Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

While shopping at Costco today, a man loitering near the pickle jars noticed the "Hillary 2008" button (I volunteered at Obama's campaign HQ and found it in a pile of miscellany) on my jacket. He asked me, "What do you think of Hillary as Secretary of State?"

Surprised, I replied, "She'd be great. She's got the deception, the deviousness, studies up on the issues, and can turn on enough charm when she needs it."

The man stared at me, smiled and said: "You're not really a Hillary supporter, are you?"

"Well, sure I am. For Secretary of State. Better than Kissinger, if she takes it."

Didn't mention that I've been predicting this all year. Or that she bears a physical resemblance to Talleyrand.

U.S. Drops Out Of International Math & Science Study

Of course it would humiliating to have our butts kicked by Cyprus and South Africa, countries the U.S. edged out in 1995 to avoid the worst science and math ranking in the world. So last year the Bush Administration decided to not participate in the study. Exceptionalism is ok to a point--hey, we're Americans. Go ahead, call us dumb. Believe me, we can get over the emotional stigma--but it probably shouldn't extend to multiple-choice testing.

This international drop-out behavior is like showing up to school on the last Finals Day just so you can cut the test and hang out behind the dumpster with the greasers, smoking the good stuff you save up for special occasions. If there's the shape of an "L" already on your forehead, do you really need to get it fire-branded on?

The study, called TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study) Advanced 2008, measures how high-school seniors are doing in algebra, geometry, calculus and physics with students taking similar subjects around the globe. In the past, the American results have been shockingly poor. In the last survey, taken in 1995, students from only two countries—Cyprus and South Africa—scored lower than U.S. school kids.

The MSNBC story quotes "some conspiracy theorists" (those are the words used in the article) who think the Feds dropped out of the test to avoid another beating (What? Our schools haven't improved in the last decade??). The commissioner of the Department of Edjucation's National Center for Edjucation Statisticks dismissed the accusations as drivel, citing budget concerns for the estimated $3-10 million it would cost to administer the tests:

“We looked at the countries who are participating, our scarce resources and our overextended staff,” says Schneider, “and we decided to give it a pass."

Yes, and they gave our youth a hall pass to go hide out behind the dumpster. They really do want us to be dumb, and the roaring battles we hear are part of a war on enlightenment. The fault, dear Bluto, lies not in the stars, but in our social darwinism and reflexive urges to privatization that we are underlings.

(Via the always-correct to three decimal points Hope at Deep Confusion.)

The Threat To Our Credibility Is Extremely Serious

As reported by Pravda on the Potomac, "Bush Aides See Failure in Fight with Al-Qaeda in Pakistan:"

WASHINGTON, July 17— President Bush’s top counterterrorism advisers acknowledged today that the strategy for fighting Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan had failed, as the White House released a grim new intelligence assessment that has forced the administration to consider more aggressive measures inside Pakistan.

More aggressive? Yeah. Storming the Red Mosque and blowing it up was like the Marx Brothers were throwing custard pies. Time to get tough and bring in The Three Stooges. In secret:

In weighing how to deal with the Al Qaeda threat in Pakistan, American officials have been meeting in recent weeks to discuss what some said was emerging as an aggressive new strategy that would include both public and covert elements. They said that there was growing concern that pinprick attacks against Al Qaeda targets are not enough, but that some new American measures might have to remain secret to avoid embarrassing General Musharraf.

Ms. Townsend declined to describe what may be alternative strategies for dealing with Al Qaeda’s threat in Pakistan, but acknowledged frustration that Al Qaeda had succeeding in rebuilding its infrastructure and its links to affiliates, while keeping Mr. bin Laden and his top lieutenants alive for nearly six years since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Finding a world-famous, wealthy six-foot-six Muslim trailing his kidney dialysis machine from hovel to hovel in one the poorest, most mountainous regions of the world? Who's also the spitting image of the Shroud of Turin? No wonder they can't find him. I have a little suggestion for Ms. Townsend: try looking for him in Riyadh. Right under the declination of your mendacious nose.

