Of bread. The Promise of Rome was prosperity and cooperation, feasts for the senses, security through Res Publica, some blessed separation of religion and state. The Romans were so like us it hurts, and it seems their self-image was nearly the same. Exceptional.

Even so, the erudite Western versions of Rome's final acts, the officially endorsed and hagiographic Historical Facts, they were rolled up in forgiving horse feathers. The Romans wrote their dramatic history to their own liking, and haven't been much taken to task. True, the decline and fall happened four or five centuries anno domini, yes, it was complicated, and yes, plenty of Germanni (in colloquial Latin, "spear-chuckers") applied to central casting for the role of Barbarian Horde. Yet far more tectonic fundamental forces than the Teutons and the Goths, forces which surpassed the control and comprehension of the actors, were the reasons Rome was burned in rage. It's strange how seldom, if at all, those factors are examined.

A tale was spun of Vandals and Visigoths, superhuman barbarians with big hands and feet who swept down irresistibly to dismantle all that was great and holy, bloody savages who couldn't be stopped. Then of course, capable of nothing else, they ushered in the next thousand years of the incompetent, illiterate, illegible Dark Ages. This is the central myth, the murkiest fallacy of Rome's demise. Easy enough to blame it on the Germanic tribes, who beat Julius Caesar himself into resigning to leave them to their wilds "east of the Rhine, north of the Danube."

Of these bloody savages, apologista wrote in language strangely akin to what we can hear in our times: "It wasn't our fault. No one could have imagined that jets. Would be used as missiles. To fly into buildings." As sins are still swept up and girdled into the guts behind cummerbunds, the Romans were cheerfully exculpatory, and contemporary historians do, after all, have to eat. Other empires less elegantly excused themselves gigantic stunning helpings of rapine, blindness, and incompetence. Spain had its blood-slathered conveyor belt of gold to worry about, Holland its water, wind, and java, the South its irreplaceable slaves, England its lethal appetite for coal. The Land of Burger King has had its equals in the fine art of threat conflation, and our trees are at home in all these forests. But are we Rome? Are we similarly doomed, standing likewise at the edge of a dozen centuries of darkness, about to be beaten by the great unwashed? There is much evidence to support a case for "yes." Let's examine some trees and forests.

Trees: Burger King upper classes over the last 50 years have entirely washed their hands of the military. To reinvigorate the services at their lowest post-Vietnam point, President Reagan attacked the Caribbean spice island of Grenada with full regalia. As if planned by Marius, our volunteer armies now increasingly attract disadvantaged and foreign conscripts who see a quicker path to benefits and full citizenship. Vigorous and wise military leadership is more likely to be passed to foreigners in the future, nicely congruent with Rome, whose legions were increasingly staffed and then commanded by the very Germans they so feared. Corruption is rampant, tax evasion for the rich is enshrined in law, the currency is devaluing. As each deck chair is frenziedly rearranged, the band plays on, because its musicians are being heavily tipped.

Forests: Our leaders do not understand the threats they face, nor do they even want to. Practical stances such as those sully carefully cultivated Beautiful Minds, through which pass timeless thoughts like these: "The Scythians, they're the rotters to worry about. They may rally in Honduras and strike at the heart of the Republic. My friend's company was vandalized in Asia. It was terrible, and the risk insurance may not pay. The vandals breed like lice, yet they make unreliable workers. They harness their women as oxen. They eat their peas with forks. Their spies walk free in our streets even as they take our charity. We must, we must extract more information. We're sorry if they go insane from pain, and we'll apologize someday. But we're scared. Oh! How could I forget the murderers of Samarkand? They hate us, and we must crush them. Again." These are the worries which distract from little problems like Global Climate Destabilization, drenching the planet in poisons conveniently absorbed through the skin, from screwing and killing people so badly for so long that their dearest wish is to strangle you to death with their own looped entrails. These were the thoughts of Caesars and their Senators.

Would the exceptional succession of fine Roman leaders in the second and third centuries have been able to deal with a huge, incipiently hostile human migration looking for shelter, warmth, food, and jobs? This was Alaric's source and base. It's very doubtful Rome could have absorbed millions of refugees, but if it had, yet more would have come. Even if the Romans had absorbed the Goths and pushed back the Huns who drove them, they could not have changed the Continent's climate, which for some reason had destabilized. It was the beginning of the Little Ice Age. The problem was systemic, dwarfed possible solutions, and leaders were overwhelmed by hordes almost without regard to the quality of either.

Speculating on the specifics of an ancient weather disaster is dicey, but it's not going too far to observe--if the Rhine froze over and the climate so shook the Germans they left their ancestral homes, one can imagine how bad it must have been for the steppe-borne Huns who pressed south upon them. Climate was the precipitant or dominant actor in Rome's fall. As Burger King's military corrodes, as yet more economic refugees become immigrants, as the polar ice caps melt with what we're told is irreversible rapidity, we may do well to ponder the inequities of Mexico, the needs and desires of Central and South America. They're all much closer than Rome was to Germania.

How Henry Kissinger Saved The World

Ah, the good old days...like they were in Washington, D.C., 1972:

Nixon: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind...power plants, whatever's left--POL (petroleum), the docks...And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no...I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for chrissakes. The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about civilians, and I don't give a damn. I don't care!

Kissinger: I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.

(From the Nixon White House tapes, recorded on April 25th, 1972. Made public by the National Archives on February 28th, 2002.)

