WikiLeaks, A Semi-Alternative Take

To be honest, I haven't followed the Wikileaks situation very closely, but Naj, my friend over at Iran Facts, got out her 3,000 mile long cattle prod and zapped me into writing about it. No doubt she knows more about the particulars, but I'd best not let that stop me. Cattle prods hurt! (As they say, Naj, be careful what you wish for.) First off, on leaks, an old Secretary of State once said something like, "Anybody thinks they can keep a secret in this town is nuts." To which I say, "Anybody thinks they can keep a secret in this internet architecture is nuts." 

By thinking its own communications so inviolate, the US government was exposed as being both a loon and its own worst security risk. For this effrontery, the streets must now run with human blood, the open internet must be destroyed, demons are being summoned from their crypts in McLean, Virginia, and diplomacy is...well, I'll stop quoting the current Secretary of State for a minute. Seriously, it's worth noting that the US will now start actively aiding and abetting industry efforts to tame the internet as we've known it, get those peer-to-peer free song downloads done while you can, and we can expect a rapid escalation in censorship policies based around shutting down internet provider servers. Again, those steps won't work very well, but it's the best strategy they've got.

Good spycraft and reportage count on a variety of human urges to leak, particularly on lucky combinations of them. Remember the FBI agent who leaked Watergate details to Woodward and Bernstein? I don't either, but he became charmingly known as Deep Throat, and his primary motivation for leaking was that he was passed over for promotion. He was pretty pissed. His secondary motivation, however, was an offended sensibility which bordered on a good conscience, and it was probably this latter quality that tipped the scales of an embittered man towards action and risk.

There's a reason for dwelling on emotional states and revelation, and I'll preface it by unequivocally stating I'm ecstatic WikiLeaks exists, and think it's greater than Brylcreem and pre-sliced loaves of bread; we are likely entering an age when our sins will increasingly, as Jesus said, be shouted from the housetops; it's great that imitators like OpenLeaks are being spawned; it's great that the MSM has its undies in yet another twist; it's great that mere taxpaying mortals can directly view the often petty, weak-minded drivel they're funding. Also, Julian Assange is one gangsta S.O.B. and it's pathetically obvious the US is trumping up whatever charges it can to detain him. And now, unfortunately, I have some questions about the source(s) of this particular material.


Whoever leaked the Pentagon-State cables was no low-level signals intelligence officer feeling some pangs of guilt and disgust, as was apparently the case with the Iraq papers. I don't have detailed knowledge of Pentagon security procedures, only rudimentary knowledge of general security for online systems, but given the breadth and content of the material, it seems very unlikely this leak was conducted by a single low-ranking, low-cleared individual, and far less likely that it was conducted by multiple leakers acting in concert. Only a high-level administrator or bureaucrat with a lot of knowledge, free access, and time on their hands fits the profile of someone who could pull this off. The Pentagon Papers era is long gone, when one Daniel Ellsburg could simply take a microfiche copy of a classified report and drop it into the lap of The New York Times, or surely when any newspaper published such papers in full without heavy deliberation and editing. Point being, even back then very few people besides Ellsburg had a high enough security clearance to get those papers.

Yes, I'm making the dangerous assumption that the Pentagon and State Department have security procedures and follow them to some extent, but all that money they've gone through has probably been spent on something and paranoia has institutional tendencies. More importantly, any such person or group looking to leak would have to be really, really motivated. Like motivated enough to be executed for violating the State Secrets Act. Motivated enough to face the ongoing scrutiny of a withering internal investigation and polygraph tests. And this in order to merely provide proof of what we in The West already knew with excruciating, repetitive clarity, that many of our emissaries and generals are first-order twits? Sorry, something just isn't adding up for me yet.


There's no doubt the US government is conducting a cyberwar against WikiLeaks, no matter how Man of La Mancha, hypocritical, and technically ignorant that may be. It's a predictable response that will rain repercussions like canned hams down on us all in terms of constrained liberties and commerce. But maybe this really wasn't a leak at all. It lacks the classic, targeted earmarks of a leak and looks more like a well-planned intelligence operation intended to embarrass the West. This looks like the famously dreaded Fuck You Flourish. Penetration could have been gained via patient internal sleeper personnel or a back door, possibly with the former activating the latter. It may have been nothing more than a neat crime of opportunity, but along with the polygraph tests, the Pentagon might want to carefully review its list of network vendors.


So much for Obama's harping on the Chinese about greater transparency. This is like being at a formal dinner in the South, listening to your hosts happily extol the benefits of racial equality after the Civil Rights Act and how thankful they are those bad old days are finally behind them. Then a group of young kids straight out of To Kill A Mockingbird run inside yelling that Tom Robinson just raped Mayella Ewell, the Klan is rounding up to lynch him, and your host grabs a long white robe out of a closet and bolts out of the the house. You can perceive a real democracy by how it welcomes the currency of clear information. This is not that.

Someone Else Sees What I'm Seeing

Julian Robertson sees the pink elephant, and publicly called out the 2008 fiasco. Now he can't figure out how the US and several other countries will avoid triggering hyperinflation with the amount of money they're printing (I can't either). He's noticed that no one is buying long bonds (who would?) and buyers for short ones have dwindled to a few usual suspects. This guy, pun intended, bears watching. He has placed big bets on shorting treasuries and appeared on CNBC to help talk them down:

The US is too dependent on Japan and China buying up the country's debt and could face severe economic problems if that stops, Tiger Management founder and chairman Julian Robertson told CNBC.

"It's almost Armageddon if the Japanese and Chinese don't buy our debt,” Robertson said in an interview. "I don't know where we could get the money. I think we've let ourselves get in a terrible situation and I think we ought to try and get out of it."

Robertson said inflation is a big risk if foreign countries were to stop buying bonds.

“If the Chinese and Japanese stop buying our bonds, we could easily see [inflation] go to 15 to 20 percent,” he said. “It's not a question of the economy. It's a question of who will lend us the money if they don't. Imagine us getting ourselves in a situation where we're totally dependent on those two countries. It's crazy.”