Oh, Here We Go Again...

Ismail AX. The shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre, Cho-Seung Hui, died with the words "Ismail AX" written, or tattoed, in red on his arm. I happen to know what it means. In the Jewish tradition, God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac with a knife. In the Muslim tradition, God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael with an axe. Why, may I ask, would a student of South Korean descent chose to have that, of all things, on his arm. You have to be paying pretty keen attention in your Intro to World Religions class to pick up on that bit of Islamic lore. You'd have to be a theology student, or you'd have to be someone studying your enemy very closely. You see, Ismail AX means "sacrificial son." In the parlance of jihad, it means suicide bomber.

Here's another weird crinkle in the tin foil. Cho-Seung Hul's older sister Sun-Kyung graduated from Princeton and works for McNeil Technologies. It's a doozy. Their motto is: "Empowering People. Delivering Results." McNeil Technologies provides outsourced spooks and goons the goverment uses to do work that's too sensitive, dirty, or boring (if you can imagine that). It's like the Stasi, only owned by a private equity firm, Veritas, which has at least two partners who sit on the Council on Foreign Relations, one of whom sits on a certain DynCorp's board. Click that link if you want to know who's moving the opium crop out of Afghanistan. McNeil's web site and its CEO are pretty up-front about their services:

McNeil’’s Intelligence and Language Center (ILC) provides unmatched expertise in the areas of Intelligence and Language Services. The combination of Intelligence and Language guarantees our clients mission success.

Our services and capabilities include:

* Intelligence Architecture Operations in support of the US Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
* Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) which supports the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other government agencies, and
* HUMINT (Human Intel) operations in support of DIA, or with federal counter Intel outsourcing effort.
* Linguist operations, with linguists deployed in various theaters of operations,
* Translation operations which include document and website translation,
* Testing, Training and Research of language and cultural awareness.

God, I love the smell of growth industry in the morning. Smells like...napalm. Is there a connection between Ismail AX and McNeil Technologies? I don't know, and it doesn't matter. Fear will be spread across all the universities of the country from this incident, the committees who run schools are petrified, and there will be intrusive security consequences at public and private places of learning because of it.

Specifically, I'm not saying this was an Office of Special Plans operation to delay Senate examination of the US Attorney General or Kucinich's filing of impeachment papers on Cheney, although those were actually delayed. It's probably all pure bullshit and coincidence. But I am saying this is pretty damned weird. I'm saying the press is going to play this for all it's worth, I'm saying there's a "Muslim" spin waiting to happen, and I'm saying loud and clear that an event like this tends to benefit the providers of large-scale security. Such as McNeil Technologies and its owner, Veritas. They're who benefits. They're the bad direction to go in. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, and dubious mo-fos such as these have been planting some bad seeds down deep, hurting the hell out of our country.

I'm saying let's not get snookered by fear. We don't need to be locking down our universities and doing to them what we've done to airports because one messed-up kid shot up a class building. Locking them down and securitizing them will be just like living in East Germany, Rumania, Russia, but even there, you could carry a bottle of shampoo through a security line. Maybe instead we should consider a little...de-escalation. Start acting like a grown-up nation. Maybe we should even do a little...gun control. I know, I know, that's crazy talk, I need to go double up on my medication.

Ahh, there, that's better. Still, maybe jilted boyfriends are a little quicker to reach for gats because we live in a society which, already hooked on violence, now has adopted a policy of pre-emption from the Top On Down. The Virginia Tech tragedy couldn't be connected to the way our leaders act. Could it?

Charges? We Don't Need No Steen-king Charges

A federal appeals court ruled last week that inmates at Guantanamo have no legal right to hear the charges against them, or to plead innocent in an open court, otherwise known as the right of habeas corpus. The LA Times article states:

In a 2-1 decision, the judges said the Constitution did not extend the right of habeas corpus to noncitizens held outside the sovereign territory of this country. "Cuba — not the United States — has sovereignty over Guantanamo Bay," Judge A. Raymond Randolph wrote.