The Beginning Of The World As We Know It (Part One)

Having gotten all the nice spiritual Rumi-stuff out of my system in the previous post, on to practical things; to the world's problems, and their solving. My ersatz leaders keep telling me how anything wrong is all my fault, so I thought, why not? Let's have a go and make it good. Our problems are only as big as the wind and the waves, as the sun and the rain.

At first, my working title was 'Why Democrats Are A Bunch Of Drooling Catamites.' You see, my case of Two-Party Immune Deficiency Syndrome (TPIDS) is late-stage, and the Democrats surely play their part as Complicit Mommy Government to perfection, as a companion and helpmeet to our Abusive Daddy Government. Whom it's our enviable task to either kill, beat sense into, or run away from. So, yes, let's start off with the Party of the Damned, or what I choose to call "the Dims." I changed the title above to something more active, with an eye to an ongoing series; by way of power law and microcosm, Dims are great projectors for our Big Problems. As the old military recruiting jingle goes, "what a great play-ace, it's a great waay...to start!"

Isabelita, the thoughtful cookie at Learning to Sequence, noted in the comments section of Shorter Clinton, Shorter Obama that Hillary:

'seems like a "kinder gentler" form of the GOP, and Obama seems insubstantial. There's not a single Democratic candidate I'd vote for; wonder if we can outsource the leadership of this country to, oh, say, New Zealand?'

Iz sums up my sentiments well. If Hillary gets elected, we will be renting and watching "Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS" as en-masse comfort food. Paradoxically, though, the inmates of Casa Lord have given money to Obama and were invited to lunch with his wife. We have an Obama sign hanging in our window. Yet, something inside me still wants to crisply slap each side of the guy's face with a pair of wet leather gloves and bellow like George S. Patton, "Be a man, fer chrissakes!! There are brave candidates out there fighting and dying, and you're hiding in the make-up room like a coward!" Sigh.

But what else is left? I've considered supporting Dennis Kucinich, and even Ron Paul, because at least they take an unequivocal stand against The War. The obvious political lesson they, or any well-choreographed goose-steppers provide, is this: Take a stand, you existentially challenged boobs, take a stand! (Note: See goose-steppers.) So at least Kucinich and Paul "get" the basic prerequisite. Fortunately or not, however, neither can get "elected."

It all starts with The War. In the beginning was The War. The War is run by the War Machine, which now makes up most of the country's remaining manufacturing base...you know, just like it did for The Soviet Freaking Union back in 1984. That being the case, if the Democrats truly didn't want us to invade/occupy/eternally exploit Iraq, would we still be there, or ever have gone? Would Cheney still be President? Would Hillary Clinton have been the one who first used the phrase after 9/11, "You're either with us or against us? (Yep, she was first, and beat Dumya to it.)

The truth is, the Dims support The War Machine, and that's why they support The War. They're bending over, busy slurping at the Money River, looking up to carp threats occasionally and then backing down to slurp again at the life blood of this nation, this precious gift of governmental innovation, as it runs in rivulets and rills down into the scuppers of FACISM. The same ugly thing this country pulled out all the stops to defeat 60-odd years ago, bombing every major city full of evil German and Japanese people to smithereens, not to mention the Italians and French who got in the way. People keep wondering and marveling how craven, how caved-in and sold-out Congress can be, but it's really simple. It's as simple as buying and selling hogs. Fascists love hogs. [Sotto voce: And fascism's better, because run! Cower! Twitter like fluffy yellow chicks, and be afraid! (Looking left and right for spies.) The only alternative is so-cial-ism. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!]

To paraphrase the idiot son of an asshole, "Being an Empire is hard work." Yes...yes, Fearless Leader, you masturbatory imbecile, it is hard work. So here it is, the answer, the solution to our problems: smarter work. The only way to save what's left of imperial standing melting away like run-off from a denuded hill, and our domestic freedoms at the same time, two-birds-one-stone style, is to wise up. And make a big, hard, brave yet obvious choice. A choice which is ultimately necessary anyway. Amongst smaller hard choices, the Democrats have to not only renounce The War, they must renounce The War Machine. Nothing much other than a tack into the wind, merely risking political and physical assassination domestically and a heapin' helpin' of Humble Pie internationally. So how, other than fitting our alleged representatives with electro-shock collars and pumping them full of 100 mikes of LSD, do we work them up to the gargantuan tasks common to vertebrates?

Somehow I can't picture my Senators (Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell) driving that bus in Selma. Actually, I'm picturing it right now as they're dragged off the bus by police and savagely beaten with batons. Ha-ha! To be realistic, look, we're dealing with a government that told us with a straight frigging face to go out and buy duct tape in case of a nerve gas attack, and that kerosene can melt steel. (Mental Note: I suppose duct tape could be used as a way to cover your mouth and nostrils so as to induce a less painful death. Kerosene and jet fuel don't melt steel, not in my back yard.) A direct frontal assault on The War Machine won't work. It would simply send Terminators after us like Skynet and shoot us with plasmatic death-rays.

But what we can do is start small. An insurgency they don't see coming, an infiltration, a Rat Attack. It's already got plenty of foot soldiers, even investors. We can do things that my darling Senators, the Bobbsey Twins, will enthusiastically support. They just won't know the full implications, and when they finally glom, it'll be ok by them. Because they care about money. Every Constitution, every Estate, is based on money, on a currency. A currency is a metaphorical basis for storing power and wealth. We need to switch the fundamental basis of our power and wealth. The US has switched its currency basis at least four times in its history, and it will do so again.