Robertson said while he doesn’t think the Chinese will stop buying US bonds, the Japanese may eventually be forced to sell some of their long-term bonds.

“That's much worse than not buying,” he said. “The other thing is, they're buying almost exclusively short-term debt. And that's what we are offering, because we can't sell the long-term debt. And you know, the history has been that people who borrow short term really get burned.”

A clever person concerned about hyperinflation and wanting to make a financial killing would use exchange-traded funds to go long on 2-year Treasuries and short on 10-year Treasuries, which is probably something like what Julian Robertson is doing.

Mousterian Age Industry & HandyMan Tool

Speculative pre-historic Question of the Month: how did they clip their nails?

Last month in the spirit of not having any right whatsoever to do so, I figured out (to my satisfaction, at least) why Neanderthals went extinct. I promised to attach a pic of a prized jasper tool which hangs above my fireplace "soon."

Apart from being a distinctive, compact and versatile tool which can be used as a cutter, scraper, and borer depending on which side is applied, and from having a shape perfect for receiving a thumb, what compelled me about this artifact was that it was made of beautiful, unweathered jasper. Jasper was coveted in the ancient world for jewelry and tools, and whoever made this unique could and did make more.

You are looking at a sharp flake of great prestige, which also was a basis of stone-age trade although this three-in-one was, one suspects, kept off the market as a personal effect. It was flaked by what looks like a semi-Levallois technique but isn't anything like the turtle-shaped circles of the Acheulian Era 100,000 years ago, nor is it nearly as thin or as specialized as the Chatelperronian flint flakes which started to appear 32,000 years ago. However old, it is a masterpiece, even sui generis and will still cut flesh.

It is from Fontmaure one of Europe's most famous Neanderthal sites near a modern-day farm and this hue of jasper tools has only been found there. The Neanderthals at Fontmaure lived above-ground, village-dwellers, and most tools from there are smaller than my HandyMan, as if the jasper was rationed to milk as many tools out of each precious core as efficiently as possible. Other objects found there are made of sandstone, flint and light gray quartz.

The light gray quartz artifacts originated from a site one hundred kilometers away, clear evidence of trade. I don't know how many above-ground Neanderthal sites exist, but there surely aren't many, and remains of both humans and animals have been excavated in Fontmaure's strata. Interestingly, limestone balls were found of a sort still used by natives in South America as a throwing weapon to tangle around legs, as well as triangular mine-pyramids perhaps used for decoration or ritual.

The HandyMan hangs directly over where I keep my Leatherman toolset. They are companions beneath a pastel blue piece of the Berlin Wall. Maybe someday I'll acquire this Fontmaure left-handed jasper handaxe. I hope they didn't use that one for fingernails.

Palestine, Gaza, And Long Shadows

In modern times it's hard to unpack all the info-maelstroms, it's easy to get snagged by electronic histrionics. They strobe-blind and strand us from seeing our natural backgrounds of time, connection and depth. The Media excel at casting, destroying, discovering, and re-casting Molochs of irrationality, erecting false yet powerful narrative arcs which demand our mental fealties. The falsities control us on the cheap, leaving collateral damages of knowledge, context, and common sense.

Israel's invasion of Gaza, for example, is utterly devoid of a context which should be completely obvious, even to Westerners, and some will soon be provided below. First, it's wise to admit my approach to thinking about politics and conflict was already unorthodox by inclination, and was kicked even further towards a "long shadows" framework by once being horribly, frighteningly wrong.

In Yugoslavia in the 1980s, I failed to see a devolution into chaos and genocide as it was happening right in front of my eyes. I cheerfully walked and stayed in places where little old women and pre-schoolers would die by sniper fire for hurrying groceries across a street, where pits would be dug to dispose of massacres, where a war against civilians (focused on Islamic Bosniaks) would soon ensue. The war consisted of ethnic cleansing, siege, mass rape, execution and torture, where it was lucky to starve in concentration camps. Rather than predict reality, however, I reported future prospects in line with official perceptions, and pronounced the area ripe for Western expansion.

All the calling cards of chaos were there for me to see: the empty shelves, rationing, black markets, Soviet-style surveillance, sharp ethnic and religious divisions, the eroding commons, growing inequities and casual police corruption. Rather than think for myself, I chose to believe what an optimistic media told me. Here's the kicker: even if my ignorance of the area's history had been corrected, I would still have denied, and vehemently, that an imminent war of atrocity would be caused by conflicts which took place more than 400 years earlier.

There's nothing like knowing that even if you'd done the homework, you still would've failed the exam. The lesson of not being equal to that test has never left me. It has urged me to be more clinical in appraisal, more mindful of past echoes, to scrutinize first-hand observations over distant theories. It forever shook my faith in the blithe premises of unchaperoned diversity, and taught me that context, however complex, is reality's keystone.

Now, then: let's go back to Israel, Palestine, and Gaza. All the way back to Zephaniah chapter 2, verse 5:

For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.

Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea coast, the nation of the Cherethites! the word of the LORD is against you; O Canaan, the land of the Philistines, I will even destroy thee, that there shall be no inhabitant.

The scripture above was written circa 630 B.C. by one of the most obscure prophets of the Old Testament. "Philistines" is a Hebrew term derived from the root p-l-sh, or פלש‎, which means to invade, divide, or overwhelm. Referring to that same people, the Romans used the word to rename Israel as "Palestina," a final insult to the Jews after their million-corpse rebellion was put down late in Hadrian's reign, 135 A.D. As for the Philistines, no one knows where they came from originally. The available evidence indicates they were ethnically distinct Caucasian refugees or prisoners, (likely from one of the Aegean islands, maybe Mycenae) sent by an Egyptian pharaoh to the southwest coast of Palestine some 14 centuries ago. They were a sea people, remarkably skilled mariners, iron-smiths, and merchants.