Hmm. Have to get the tri-corder out for this one and scan for possible life forms. Do the judges mean to imply Fidel Castro can hear their cases? Cool! That'll be fun!!

Practically, the hundreds of inmates still held at Gitmo, most of whom (by the military's own admission) are probably innocent, can continue to age like fine cellared wines. Next stop, the Supreme Court, when they get around to ruling. In related news, a federal judge ruled US citizen and enemy combatant Jose Padilla is competent to be tried, for what it's still less than clear, despite a slew of mental health professionals who say he's lost his mind after years of solitary confinement in a Naval brig. Honestly, I don't know if Padilla was a bad guy or not. But I do know rulings like these will be routinely used against honest, law-abiding US citizens in the future. Must think of flowers, pretty flowers, and butterflies.

("Papillon" is French for butterfly. While writing this I had an idea for a movie, a loose remake of Papillon, in which a couple of inmates escape from Gitmo like Henri Charriere and Louis Degas did from prison on Devil's Island in South America.)

Smoke And Mirrors

Then from his secret Art the Sage Vizier,
a Magic Mirror made; a Mirror like
the bosom of All-wise Intelligence,
reflecting in its mystic compass all
within sevenfold volumes of the World involved
and looking in that Mirror's face
the Shah beheld the face of his Desire.

The term "smoke and mirrors" refers both to an optical trick used to terrify audiences with strange images and to divination employing reflective surfaces. These arts are ancient, I suspect far moreso than we know. Lucas Arts special effects and a pundit class now beamed to us through space have made us forget the connections to old trickery, but the conjuring skein is unbroken, the joy in deception the same; the important things have always been practice, knowledge of human prejudices and blind spots, and to keep the oft-difficult techniques of projection refreshed and secret for as long as possible.

In the relatively recent Roman Empire, the readers of mirrors were called the Specularii. In Greece, St. Augustine reported how the witches of Thessalonika used human blood to write oracles upon mirrors, and that this practice had been passed down to them from the unspeaking eons. In Victorian-era plays smoke and mirrors were commonly used to project ghosts onto the stage, and they're probably still used today to spice up creepy late-night campfire tales, as they were in my youth. Using a small mirror and a torch, you can make faces play in the smoke, and make suggestible, giggly, and over-tired boys believe in things which aren't there. It helps that they want to.

Invading Iraq was a magic act. In political terms, it really was. Smoke and mirror techniques were knowingly applied by political sorcerers who took our present and future wealth, and they're reduced to reaching for rabbits. For awhile, the audience which is our country was made to see things which weren't there, and I suppose it should be forgiven its initial gullibility. Now the entire world (except Fox News and a disturbingly large number of ignorant, bloodthirsty galoots who actually enjoy this) has noticed the old magic stand-bys have gone horribly wrong, their promise of a glorious grand finale is gone, and we see the lovely assistants really were sawn in half in those wooden boxes because all those entrails onstage are coming from somewhere. It started off as a spectacular show and many of us cheered it on. But we were promised magic, dammit, and sometime, during pathetic diversions from blithely sadistic blunders, we've begun to wonder: "How much trouble are we in, and can I get us out of this theater alive?"

If Specularii give bad advice, and if failed magicians refuse to leave the stage, what do you do? You discredit them, and start throwing things until they get the hell out. I held off on defrauding them, because far better people than me have been trying; everybody, deep down, wanted their tricks to work and no one wanted to admit how bad they were. I'm that part of the crowd which triggers the radical middle, and I know it's time to start throwing rotten tomatoes. No amount of reassurance, curtains, or denial can hide the ugly centerpiece of their act, and a con-man's reliance upon audience decency, always presumptuous, has become real abuse. If you dare to look at what they've been trying to divert our attentions from, it's on the video below. It's fifty minutes long. SwimDeep over at Deep Confusion posted it last week; it's been around for awhile, the kind of thing the large, respectable blogs have shied away from. Studious, analytical, and articulate business owners, government ministers, historians, and teachers will explain why the trick's techniques worked, and why the act has not. If you prefer magic, don't watch it.