Power and wealth. And beer! Mmmm. The focus of our big ol' technologized Teddy Bear, our throwing-candy-to-the-children-while-it-kills-them War Machine, is oil. Our currency isn't The Dollar. Our currency is oil. This is a VERY BIG problem. First, its worldwide production has begun to go into decline--9.5 million Saudi barrels a day wen down to 8.5 over the past year, but they "could pump more if we wanted to!," sure, and Iran, well, they're desperate for nuclear power because the mullahs know how wildly overstated their reserves are, and the rate at which their wells are declining--plus, we're losing control of the damned stuff anyway. That's why we're building military bases on top of wherever we can find new, relatively helpless sources of it. Even if that quixotic effort starts getting a lot cheaper or miraculously succeeds, well...we're still, for all practical purposes...Going To Run Out of Oil.

We need to switch our currency. This implies a future Manhattan Project, a huge national investment and roll of the dice, on sustainable energy. And that will, at some point, happen. But the Rat Attack doesn't have to wait for a Manhattan Project. It can germinate and advance incremental change. Its weapons are not just wind farms and solar panels, not bipolar Priuses and biodiesel Passats, but all manner of gardening, all sorts of ruminants (including ponies), tree-planting, urban bee-keeping, de-centralized heating, and simply giving a damn. Raising chickens on your patio, damn the Bird Flu, full speed ahead. This is how the Amish and most of the world survive on two bucks a day. We should probably do A-OK on forty thou per capita. And if a schlumpf like me can do organic gardening,anyone can.

This might be a good place to note that Exxon's corporate profits were bigger than the Gross Domestic Product of all but about a dozen countries last year. Exxon and other distended, artificial, inhuman structures like it are The Enemy. These are the enemies who are stealing your money. By the way, they also want to kill you, slowly, so they can wring every last bit of useful output and consumption out of your body. They've calculated the calories, and want to turn the world into one big "Arbeit Macht Frei" concentration camp, their kapos as commandants, and they're succeeding. Every drop of oil you don't use and every ray of sunshine you do sends these monstrous mutants, and many of their large shareholders, into fits of depression and murderous rage. Because they know, deep down in their black insatiable selves, that no one owns the wind, the sun, or the rain. Although they've hired lobbyists to address that disadvantage.

We need to start an anti-oil insurgency, and it's going to be surprisingly easy. I belly laugh at the prospect because, you see, we're not going to have much choice. Soon enough, driving 40 miles to save five bucks on t-shirts made by slave labor fed by slop troughs in some distant Work Zone is going to look exactly like what it is: stupid. We're going to live in a world where you can walk, float, or teleport to bars and stores. I'm not speaking from high moral terrain here. It's simply going to be cheaper than going through violent machinations and invasions to coax flammable goo from under far-off ground.

"Mr. Gunwrench"

A friend tore a story out of the local paper and gave it to me, and of course Phil over at Perils of Caffeine in the Evening beat me to posting it.

This article will satisfy neither camp in the culture wars. While it seems to indicate that Darwin is losing influence (the guy lived), it also resoundingly refutes the concept of Intelligent Design. From today’s P-I:

SOUTHWORTH — A man trying to loosen a stubborn lug nut blasted the wheel with a 12-gauge shotgun, injuring himself badly in both legs, Kitsap County sheriff’s deputies said.

The 66-year-old man had been repairing the car for two weeks at his home northwest of Southworth and east of Port Orchard and had gotten all but one lug nut off the right rear wheel before getting frustrated Saturday, Deputy Scott Wilson said.

From about arm’s length the man fired the shotgun at the wheel and was “peppered” in both legs with 00 buckshot and other debris.

Wilson described the injuries as “severe but not life-threatening.”

Now, the big mistake here was using buckshot in the Gunwrench. He might've thought his gun was loaded with a slug, which, from the proper distance and angle (point-blank, 90 degrees to side), would’ve worked on your standard Lincoln Continental frozen lug nut by fracturing the top off so you could then drill out the threads. Skating on thin Darwinian ice? Sure, but buckshot guarantees disaster from any angle. And wouldn't work. Of course, by relating this bit of trivia, I realize what it discloses about my socioeconomic and geographic origins...in the Land o' Gun Racks.

At my high school, the principal came on the loudspeaker one morning during deer season and told us boys we were to never, ever, ever leave our rifles and shotguns in our cars; as someone might be tempted to steal them, to do so was irresponsible and unsafe. We were henceforth only allowed to store them in our lockers while at school.

A Kiss Before Bombing

These pictures are from the Unapologetic Mexican. He says, "Here are images, I wanted to lay them out. As glimpses. Isolated glimpses into another country, one that mostly exists for us in scary soundbytes and media-approved shots of hangings and flame and the dark dark chador and the obscuring burqa. We pump the hot gas of our fear and media worship into those shadowy shapes, because after all, all of us here in the USA are experts at marketing and advertising and image. We take joy in our trade. This is our most intensive area of training.

We are mid-commercial right now. Halfway through the award-winning "Bomb Iran" messaging blitz. I give you a few outtakes that might not make it into the glossy front page spread.