At that time, and until its name was changed to Judeah post-Exodus, "Canaan" was the name for all the lands east of the River Jordan to the sea, which had been a province of Egypt dating to 2000 B.C. Beautiful purple fabrics, prized above all others, were made in Canaan with dyes coaxed from an indigenous murex snail. The dye was called Knaa, and the Phoenicians (Greek for "purple people") became famous for shipping the fabric all over the known world from Jaffa (Haifa). It signified royalty.

Many peoples existed in the land other than Philistines and Judeans, most of which are even more lost to history than the Hittites. The Old Testament remains the only document to list the tribes and clans apparently displaced following the Exodus (see Genesis 10: 15-19). Today's Palestinians and Israelis are the survivors of those ancient disputes, in which one can imagine a violent churning of migrations, innovations, and assimilations. The southwest coast of Canaan which the Philistines first seized is now known as the Gaza Strip.

Gaza ("strong point") was named for the most formidable of its five city-states, and the Philistines gained their pejorative stature after gaining them by Egyptian mandate. They became wealthy, built up and pushed further out into Hebrew-held lands. And so it came to pass that the Hebrews developed a special hatred for the Philistines--and they must by no means have been alone in reviling the strange and powerful usurpers of choice coast-line. In the Bible, conflict between them seems to be a constant, and several hundred Old Testament scriptures are devoted to heaping scorn on Philistines over and above the other unwanted occupants of Canaan. The stories of Samson and Delilah, Saul, Samuel, and David all feature Philistines as villains, and when David slew Goliath to become King of Judah, he slew one of their champions.

To a contemporary Israeli with even a cursory knowledge of tradition, Palestinians are synonymous with Philistines, the Gazans most of all, and ancient Canaan is geographically synonymous with the outer borders of modern Israel. As a policy, revenge and cleansing of them and the other cattle-people ("goyim") are deeply embedded in Israeli tradition, and more. It's repeatedly spelled out in sacred text as the will and commandment of god. as it is in Deuteronomy 7, verse 1:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;

Fast forward to last November, stop, and note: it's handy to keep deep background in mind while you debate whether to fire up your Bullshit Detector. Our media now tells us that Gaza's Hamas Party broke a cease-fire with Israel, easy enough to believe. But rewind two years, stop. Hamas won a democratic election held in 2006 at the behest of the Bush Administration. The US, Canada, and the EU froze Palestinian government accounts and withheld all payments. Israel then blockaded the Gaza Strip, where 2.5 million people are crammed into a hundred square kilometers, and the industrial output and trade promptly shrank by 95%. The only food Gazans get is from humanitarian aid, and Israel supplies the electricity (not!). All manner of subterfuge, spy-craft, and force have been applied to throw Hamas out, and have failed.

Israel broke the cease-fire on November 4th, 2008 when its forces killed a Palestinian in Gaza. Some people there responded with a single mortar barrage towards Israeli positions, no casualties. Israel then killed six Gazans, to which Hamas responded with its "advanced" Qassam rockets. This fits the pattern. 79% of Israel-Palestine conflict pauses were interrupted when a Palestinian was killed. 8% of pauses were interrupted by Palestinian attacks, with the remainder unclear because 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same date. Of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel broke 24, or 96%. Israel attacked and killed Palestinians every time after 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days (data source: Israeli Consulate, New York).

The picture above is of a Qassam rocket impact on a road. It didn't even leave a pot-hole. Rewind 2638 years, Deuteronomy 7, verses 2-3, stop:

And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them:

Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

The shadows are long and often ugly, but the sun also rises on the naked and the dead. On Jew and on Muslim. Israel has finally lost a PR battle for narrative arc in the West, as we have seen the pictures and video unravel on the InterNews. When the next Gazan school is bombed, the next family lies in a house entombed, Hamas will gain strength. It's not enough for Israel to stop now, the ship embarked and is cruising for a distant boycott. To survive another 20 or 30 years, Israelis have to pull their heads out from where they are so deeply stuck: from the dream of a Zion that never was, and from the Bible's ass.

Blagojevich Might Skate

I previously marveled that the Blago case broke with the tradition of political corruption cases because no money had actually changed hands. Turns out there's a reason. The Chicago Tribune blew it for federal prosecutors by ending its cooperation with Fitzgerald, who had requested they hold a story, by running it on Dec. 5th. The run-down is given in a dynamite inside-reporting WSJ online article:

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the FBI to arrest Rod Blagojevich before sunrise Tuesday in order to stop a crime from being committed. That would have been the sale of the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

But the opposite is true: Members of Fitzgerald’s team are livid the scheme didn’t advance, at least for a little longer, according to some people close to Fitzgerald’s office. Why? Because had the plot unfolded, they might have had an opportunity most feds can only dream of: A chance to catch the sale of a Senate seat on tape, including the sellers and the buyers.

The precise timing of Tuesday’s dramatic, pre-dawn arrest was not dictated by Fitzgerald, nor was it dictated by the pace of Blagojevich’s alleged “crime spree.” It was dictated by the Chicago Tribune, according to people close to the investigation and a careful reading of the FBI’s affidavit in the case.

At Fitzgerald’s request, the paper had been holding back a story since October detailing how a confidante of Blagojevich was cooperating with his office.

Blago read the story, called his brother, and told him to "Undo that thing." Slimeball? Yes. But it is not a crime to advance agendas, or to go over a list of preferred candidates and discuss one's future political career, and Blago can honestly say he didn't take a dime for the governor's prerogative regarding appointment of vacated Senate seat. That's why he's not resigning. The way he sees it, having a third party set up a charity which he and/or his wife could run is not illegal, and I don't know that he's technically wrong on that. He figures a local jury will see it his way. Expect taped evidence and testimony that makes him look like a pig, but America has elected worse.

As for the rumors that Rahm Emanuel or Obama are mixed up in influence peddling? Hopeful tempest, meet pretty teapot. They promised nothing but appreciation. It's right in the complaint.