The tricky part about laying out images in a sequence is that, depending on the order, a story wants to connect the previously separate moment. The Glimpse becomes a Thought, and then a Tale. But I did not want to force some clunky narrative...which my hands seemed to want to do no matter how I moved around the pictures. So I ended up initially grouping them by color to solve my problem. That gave me a basic blueprint that I could follow without fear of setting up something too contrived. Let the colors lead the way, let the pigment and the paint and the hue have its say."


A woman looking into Khomeini's tomb.


Meadows as green, flowers as wild.


The mosque in Naqse-Jahan Square in Isfahan.


A Kurdish-Persian wedding.


In Najar, Iran. Kurdistan. People descended from the Medes.


Bolhassan, Iran. The cluster of homes that do not seem ruled by a grid, but rather naturally occurring as groups of people settled near one another. This village of people was chemically bombed by Saddam Hussein with munitions provided by the US in the Iraq-Iran war in 1987 and 1988.


A cooling tower on a museum roof in Kashan, Iran.


Naqse-Jahan Square, Esfahan, Iran.


The Azadi Tower, or "The Freedom Tower."


Bam, Iran. The same year this was taken, an earthquake destroyed the city, taking 40,000 lives.


September 8 is International Literature Day in Iran.


Shirley Temple Day.


A major highway in Tehran. They noticed, and titled it "Inconvenient Evidence."


More Iranian schoolchildren. Probably in California.


Children play outside Ali Qapu Palace, in Esfahan.


Women poking fun at something.


A woman protests against the US-led bombing of Afghanistan.


Sheep graze their way to freedom.


The Grand Bazaar.


Women in Arsanjan mash pomegranates.


God Bless Humanity.

The Battle Of Bletchley Park, Science & Free Speech

WWII was won largely because German U-Boat captains were often bored. To amuse themselves in the lonely North Atlantic, they signaled to each other wirelessly and thought their signals secure.

For that reason on a squally spring day a friend named Nieves Khoury, the only Canaria resident I've had the pleasure to know, rode with me sportingly up out of London to where the fates of nations had turned. They turned, of all things, on practical applications of information theory. I wanted to see the belly of Bletchley Park, the military import of which was clear from my childhood things. The park lies about the same longitude west of London as Castle Windsor's polo field but an hour further north, off the M1 towards Buckinghamshire. Remote, yet just enough. They deciphered the Enigma code there and many others with the aid of the world's first programmable computers.

At the time I was in the delightfully disreputable field of artificial intelligence so visiting made professional sense, and for ironic measure I brought along a disowned, reprobate-turned-con-man who was the son of one Intel's founders. He faked an enthusiasm to see where Alan Turing's inference machines were first made in 1940. Their electrically actuated gears were housed in lockers which took up much of a room, then finally they used valves, or vacuum tubes, which took up even more. Which led to transistors and then to the comparatively tiny silicon chips which made Gary's disappointed father, but Gary not yet and probably never Gary, filthy rich.

To Nieves the notion of heavily armed ships and warplanes milling around at dreadful expense to kill millions of foreign homicidal maniacs was dated and inappropriate. As anachronistic as slave-holding. She and her friend Lola, who came with us, were from islands off Spain long accustomed to aggressive, pasty-skinned tourists. So they graciously kept their thoughts to themselves. We drove into the Park to see wind-blown grounds and ill-kept buildings, where a compound of decaying huts had once housed the weary boffins who fought the Battle of Bletchley. I got out of the car to walk up and look in the windows, to contemplate why the US and England prevailed. I considered patent law, competition, Jacquard looms, systems of government, economies, luck and leaders. What the scientists ate. Why did our system win? Perhaps because we had New Science, more freedom, enough openings to throw down old gods and repeat Titanomachia.

They called me back into the BMW, telling me there was nothing to see, the girls scolding me for staying out in the sideways rain. For staring oddly and too long at a reverie of dilapidated, boring buildings.

Where art and free speech flourish, so does science. When they are turned away their empty seats are always reserved for pretty falsehoods, failure's bridesmaids. Alan Turing was a very special boffin who loved truth and adored beauty, who believed the exceptions in regular patterns are so information-rich you can divine all relevant data from them; in essence, contradictions point to the most meaningful rules of life itself. He meditated on morphology. What would become known as Chaos Theory. With this intuited precept, to focus first on data's diseases and compare them to the whole, he broke open the most complex and secure codes yet devised. As with so many contradictions, he was himself the precept's social embodiment. In 1954 he was hounded to the point of suicide, having been convicted of a "crime." Homosexuality. He died of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple by his side in imitation of the heroine in his favorite story. Snow White. Turing's death is why the first personal computer maker later chose a bitten apple as its logo.

Amongst acclaimed scholars (Those Who Should Know Better) it's a commonplace that the American plan to inexorably smother its hapless enemies under mountains of industrial goods was chiefly responsible for victory. As if triumph was a fait accompli, the materials merely having to be put at disposal of generals and their armies, and voila, determinism. (Stupidity.) While it was nice to luxuriate in weapons and supplies, the intelligence gleaned via math was fundamental, had far more strategic effect and was morale-crackingly lethal. Materiel had to traverse a hostile world in fragile berths. Armed with oracular knowledge of enemy movements and intents, a plodding fool such as Bernard Montgomery couldn't manage to completely negate such advantages. Even with foreknowledge of his enemy's strategy, the only reason he was able to keep Rommel away from Arabia's oil fields was because the latter's supplies were inconveniently situated at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Right where the oracles of Bletchley had put them. Montgomery became a Field Marshal, Germany tried to make oil out of turnips. Such are the impacts free speech and art impart to science, and long are the reaches of the gods which rulers worship.

In early 1942, the German Navy added a fourth rotor to their earlier Enigma coding machine, vastly increasing its mathematical complexity and regaining secrecy. In February of that year, a million tons of vital supplies bound for England and Russia were sunk in the Atlantic. Imagine, say, a million cars being sunk in a month. Then the next month 1.2 million. Then 1.5 million. Then 2 million. Who can keep that up for long? With the code unbroken, America's industrial output was on a conveyor belt to The Deep. From the Allied perspective, the war looked lost. In the eyes of most, democracy and communism were beaten by the efficiencies of fascism. Millions in Russia and many in England were starving, and weapons were short in the field. Convoy ships were sunk within sight of Miami Beach, the Naval Academy at Anapolis, in the Long Island sound, off Portland and the Carolinas. 35% of US Merchant Marine shipping losses and over 50% of its casualties during the entire conflict occurred in 1942. The pressure on the hut-dwellers in Bletchley was intense and Turing's team slept not in beds, but at desks.

On December 13th, 1942, Enigma was re-broken through toil, good guesswork and computer programming. The German Navy's commands to its U-Boat fleets began to serve as writing on the wall once more. Shipping losses from U-Boats decreased dramatically, and the submariners were baited, blasted, and bagged like sharks. Had U-Boat communication protocols been more strict, it would have taken longer to break the code; but the sheer volume of data allowed Turing and his machines to spot contradictions in patterns, to form hypotheses about what caused them, and to test those wild-ass guesses far less laboriously than was possible heretofore. His sexual orientations were overlooked long enough for that.

Stretching off to near infinity, white punch cards flurried and spinning tape rolls curled into flames. They translated information and pegged them into grids on big maps with little symbols hung upon them for sharp relief. In a bombsight's reticule, at a periscope's vortex, the fragile holds of far-off symbols gravid with troops and war-fuels were soon to be split, rent hopeless with spray and steam. Athena has on rare occasion allowed to be our goddess and from her wisdom we soon derived secret range and azimuth. Before we betrayed her it was she who ministered unfair advantages and quotidian death down upon the acolytes of Aries.

Whether above or on or under the sea they must've had last thoughts such as these: "Impossible! Noooooh! How could they ever have known...that we were here?"

Of Mercenaries And Black Waters

A good rule of thumb in military history is to bet against a belligerent which hires mercenaries. For bad ideas, it generally ranks up there with press-ganging peasants into service and sending them into battle armored with straw, carrying scythes and pruning hooks. Commingling the former with the latter is more than a rule of thumb, the results as predictable as throwing a match into a keg of gunpowder which is lying under an outhouse near a propeller. Unless, of course, one adversary is determined to outbid the other in terms of simple stupidity. There is an undeniable element of luck in battle, as those who lived through them attest. The famous Hans Holbein engraving, attached above, conveys the image of confusion without the blood.

There are exceptions to these rules, of course. In the article below, for example, economic warlock Paul Krugman needlessly takes Machiavelli far out of context, even falsely construes his meaning, in order to denigrate the US security services firm, and the regrettable haven of our bad fortunes, Blackwater USA.

In truth, Machiavelli did not say mercenaries are worthless. He said they're unreliable, and also wrote a great deal about their relative utility and employment, praising in particular the dreaded Swiss pikemen who were renowned for their competence and ruthlessness. In the Hundred Years' War, if you didn't have your Swiss piker contingent, or a larger one than your opponent, the starting odds were considered as stacked against you. They were impervious to cavalry charge and pretty much everything else but another heavily armed pike box, such as another formation of Swiss mercenaries. They wouldn't fight each other, however. Their supremacy in Europe only began to dim with the increasing effectiveness of firearms circa 1500, but they remained on the battlefields there until the early 1800s. Even today, their last contingent guards the Vatican.

More commonly, mercenaries, the Swiss included, have always been known for their abominable behavior off the battlefield. They are known for freebooting, looting, murder, pillage, rape, protection rackets, and the indiscriminate application of senseless violence. Nearly four hundred years after the fact, bad memories of mercenaries remain compressed into an expression of disgust in German: Schwedentrunk, or "Swede's mead." In the Thirty Years' War, in which 20%-40% of Germany's entire population died, Swedish troops swarmed down throughout the land to ostensibly persecute Catholics. Their rear, or "black" guards devised an expedient to aid in finding hidden food, treasure, and women: they would take manure and liquify it with urine, fill a funnel with it, and force a servant or farmer's jaw open. The practice was recorded in the baroque satirical memoir of that war, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (English title: Simplicissimus):

They lay the bound servant on the ground, stuck a wooden wedge into his mouth, and poured into his belly a bucket full of foul manure water, which they called a Swedish Drink.

The quibble with Krugman is past history. Blackwater USA, founded by evangelical crusader Erik Prince in the here and now, is the private muscle of the Bush Administration. Prince has donated $168,000 to the Republican National Committee. Iraq's population has been preyed upon by its lawless mercenaries and 20% of its population is already dead, maimed, tortured, robbed, raped or displaced. Blackwater had a lot of help with that, but they did play a prominently annointed part. To think that Blackwater's mercenary role departs from the norms of history is utterly naive, which most of my fellow citizens still choose to be, as is thinking that the American Legacy retains its former status. Which we all prefer to do. Here's the article (via Cat in the Bag):

by Paul Krugman
NY Times

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn’t get out of their way.