(Update: The pic is of Ann Cavello of the Bay City Bombers, inspiration for Jim Croce's hit, Roller Derby Queen, "the meanest hunk o' woman anybody ever seen, wham-a-bam, whoa, wham-a-bam.")

Four Year-Old Existentialism, Part I

The animated children's movie 'Ice Age' features Manny, a lonely mammoth. It becomes clear Manny has lost his mate and baby to human hunters, and it is implied his species faces extinction. This prompted a discussion, in which Lord Running Boy asked:

"Daddy, if mammoths could talk, would they still went ex-stink?"

Super-Spies Agree: United States To Surrender Control Of World

The National Intelligence Council (i.e., all above-ground government spooks) issued a report today predicting how the world would look by 2025 (AP/AFP/BBC/WaPo). I find these exercises entertaining, but you needn't bother reading a fairly standard novocaine-laced acronym-strewn litany of bureaucratically paranoid woe telling us what we already know.

The good: the world, apparently, will still have people left on it to fight each other. The bad: the US will not have enslaved everyone in McFreedom Fry Camps and make them keep buying plastic-electric thingies or else undergo the re-application of microwave blasters. The folks paid $100 billion or so per year to think about Complicated International Shit foresee more resource wars, a strong possibility of dramatic climate change, global instability (as in, umm, war), more WMD use by the bad people, and China will of course kill us all, perhaps after joining up with India, which will then be killed, too, after totally running out of water and starting to die on its own.

The US share of global production at the end of WWII was 75-80%. Not much way to go but down after that, and when it became obvious the world would be multi-polar (at the fall of the Soviet Union, circa 1990), we could have started using a temporary windfall of pre-eminence to craft treaties, international standards, alliances, back-room deals, and legal language which would grant a most-favored status, both economically and culturally, to the US for 50+ years. If you've ever watched Star Trek, you will have noticed that they speak English in space.

Instead, the power structure here tizzed out, ignored the real opportunity and over-reached in the worst possible way. It truly sucked to watch them do this, and know. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) surmised it could leverage a temporary military technology advantage (or in their inflationary terms, a Military Revolution) into a hegemony set in re-bar. If India or China got out of line, we could simply step on a pipeline or two and cut off their blood. Amongst the many things the PNAC crowd, which is to say Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their coterie failed to notice was that the real military revolution was occurring not with lasers shooting from the sky, but with citizen-soldiers (a.k.a. terrorists) using prepared positions, cheap explosives, sophisticated evasion/cohesion, and disposable cell phones.

The United States, in all likelihood, will be one nation amongst many. An ideology of exceptionalism will have trouble clutching up to that world, but there is reason to think it can happen. Other nations, as they've matured, have done it. I mean, look at Germany. And of my god, the Japanese, the Swiss. You will find few nations with a more innate, quiescent sense of superiority than the French, but they live rather peaceably these days, secure in the knowledge they're living better than anyone else. I can imagine far worse outcomes for my nation of birth and conscious choice, and am reconciled to the fact that the refrigerator in our kitchen was built to the standards of the European Union.

More Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton

The Dem caucus has mapped out their turf on healthcare (Kennedy and Baucus), and on seniority & leadership (Reid), just as the "Clinton as Sec-State" rumors began swirling and leaking. Leaking with two aides quoted in every story.

That's the kind of choreography we got from the Dark Side for 5-6 years after 9/11. Either the Obama camp wound up a couple of allies in Kennedy and Reid to show Clinton she wouldn't get Senate Majority Leader or anything in Health Care, or La Clintonessa heard the rumors and sent out feelers. Given the communications discipline (not among the core Clinton traits) the former seems far more likely.

Bottom line, her Senate opportunities were being closed off right around the time Sec State rumblings started. It will give her a world stage, more cameras, and possibly high drama, so my bet is she won't be able to turn it down.

The Wit And Wisdom Of Rahm Emanuel

I hate Rahm Emanuel. I hate him for being a shitty DCCC chair, for battling with Howard Dean over the 50-state strategy, for doing everything possible to undermine the winning strategy, then for taking credit when it worked. I hate him for running Bush-sympathizing 'Blue Dog Democrats' in red districts in 2006, and I hate him for being a smirking phoney smarm. He is rumored to hold an Israeli passport, to have volunteered for the IDF during Desert Storm, he is a Zionist and passes out Uzis to Jewish gangstas, "The Isros," in synagogues all over Chicago's north side. My mildest reaction to him as Obama's chief of staff was "Blerrrchh!"

But then I thought, "What would Saul Alinsky do? What would a community terrorist who has improbably seized power next do?" Get himself an enforcer. A Nastasi Beria, Luca Brazzi, knock-on-the-door-in-the-night Bad Cop. My hunch is it was also a "keep your enemies closer" move. By naming Emanuel, Obama fulfilled Chicago political machine payback in perpetuity and also removed a major, ongoing congressional pain in the ass, one which is now condemned to schedule meetings and incessantly listen to people bitch and whine about how they absolutely must see the President. Music, sweet music.

Is it any wonder Rahmbo didn't immediately accept the post? He's done it before, and knows it often requires arriving 5AM and leaving 9PM. Plus, it messes with his ambition to be Speaker of the House, so he only committed 2 years to the job from hell. A placeholder will take his congressional seat, but things aren't always predictable on that watch. Especially now. The shit that's being aerosolized will not have settled back down upon the turnip field a short two years from now.

So Obama has a (preferably hypoallergenic) pit bull for CoS, and past holders of that slot like Dick Cheney and John Sununu were noted for startling levels of unapologetic rudeness. You don't need to trust the holder of the post to be nice, you need smarts, stamina, effectiveness, and quick answers to your reins. Obama trusts his combat team: Axelrod, Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, and his wife. Not the Merchant of Hyde Park, who will henceforth be Axelrod's responsibility. Emanuel scares the ever-living shit out of the Reich Wing, and he's as bipartisan as a broken nose. (See the cancelled SNL sketch above.) Politics is his blood sport. This is a good thing, if your President backs off from it.

Here's another Rahmbo angle: I suspect Obama will throw deep right away on the Palestine-Israel issue as a way to open up the options, because progress there, or the convincing illusion of it, makes everything else easier in the Mid-East. Emaneul knows how to work with the Clintons, is an intimate who maintained his neutrality, which pushes a few jigsaws together with Hillary as SecState. Baggage or no, the Clintons have mondo stature on the archway issue that's screwing the entire world up. They're the most recent people to make any headway on reconciliation and recognition, exact roboratives needed to free the Mid-East oxen from the desperate mire.

Obama is going after Israel, and it will be leaned on hard, with all the remaining US leverage available. Right where it should've been placed for the last decade and more. It may be tool late, as Israel is busy sucking up to Russia with all possible speed, but having Rahm as CoS is like establishing an open channel to Tel Aviv. He will communicate what's doable, what's not, and he'll be believed.

For everything else domestic, he'll be diabolically effective, and will use his time in the White Cabin to gather power, not burn bridges. Aaron Sorkin's scheming character on the West Wing, Josh Lyman, is supposedly based on Emanuel's three-ring performances with the Clintons. Which, if true, means he gives a shit about liberal causes. And as for the rest, I'll take Machiavellian over Vaudevillian any day.

OK, So Maybe Obama Won't Win Georgia

This is the probably best signage I've seen yet out of the McCain campaign, brilliantly themed as grass-roots folk art. It's in Florida, but they filmed "In the Heat of the Night" in Georgia or Mississippi or someplace with swamps, so I'm going for the Virgil Tibbs angle. It's in a town called "Barefoot Bay." From the actual news story, here's what the man displaying the new McCain slogan has to say:

Lacasse put the sign in his front yard four days ago. ‘If I see anybody touching that sign, I got a club sitting right over there,’ Lacasse said.

The next lawn sign for McCain supporters will read: "Obama Half-Breed Muslin Lawyer."

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.

Charlie Wilson's War & The Beauty Parlor Reaganites

Former Reagan officials are angry about the new Tom Hanks movie, Charlie Wilson's War. They say it aggrandizes how much a mere Texas Rep, a Democrat!, helped the Afghanis to forcibly eject Soviet occupiers. They dispute how much credit "the Avocado," CIA agent Gust Avrakatos, deserves for devising effective insurgency tactics. They claim Wilson and Avocado actively resisted sending Stinger missiles to the tribes, finally being overruled by Cap Weinberger, certified Cold War Hero. A blog called "Libertas" is one of many piling on the trope:

Sorry, Hollywood, THIS (Ronald Reagan) is the man who won the Cold War you wanted us to lose, not some cocaine-snorting, whore-mongering, alcoholic liberal… It was this man, the people who served him, Pope John Paul, Margaret Thatcher, the people in Eastern Europe who rose and followed the likes of Lech Walesa, our brave military, and a man named Ollie North who also sent covert arms to freedom fighters, but there will be no movies about him…

I'd love to see a movie about Ollie North! One which depicts a moral compass Heinrich Himmler would've loved, although of course the pic would have nothing to do with defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan. That's why there's a movie about a cocaine-snorting, whore-mongering alcoholic liberal who delivered enough money to a wholly insubordinant, down-and-dirty CIA agent to blow up every Russian in the country, an agent whom the Republicans hated, feared, and tried to get rid of. At one point, Avocado controlled 70% of the CIA's discretionary budget for the entire world. On top of that, Wilson and Bill Casey got the Saudi government to match the US funding buck-for-buck.

The bad liberals begged for Stinger missiles to give to the mujahedin, and it was the Reagan Administration which wouldn't send them. It was the Reagan Administration which held up the shipment of sniper rifles for nearly 5 years on fears they would be used to target Russian generals. (Finally the rifles were sent, but without the night vision goggles needed to make them effective.) It was the Reagan Administration which held back the good stuff, fearing it would offend Gorbachev.

Wilson and Avrakatos were flawed bit players who thought up a solution and pursued it with single-minded determination. Just pawns, really, of Zbigniew Brzenski's 1980 plan to stick Afghanistan up the same Commie ass which took his native Poland and killed family members and friends. (Z-Big was Carter's national security advisor.) Still, the grasping and whining from people widely praised for engineering a "Morning in America" (which, if it existed at all, was made possible by hard policies of their predecessors), is beyond unbecoming. It's yet another unfortunate confirmation that duplicitous, perpetually insecure glory-whores rarely change. Reagan's whores claim the movie is liberally biased, a low blow to conservatives because the screenplay was written by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of two Liberal Wet Dream White Houses portrayed on television series "The West Wing" and in Michael Douglas movie "The American President." Clearly, Aaron Sorkin wants all Republicans to be lined up against a wall and shot, ergo speaks with forked tongue.

That the Reaganistas are not remembered for treating Afghanistan like a snotty Kleenex while basking in political glory is too bad. Once the Russians pulled out, the Tough Guys were too timid and dim-witted to maintain any presence and funding. In their stupidity, they did not rebuild Afghanistan, preferring to create a power vacuum into which were sucked the spores of the Taliban. Kool-Aiders will claim stability wasn't their responsibility, they couldn't have known it would go bad, the Cold War was won anyway, the Taliban wasn't formed until the Clinton years, yadda yada. Of course, that's also saying ignorance of basic statecraft is wonderful. In keeping with Republican style.

Meanwhile, after the Russkies hauled ass, a rich Saudi national named Osama bin Laden (OBL) stayed on in Afghanistan to build roads, dams, and schools, to further promulgate the Muslim reformation (Al-Qaeda), and to build a network so loyal to him that he hasn't been turned in despite a $40 million reward. Again, the tropes proclaim no connection between the CIA and bin Laden, that he never got any direct US funding, and the events in Afghanistan and Pakistan had nothing to do with 9/11. The rabid Puggies don't seem to realize the dreaded librul Sorkin adapted the bothersome movie's screenplay from a book, one funnily enough called Charlie Wilson's War. And they're missing the central plot point:

What if, instead of Osama bin Laden, we were the ones who stayed on to build the roads, dams, and schools?