Yeah. We know pretty well what happened. And what else is happening. Krugman goes on in language suitable for polite society at the NY Times.

Rudyard Kipling, Back In Fashion

Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
At the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph clear: "A Fool lies here, who tried to hustle the East."

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, and Hindu was his first language. He uses "Aryan" in its correct sense above, meaning someone of Indo-Iranian ethnicity. Kipling had direct experience in the Eastern mind, and considered himself an Anglo-Indian. Along with his poetry, verse, and his fore-shadowings of science fiction, much of his writing concerned the East, including many of its fairly tales. Kipling lived a sort of dissident life in Brattleboro, Vermont until 1896. Able to see colonialism from a number of angles, he both disturbed and mollified his contemporaries with his knowing, somewhat veiled satirical stilettos, and his prophetic publications on that subject.

For example, many in England were heartened by "The White Man's Burden," and widely used it for decades as justification for continuing occupations. The phrase entered common parlance as a real duty, to improve the lot of the benighted heathens with the application of Christian faith, military discipline, and economic reforms. In reality, Kipling's 1899 poem was written in a voice of purely caustic satire. Its subtitle is The United States and the Philippine Islands, and it can only be read as a warning to America upon its invasion of the Phillipines, as it can be seen embarking on a road of difficulties and disillusions, traveled by Britain long before. The poem is worth reading in full, but here are two selected verses:

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

It comes as a surprise to me that literary authorities argued, and still maintain, that the poem should be read as a ringing endorsement of imperialism. Kipling's other works of the time, critical of imperialism and sympathetic to the poor soldiers sent to enforce it, do not support that supposition. Maybe the Main Stream Media has deeper roots than we know. The painting above, 'The Gallery of H.M.S. Calcutta (Portsmouth) is by James Tissot, an artist whose subject matter was often the leisure and grandeur of a prior country's Victorian Age.

"Guest" Post: Will And Ariel Durant On Democracy

As a form of government, the advantage democracy saliently presents over others is the facility to possibly promote those most able, regardless of caste, to positions of leadership by common approbation, achievement, and consent. If any system can figure out how to promote its most capable minds, its advantage will be potent.

In contrast to dictatorship or aristocracy, arrangements which guarantee the systemic promotion of hermetic stupidity, timidity, corruption, and neglect, democracy at least holds out a chance for meritocracy. It assumes fundamentally that intelligence and ability are not the provinces of class or heredity, but intangible, competitive qualities which are vastly improved by an equal access to knowledge. Dummies may live and struggle in democratic squalor, but their children, if they make their way smartly through the system, could be elected President or Prime Minister. As was Bill Clinton on his merits in the former United States, and John Major on his in the United Kingdom. Clinton was the illegitimate son of a cleaning woman and a traveling salesman, born and raised in a state best known for its obscurity. John Major dropped out of school at sixteen and was the son of a former vaudeville musician.

We live in a special time, in that more information flows to our fingertips more freely than ever before, just after the tireless cheerleaders of dictatorship seized upon electronic megaphones to lead the crowd in chants. But how does democracy, on the whole, compare to the Platonically cycling formulae of aristocracy and dictatorship?

All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place. Under its stimulus Athens and Rome became the most creative cities in history, and America in two centuries has provided abundance for an unprecedentedly large proportion of its population.

Democracy has now dedicated itself resolutely to the maintenance of public health. If equality of education can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth behind its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. The rights of man are not rights to office and power, but the rights of entry into every avenue that may nourish and test a man's fitness for office and power. A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have.

The Lessons of History, pp. 78-79

Recent posts regarding democracy's drawbacks set me to searching for what some better thinkers on civilizations had to say. To a person who studies the classics at the expense of noticing modern surroundings, the word "democracy" will have a very different meaning to them than it does to the average person. To the Greeks and Romans, for example, democracy was an unfortunate aberration, a time between aristocracy and monarchy, and the word automatically calls up scenes of dreadful disorder and bloody vengeance. To us today, it is a representative-driven device for balancing and managing power, diluting, re-distilling, and applying it as carefully debated circumstances require.

The Durants note, along with their fellow traveler Arnold Toynbee, the main weakness of democracy as a system: its easy susceptibility to bribery. If they were alive, and had the chance to sit on my couch for some tea, I suspect they would quickly notice that there is a new kind of nation, ones which have surpassed borders. One example they might train their capable minds on would be Walmart, which currently comprises the fourth-largest economy in the world. I wonder what they would call it, and how they would describe its effects on the old systems of aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship.

Polity, Declination, and Re-Boot Pt. III

Have you ever noticed how the the things least repeated tend to be the most interesting? Science, as a religion, is not allowed to truck with them. True, whole worlds often do things almost exactly the same way twice and thrice and three million times. Yet even the Law of Gravity is not an absolute. Newton's apples will always fall from their trees, unless they're subjected to a tornado. Then they'll be sucked up into a vortex, and fail to hit our waiting heads. This isn't to say gravity has not attained the status of physical law. Just that science has simplified it, failed to understand its source, and downplayed anomalous conditions which can supercede it. And I can't see how that is helpful.