"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.

History Never Repeats...But It Can Rhyme

Bush will go down in history as the torture president. I hate that this country ever had a president who made the torture of human beings official government policy.

-Tristero at Digby's Hullabaloo

The following piece by IOZ, It's All Just a Little Bit of History Repeating, came to me via The River Blog. If you're not in a "raw food for thought" or "this is not my beautiful house" sort of mood, skip to the next post. If you are, go for it. It's push-back on Tristero's somewhat purposeful naivete' above, using a mind also pushing lots of electrical current back through a molten ball of mercury vapor. The result is a brightness which exposes much in the way of Real vs. Fugazi. Again, proceed only if you are comfortable with intellectual nudity, take your moonshine by a Mason jar, or both.

"American liberals accuse their conservative counterparts of atavism, but they themselves are equally guilty--if not guiltier--of eying an imaginary past. Because their program is untethered from the history and reality of the actual United States, a vapid, vacuous series of exhortations to the better angels of our nature without the slightest attempt to grapple with the real actions of our country over the past centuries, they propose it as a reinvigoration or restoration of a peaceable, humanitarian, democratic tradition that never in fact existed.

As partisans, it's understandable that they would want to exculpate their own political and intellectual forebears. Likewise, it's easy to see why the myth of a Just America plays so heavily in their rhetorical contortions. I'll make the point again: all politics is conservative in the sense that it seeks to fulfill the promise of an heroic past. (Italics added.) The impediment is that the past wasn't heroic, but that's never stopped anyone.

Tristero, AKA Richard Einhorn, was born in 1952. The School of the Americas, wherein the United States Military trained allied armies in the techniques of state terror and torture, was founed in 1946. The Vietnam Conflict, in which millions of Vietnamese were slaughtered in order to satisfy the theoretical fancies of American paranoids, began with the arrival of American "advisors" right around the time Tristero was born, and it was prosecuted alternately under Democratic and Republican leadership for twenty years. The Iranian coup, "Operation Ajax," occured in 1953. The number of foreign dictators supported directly by the United States, not even in secret, despite their affections for torture, mass murder, sand all other manners of human savagery and indignity is too long to list. The practice of "extraordinary rendition" began not under Bush, but as a presidential directive issued by Bill Clinton. The use of black sites, CIA prisons, secret transfers, and torture date at least to the beginning of the cold war. Torture has long been the official policy of the United States.

What sets the Bush Administration apart is only that it has been unabashed where others have been circumspect. This has made it easy for partisans like Tristero to fulminate against abuses that they would have otherwise been happy to ignore. How, you ask, do I know they would be happy to do so? Because they did--in this case for many decades. They ignored the dispassionate critiques of people like Chomsky or else dismissed them as lunatics. They believed that people like Jim Bovard were hysterics and heretics. Somewhat more moderate critiques of empire--Vidal for instance--were more palatable to them because the writing was prettier. But they never accepted the heart of the critique. (Ibid.) If it were true that Bill Clinton sought to expand, and did expand, the powers of government to combat "terrorism," to kidnap and to torture, and to prosecute foreign military actions, then it would hardly do to spend hours a day and thousands of words figuring out which member of his identical political faction to bless with the keys to the kingdom.

The idea that George W. Bush occupies a lower rung on the ladder into the inferno than, say, Harry S Truman is preposterous on its face. As good liberals everywhere worry that Bush will launch a war with Iran, with the fortunate collusion of their own liberal politicians, perhaps even using a "preemptive" nuclear strike, let us recall that Harry S Truman did, in fact use nuclear weapons on a civilian population. Twice. (Ed: when he had already received two requests for peace talks from the Japanese govt.) They note that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dying at the hands of our invasion under Bush, but how many Vietnamese died under the escalations of Johnson and Nixon? These aren't cavils. I have already written about the similarities between Bush and Clinton when it comes to the catch-all usefulness of terrorism to consolidate state power and to subvert the basic rights of man.

What accounts for this deliberate blindness? Is it intellectual laziness? Is it political "tribalism," to use Arthur Silber's going term? To a degree. More substantially, it's blindness motivated by moral and intellectual cowardice. If, after all, President Bush is the continuation of an historic trend; if present policies are the apotheoses of past practices; then the complete hollowness of choosing Obama over Clinton over Edwards becomes readily apparent. The bankruptcy of investing time and energy in people who will do nothing to change the fundamental principles of the American empire because they are products of the empire becomes evident.

If, however, that were the case, then one would be less inclined to imagine himself vaguely as a revolutionary for the courage of pulling a democratic lever in a curtained-off little room. He would first have to confront his sundry importance. His dispensibility. His irrelevance. He would then have to confront what it means to be one more disposable body in a vast military and mercantile empire. He would have to see that the only real politics are a more radical politics than he is willing to entertain, and he would have to admit that if change comes, it will not come within his lifetime.

The principle here is Copernican. To understand your actual place, you must first discover that you're not at the center, and then discover that you are very, very small. There's a different kind of power in that knowledge than in the delusion of grandness and centrality. But it isn't a power that bears quadrennial rewards of falling balloons and butterflies on inauguration day."

Made it this far? All politics is conservative in the sense that it seeks to fulfill the promise of an heroic past. Yeah. And creative adherence to that principle is how Hitler won over Germany. Like Germans, I think that to change, we first have to admit what we are, and have been. Welcome to my smallness. Here...have some butterflies, and some balloons.

Pakistan Declares Martial Law

A year ago, exiled former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto began offering US leadership a magic bullet: if they helped her become Prime Minister of Pakistan, she could iron out all its problems. Musharraf was leaned on and was proffered a populist coalition government with Bhutto, an arrangement he eventually accepted. Last week, however, Bhutto's promises and populist appeal didn't last past the car bombs in Karachi.