For the last fifty years, public school science teachers have taught that gravity makes all objects fall at the same speed, obscuring or expunging the notion that their maxim is only true in a theoretical vacuum. A feather, with its low specific density and high aerodynamic drag, falls slower through an atmosphere than a cannonball. The Newtonian experiment in which a feather reached the ground as quickly as a cannonball from the leaning tower of Pisa, quoted to my class when I was 17 as gospel, was pure scientific superstition. A functioning adult with a PhD in Physics once insisted in all seriousness to me that all objects fall at the same rate, and he would brook no disagreement. Hmm. And what scientists have measured the differential rate of terminal velocities between falling feathers and cannonballs? Some, hopefully. Perhaps eccentric hermeticists, or heretics who desperately needed practical answers. Engineers, not scientists. People who had no time for fear or dogma, but needed to solve practical problems, tending to keep their data as private knowledge.

Philosophies, seeking practical solutions, provide less absolutist windows into the soul of man than religions. Philosophers may have much baggage we can disagree with, but at least they don't claim to be chosen of God. Their quest by and large has been to point ways out of the closed mazes of religion, to get people to think of the universe less like an ongoing game of cut-and-dried angles and DNA strand tic-tac-toe, rather more like dimensions in which a particle can be in two places at the same time. Which, I admit, is a concept borne of practical science. The continuum on which science and religion dwell blurs into interesting nether-worlds of philosophy, just as communism and capitalism have their demi-states. In preparation for more, here's a whirlwind distillation of a few influential historians and philosophies as provided by Church and Empire in his post on Historiography:

* Plutarch--Great Men and their Character. His thesis is that the very character of men changes history. His study of Mark Antony suggests that his love for Cleopatra blinded him to his duties in Rome and was destroyed by Augustus; who, it turned out, was not a lightweight.

* Historical Forces. This is the assertion that certain ideas, movements, etc., become irresistible forces that will have their way. An example is Christianity being such a force that would eventually not only survive persecution, but emerge victorious over the Roman Empire. Another is the dominance of Science in the West over Theology and Philosophy as the authority for determining Truth.

* Toynbee--Challenge and response. Toynbee's theory is that all civilizations are faced with a crisis which is either one of ideas, or one of technology. How they respond determines whether they will survive. An example is the Fall of Rome. Many blame Christianity for sapping the Pagan strength of Rome and causing her downfall. Toynbee points out that the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire) used Christianity to revitalize and reform the Roman Empire for another thousand years.

* Hegel--Dialectic. Hegel's Theory of History says that for every old idea, there is a new one which conflicts with it. Out of the struggle a new idea is created (Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis). He felt that this was how God led us to perfection and revealed new truth. History is just the product of conflict

* Darwin--Not a historian, but he took Hegel's idea and applied them to science. His biological application led to the Origin of Species. Herbert Spencer and others then used his biological ideas to support their ideas that a struggle among races of people and differing nations led to the strongest and most able nations ruling the world. Victory in combat meant the superiority of a nation or people.

* Marx--Material Dialectic. Marx used Hegel's ideas and applied them to classes of people throughout history. Any ruling class controlled the "means of production" which gave them wealth and power to rule. Whenever a new method of production occurred, there was conflict between the older ruling class and a newer class using the newer and superior means of production. An example is how the Businessman and his money destroyed the power of the old Aristocracy based on land and hereditary ownership

* Turner--Geography and the Frontier. Turner's thesis said that geography determines the character of a people and, depending on the situation, gave them certain advantages and disadvantages. An example is that the English and Japanese, being Island Nations, would naturally have an advantage at sea combat. And, in an age of sea-trade they would, tend to be powerful. His thesis explicitly stated how the Frontier shaped the American mind to be open to new things and to strive for what was new. In our modern technological age, Americans are very open to new technologies.

* Radicals--History is the story of who won. This thesis says that history is little more than mythmaking. "History is the history of winners." Those who win, write the history books. Those who have lost are excluded or demonized. History is determined by who has the political power to write the books. But, for some, reading a restaurant menu is as important as reading "history."

* Boorstin--The unexpected. Daniel J. Boorstin's books suggest a thesis that ideas and practices simply come together in various places and time and can hardly be predicted. What has mattered, is that the great Creators and Discoverers have been open to the challenge and took previously unrelated ideas and put them together in a way that was entirely new. They thus change the world. An example is how an anonymous optician in Belgium created the first telescope to be used in combat. It found its way to Italy where Galileo began to look at stars with it. His findings undermined the Ptolemaic system. However, the Church used his information to create the modern Gregorian Calendar we use today. But sixteen years later in the firestorm of the Reformation, Galileo was ordered to remain silent. Boorstin is hostile to the Hegelian-Marxist-Darwinian school as it can only tell what the future is like based on the past. The Hegelians could never have predicted the impact of the telescope. Boorstin makes considerable money showing that no one can predict; you can only remain open to change. Change cannot be managed.

That the Radicals currently amongst us would manufacture history via synthetic reactions under a Diocletian bubble is clear; to them, the Outside Threat is a sulphuric acid which melts away all restraints to their ambitions, and the barbarians outside the gates are more useful than the artisans within them. There's no arguing with the short-term effectiveness of what they do, only with its unpredictable, undesireable side effects. I side with Boorstin against them, who is saying right along with the high-energy particle jockeys and the message sent from the fictional character John Connor in Terminator 2: "The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

Polity, Declination, and Re-Boot, Pt. II

Lucretius said it was fears which first made the gods. Now as when we first appeared, there are still forces hidden in the earth on which we stand, and only dimly understand. The rivers swallow us in their swirling currents, the vagabond tides of the oceans decide the climes of continents, the winds and skies remain recalcitrant, trees fall and clouds lower upon our houses as they always have. We're actors in eternal tug-of-wars which carry on between rich and poor, religion and philosophy, socialism and capitalism, research and engineering. As Will and Ariel Durant noted in Pt. I of this post, the lung of our striving meta-organism acts as a flexing systole and diastole, propelling us through a cycle of conflict with each strenuous breath, propelling us we know not where.