Today, Musharraf declared martial law, deposed the head of Pakistan's Supreme Court, and suspended the constitution and elections slated for January. The US expressed disappointment, but has no other option but to support Musharraf. It will continue to press him to make war upon Pakistan's outlying tribes in an effort to salvage the 'NATO' effort in Afghanistan. This is not a pragmatic course. The Bush Administration is probably best known for its bungling of Iraq. By strategic comparison to Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, Iraq is probably a Safe House.

In the past months, Musharraf has sent tens of thousands of soldiers into areas bordering Afghanistan, with poor results. Sympathy for the Taliban there is strong, and hundreds (if not thousands) of government soldiers simply surrendered rather than fight. Throughout the rest of Pakistan there is sympathy for Islamic utopian ideals, and even more widespread disgust for Amerian objectives which, to the average observer, appear to be imperialist. Martial law will turn moderates into strange bedfellows with extremists.

The religious parties in Pakistan are very well organized. The more Musharraf tries to use his army against "extremists" (Islamic rebels), the more his generals will have to subvert his orders. They know the will of their troops, and know Pakistan is on the precipice of transformation. Transformation into what no one may know, but 'Islamic extremists' and supporters of democracy won't put up with martial law for long. Together, they are now the latent power in that land. Musharraf is known as a "hard man with a hard job," and he would not have made this move if he had other options. It's just buying time. How much time is anyone's guess, but Pakistan appears set to splinter.

Iran Facts Update: Earth Moves Under Thy Feet

Update: Talks in Rome held, and successful too, According to Solana.
In this picture, he is shaking hands with the resigned negotiator, Dr. Larijani. Iranians showed a united front, and willingness to negotiate peaceful solution.

I am beginning to romanticize the cleverness of the Iranian government, wondering with a satisfied grin: was the resignation a part of the choreography?
=================================

More than 180 Iranian MPs have signed a letter praising former chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, who has resigned from his post.

The deputy speaker of Iran's parliament has said that Mr Larijani resigned because he could no longer work with Mr. Ahmadinejad, confirming suspicions that they had fallen out on policy, and possibly personality as well.

This means Ahmadinejad's in trouble!

This indicates that if Ahmadinejad deviates from the expressed wishes of the supreme leadership and the parliament, he will be in constitutional trouble! That, Larijani attended the Rome talks as representative of the supreme leader is already alluding to to exposed rift between Iran's ruling factions. However, it seems that the so called "islamo-fascist-dictatorship" in Iran is acting more responsibly and more democratically than that of the US of A!

Mr Velayati, the former war-time foreign minister- now senior foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has expressed objection to Ahmadinejad accepting Larijani's resignation: "In the very important and sensitive situation where the nuclear issue is at the moment it would be better if this [resignation] did not happen, or at least it was prevented".

According to Velayati (read the voice of supreme leader on foreign matters) pragmatists believe in negotiating with the international community and talk of following the path of Japan.

It would be becoming worrisome however, if Ahmadinejad takes a radical stance against the supreme leader. He has been showing Komeini-ist megalomaniac symptoms, and he has been capitalizing on the capitalist corruption of those who are opposing him at this moment. Khomeini's radicalism has done great harm to Iran. I doubt this rookie is afraid to fall in the same Neo-Con trap that his spiritual leader fell, 30 years ago!

(Editor's Opinion: Ahmadinejad seems to be losing control of his "Base." Like in the US, the clerics in Iran hold the minority position, but the most concentrated power. Except in Iran, they will act functionally, meet, and deal. Khameini is the dealer, and by comparison to our crazies, he's taking a "first do no harm" approach. Larijani resigned in order to free himself from A-jad, and he's still very much in the negotiating driver's seat as evidenced in Rome. Iran's end game? It wants nuclear power so it can generate electricity and doesn't have to burn or export so much oil. It's reserves are wildly overstated, and its oil fields are in collapse. The objective is NOT to nuke Israel, screeching harpies notwithstanding. The contract for providing nuclear power generation is now at play between Russia, the US, and France. Thanks to Naj at Iran Facts for the high-quality local insight.)

Hidden Histories & The Bombing Of Benazhir Bhutto

[Caught in sensual music all neglect the monuments of unaging intellect. At night old friends and such as me ate sushi in a Boomtown restaurant. At one point we discussed the assassination attempt on Benazhir Bhutto.]

What a terrible thing, hundreds of people blown apart. How big that bomb must've been.

Terrible for us, too.

Really? How so?

It's so because as you know we caused atomic bombs to be given to ul-Haq, the general who killed Bhutto's father in '79. Who went to Berkeley, by the way.

Tsha! Berkeley. Hotbed for hippie socialists.

First, we didn't trust India and still don't. The Bomb was quid pro quo for setting the biggest CIA station ever up in Islamabad. The Saudi Foreign Legion loaded donkeys with weapons, the donkeys climbed with Stinger missiles through the Wazir passes. Russian boys same age as me back then were riding around in trucks so they could get ambushed. The missiles messed up the helicopters, shot down some generals. The soldiers and half Russia got messed up on smack. With the Bomb, the CIA and Foggy Bottom raised alarms and tried to stop it but they got trumped and stifled by the same guys who run this Tom Clancy shit right now.

C'mon, you're talking crazy we would never have done no such thing. Give the bomb away to a bunch of Islamic fascists? No way.

Weren't you just foretelling how thin the world's thread is hanging and how the stock market's life should be feared? Whatever. Believe what they tell you Sunday morning. Pakistan has the nukes, it's got the people who'll use them. The means to deliver them. Probably the same people who tried to off Bhutto's daughter. Musharraf is so desperate to keep the lid on that he's bringing her in to form a coalition. The whole thing depends on a few people staying alive. Kinda like the country formerly known as Yugoslavia, but with nukes.

Stop it, you're cheering us up. Maybe you should go on Meet the Press! Talking like you're some kind of expert.