Our forebears sought to placate the giants in the earth through offerings, ritual, and prayer. When priests channeled our desires and our fears,with answers revealed to them by the most high gods, their prescriptions became morals, ethics, laws, which in turn became convenient to statecraft. Shamash gave laws to Hammurabi, Thoth gave them to Menes, Egeria to Pompilius, Yahweh to Moses, Jesus to the Gentiles. Priests and paupers proved symbiotically precious to kings and states, yet as their orthodoxies became more successful, then inexorably more ridiculous and rigid, they sent increasingly ripe invitations to the reliefs of comedy and blasphemy, and each regime receded in relevance. But when first coming down from Gilgamesh, a holy man with hair standing up on end charged with the electrons of divine righteousness akimbo, bearing simple solutions, he was no easy thing to dismiss.

The effigy to burn now is science, which has attained the status of religion. I don't seek to restore mere Christianity in its place, and nought else. I know not what I seek, only that as a roadmap or religion, science is incomplete. While advancing our understanding bit by bit, and better than many other formerly discredited superstitions, science remains a fragmentary and unsatisfying religion. Obviously it has been useful, bringing us our electricity, piloting our airwaves, crafting our pharmaceuticals, powering our vehicles. But it is important to out "science" itself as a ritual-based religion, one which indoctrinates and amplifies a reflexive, barren fear of non-replication. It tears matter down into building blocks well, but is horrible at understanding how to integrate them into heuristics.

In short: the deepest lie of Science is that life and its attendant forces must consistently repeat in order to be valid; if not infinitely repeatable, an action isn't true. Whereas in fact, basic impulses seek what they will, are not repeatable, and go off the charts. All anecdotal evidence richly illustrates that life seeks to novelty. The universe is a novelty-seeking organism, not a Xerox copier. Matter seeks to assemble itself across different dimensions in ever-more appealing ways. It resists extruding the same thing twice, it is reluctant to allow even a glimpse of uniformity, and this resistance is a natural law. Matter is meant to mutate, to subvert, to transmigrate, and seek the undiscovered eddies of existence.

The Impeachment Of Richard B. Cheney

Why is impeachment repeatedly said to be "off the table?" If professional handicappers were making odds at Vegas between Dick Cheney's impeachment and his dying in office, the odds would be posted up on the board in lime-green lights. They would look something like this:

Impeachment: 85 : 1 against
Dying in Office: 2.5 : 1 against

Despite his hypothermic approval rating, Cheney has full control over the most expensive, extensive security apparatus in the world. If a move in Congress begins to gather steam for his ouster, which has already happened a few times, all D.C. has to do is reach into his special files and peruse the unmentionable sins of his political enemies (and especially his wavering friends) and make a catalog of stained undies to throw into a briefcase. Few politicians can withstand such scrutiny. Few of us regular folks could. This is the biggest reason Congress wilts every time the pressure is on.

What kind of scrutiny are we talking, here? OK. Cheney has access to every conversation over a phone, every email and SMS message which passes between Congressional staffers and more, all back-doored, all illegal. That's the truth the hubbub with warrantless wiretapping skirted. Technically, it's all just data, and is not covered by outdated laws which pertain to unencoded/decoded phone conversations. J. Edgar Hoover stayed in power at the FBI for almost 40 years on a less powerful exercise of this technique, and Beria (Stalin's head of security) did the same in Russia.

Cheney recently ducked his office being de-funded. The vote was 15-14. Like Hoover, he can find goods on his enemies, and already has them on his friends. I state these things not as speculation. Every word you spake, every keystroke you make is subject to the core technologies and systems I've worked with. It is automatically stored on optical disk, word-spotted, then if triggers are hit it is automatically transcribed, linked to other transaction records databases, threat-graded, and if necessary, passed up the line for review. This Total Information Awareness tool isn't known to have caught any terrorists, but it is ideal for controlling political resistance.

It's critical for we the people to press for Darth Cheney's ouster by traditional procedures, those which have not yet been officially negated. Why? Sooner or later, the will of the people becomes the law of the land. Cheney is a bad-ass trembling stalwart set about by offended inimicals, about to fall. Who wants him? Who loves him? Sonny in the Godfather is riding in a car on the turnpike in New Jersey, a car which is slowing down for a toll booth on a Sunday afternoon. And almost everybody wants to get him gone. Even the establishment crime families who run this country. Leave the gun, take the cannoli.

Queens and Kings knew they had to keep the People happy. Smile and wave. Wave and smile, all the while concealing matters better left unexamined. It's not too different now, and why should it be? Even if he were to die in office, his security apparatus, all $40 Billion per year of it, will remain in place and loyal, resisting a Purge and with the old lines in place. There are matters we don't want to hear about, and it's why we keep hearing impeachment is "off the table." Probably true, but the pressure has to go somewhere, and there's only one thing sure: some rough beast even stronger lies in waiting.