Yeah right. Monuments to our magnificence. They press the meat so flat we can receive wisdom like pizzas. Sing, baby, sing. Well maybe the truth can't compete with the Kabuki. But when the spin is spun and forgotten the truth stays in the ground like veins of gold. They stay put, can't get rid of 'em. They're right there waiting on forensics like CSI. Even after a thousand years someone like Ed Gibbon comes along, digs 'em up and sings out to Byzantium. He was way into the Roman Empire because he was thinking so hard about his own.

So you're saying Pakistan's going to go up?

Yep. Not saying they'll nuke somebody for sure, but maybe. If it happens, it'll escalate. And all this Iran shit is just a scarecrow. They want to bomb the only stable thing on the whole damned yellow brick road. Crazy mother#&*%ers. That axis of evil they kept pushing, it's stuck smack dab into Pakistan. Strapped onto us like a suicide bomb. Hey, I hear they're making a movie about Afghanistan called Charlie Wilson's War. Tom Hanks is in it. He's doing fantastic stuff now.

Yeah. I loved Band of Brothers. Let's drink to that. To Bands of Brothers, and to America!

[Clink. Clink. Clink.]

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.

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.

iPhone, Therefore iAm

One sunny day last week was iPhone day. Because of my profession (speech technology) and the nefarious activities of a particular client involved in podcasting, having an iPhone is a necessity. Or, at least that's what my partner and I told ourselves after a few bouts of rationalization, guilt, and cover-up: then it went like this: "Debate has now concluded, and the floor is closed. We're getting them. Gentlemen, start your engines!" Of course, Lord Wife already knew of the decision well in advance.

Oh, yeah? Well I know things well in advance, too. For example, I know the battery to this fragile sucker is going to die, at best, 21 days after the one-year warranty lapses. That's only if someone doesn't steal it first, and if my son (Lord Running Boy) doesn't drop it into a sink full of water while playing on the sly with a camera so intuitive and slick, any toddler can use it to take great pictures. There's a good chance it could drop out of my pocket and shatter like a crystal chandelier on the floor of Whole Foods, or supernatural forces could get involved, like the time I saw our iPod fade and disappear into thin air, snatched by envious poltergeists who reached forth to envelop it in the sheltering bosom of their realm. (The echoes of distant laughter could be heard, along with a cry which sounded a lot like "Toonage!") Yes, a lot of things could befall this media equivalent of a sleek P-51 Mustang. It can do anything a flat-screen TV can do--but it can do it over Berlin. And I know that battery is screwed either WAY!

I also know that there's a YouTube button right on the screen. And Google Maps with directions and satellite imagery. Instant-on streaming video which works surprisingly well on the 200kbps EDGE network, delightfully well on Wi-Fi. Consider this single point of data for a moment: a whopping total of 17% of cell phone owners capable of playing YouTube have used them to do so. By comparison, here's the just-compiled research on the iPhone:

Despite owning their new iPhones for a short period of time, 63% of iPhone owners have already used the widescreen-enabled device to watch video.
Half of iPhone owners (51%) have watched a YouTube video on their phone.
46% have watched a music video.
34% have watched the news.
32% have watched a movie trailer.

The graph above the post's title shows the number of news stories filed per day about this media device. Grown to over 20,000 per day, still going strong. Twice the number of stories yesterday as the day of the launch. What for? What's the rumpus? Because it's as good as they say, that's what for. It's so elegant it makes me want to download a free copy of Plato's 'Republic' from iTunes (yep, it's in there) and listen to it as an audiobook. There's been so much thought put into the interface functions that, unlike the Palm Treo sitting on my desk as a paperweight (make me an offer), it makes getting my emails and voice-mails a pleasure. It may even cure my non-violent but total resistance to text messaging.

A product development friend at T-Mobile says they've taken the little pony apart, sliced it, diced it, looked at it from every angle...and determined it's not a threat. To wit: 1) Communications functions aren't good; 2) Virtual keyboard a serious drawback to high wpm and interface integrity; 3) Worst of all, no one likes getting fingerprints on their screens. Summary: Not a serious communications device.

Guess what, muchachos? Denial! You're in dee. Nye. Ull. YouTube is the future of communication. I can go to Amazon, rent 'North By Northwest,' download it to my desktop, sync my phone, then watch it wide-screen. The screen resolution is so high and sharp I'll actually enjoy the movie. As for the virtual keyboard, it isn't any worse than the slippery, convex-shaped keys on the pad of my former (buh-bye!) Treo. For the first time in my life I have set wallpaper on my cell--it's the painting 'Sunday in The Park.' I just switched to that in 10 seconds from the peacock feather I tried out for the sheer hell of it. My ring tone is from a WWII-era Ma Bell. And smudges on the screen? Ha! I keep the touch-screen clean because it's beautiful. I just keep it that way. I've waxed it. All this, and I haven't even cracked the instruction manual yet. But then, there's this Teleport button on it that I haven't tried...

Just kidding about the Teleport. Apple says it plans to sell 10 million of these communications revolution devices during the first year. They're wrong. They're going to sell 20 million. More. It's not a niche phone. It's The Web 2.0 phone the world has been waiting for, and Apple has done a quadruple-lux and nailed the landing, first-try. This device will achieve a Halo Effect and vastly accelerate the pace of innovation and proliferation in mobile entertainment and services. By September, you're going to see octogenarian retirees cheerfully wearing these things on lanyards around their necks. Capice? It's that good. And just see what happens Google introduces Voice Search.

Update: my esteemed partner just called me to rave about the earbuds. Say you're listening to Sinatra and a call comes in. The song automatically lowers volume so you hear the phone ring. You answer the phone, the song mutes, and the bud system switches on the microphone. You talk, and you hear your phone conversation in stereo. You end the call, and the song comes back on. You reach down to the volume control, and turn it up. Steve Jobs was in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, and just today in London signing distribution deals. This phone cost me $652 dollars. If I drop it the wrong way, there's no service plan, and no insurance. I would have to buy another. And I don't much care. Do I hear 30 million? And here's one final thought: