On the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month, the Guns Fell Silent

Am commemorating Veteran's Day by waiting in an internet cafe at the airport, aware that many have been sacrificed for the privilege of my doing so. The above Black Adder clip, while comedic, might as well be a real transcript of low-level British commanders steeling themselves with black humour before embarking on a suicidal attack in the Great War. Here's Hugh Laurie of "House M.D." fame playing the Leftenant who greets a glum Captain Darling, sent down by a general to join the deadly fanfaronnade:

Laurie: "Well this is splendid comradely news! Together we'll fight for king and country and we'll be sucking down sausages in Berlin by tea-time!"

Darling: "...rather hoped I'd get through the whole show. Go back to work at Pratt & Sons...keep wicket for the Croydon Gentlemen...marry Dorothy. Made a note in my diary on the way here...it simply says, 'Bugger.'"

(Credits to "WTF is it now?")

In Defense Of Christ & Advent Calendars

Someone sent Isabelita, she who blogs in Wallingfjord at Learning To Sequence, an Adventskalendar. Even though neither she nor the sender are Christian. This, like Christmas itself, is weird. Now, if you don't know Adventzkalendars, they are funny-strange mnemonic devices devised by sadistic Germans to build up the Christmas suspense, turning up the pressure a little every day, each little paper door a port-hole to fresh horrors. Sick, hyper-competitive bastards. ("Twelve days of Christmas? Tscha! Eat our socks, you English. In Germany we get all 25!") Ok. I'm not doing a good job defending the calendars.

Whether you go in for the Nativity or the North Pole, or both (or not), if you speak English as a first language there's always plenty of fertilizer coming at you this time of year. Iz wishes, quite practically, that there was more chocolate in her Advent's calendar, and is turned off by the fictions about the baby jebus waiting behind each door. Christ, were he still cracking wise, would nail the whole concept of Christmas. He would point out how Christmas occasions all manner of evil, and he wasn't born then anyway. And say what you want about evils, but they're almost impossible to avoid.

Therefore, most of us here have to roll with the reindeer shit, and for those with young children there are few courses open outside of Buddha, Moses, and Mohammed but bowing to convention. Then suddenly you find yourselves standing in line for over an hour, outdoors in the freezing wind. Waiting for something useful, maybe, like free food? Coffee? A concert? No. You wait to see a complete stranger inexplicably dressed up like a murderous freebooter, as red as drenched from head to toe in fresh blood, all to put your little one onto the lap of this seasonal worker of questionable origins who you really hope isn't a child molester.

Then, when it's almost your turn to stop freezing and fork over 30 bucks so Santa can cop a feel (Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus. Run!), some officious elf sticks her head out of the faux North Pole workshop and intones, "Santa goes on break in three minutes!" You're three places away from Santa's Gate, you've been looking at the Apple store not 75 yards away for 75 shivering minutes, and now you're auto-scanning your whereabouts for weapons and thinking: "If you try to close that gate, little elf, I'll rip the points off your ears."

Ah, the ghosts of Christmas future. What the hell are we thinking? I mean as a whole culture, one which has gone alarmingly insane and tells lies to our children, lies which don't even bother to have a purpose. The pagans who ran Samhain and went in for sacrificing Tiny Tim around the solstices, at least they had a plan. We've got sales and toys so frigging complicated you wonder if it's China taking a little prevenge on us for the opium wars. ("What? A 9-volt battery? Required to power a treaded race-bot that climbs walls? Sure. Got it right here. In my ass.") When I lost the Leatherman with the phillips-head screwdriver while surrounded by wires, styrofoam, cardboard boxes, those twisty cables you can't unwind and have to cut, and the 500 pieces of interlocking plastic (sorry to not be exaggerating) which have to go together somehow, first a panic, then a depressive funk, ensued. Lord Wife found the Leatherman after determined searching and we were like, "Christmas is saved!! Pass the Xanax."

I realize this is all sick, very sick. The best part is, there are children on their way here who think that chasing a Jack Russell terrier around the house with a rectal thermometer is the height of folly. A tradition, I kid you not, established last year. How do I get out of Christmas, or give it a purpose? I know it's supposed to be about giving, about Christ's birth, but maybe it should be more about holding back, and taking the lies about Christ out of it. Christ doesn't have a goddamned thing to do with Christmas. (Catholics, don't even try any of your weak Pope-ninja bullshit on me. I've been to midnight mass in Nuremburg's town square, Christmas headquarters, and Jesus was emphatically not there.) Maybe it should be about practical forgiveness, as in, "You know, you really got on my nerves this past year, and a couple times there I wanted to effin' kill you. Here! Have a Cuisinart, and let's treat each other better." Forgiveness. A way to start. First base to the home plate of not killing people.

Iz asked what Christianity was all about, given the crap they tried out on her in Episcopalian Sunday schools, not to mention the other religions with fraud and hypocrisy, i.e., just about all of them. Being an ex-missionary for Jesus, I'm supposed to still know. So I was provoked into a post-modern "Yes, Virginia" exchange. Here's part:

No, I don't mean Christ actually said anything. It could've been a mere construct, and there is no telling proof otherwise.

Yet if you look at the historical context, there are many (of his) quotes that don't fit preferred contemporary Jewish revolution or nascent Catholic/pagan order fantasies, and this seems to indicate actual statements of at least one provocative personality leaked through unexpunged. They are problematic for any organized religion, and largely ignored, yet they were left in. (Only a guess, but Jesus may have been an Essene, philosophers who traveled and studied in the East. Someones who came close to answering the desperate Jewish need for a Messiah who would deliver them from Roman occupation. But not close enough.)

Organized religions completely ignore quotes that don't neatly fit their purposes, but the Jesus texts are far more prolifically radical than Sunday schools acknowledge. For example there was not a word from the Jesus character about fire, nor brimstone, so Episcopal simply isn't "Christian" on that score.

It really doesn't matter if Jesus was a man, many men, or a god, the message was to reject the revenge-based mindset of Judaism and embrace a philosophy of self-actualization and positive action. Human desire for hiearchical control purposefully obscures the philosophy.

Jesus comes straight out and tells people, at one point, that if they wish to live immortally with god-capital-G, they all have to pick up and carry their own cross. No way around it, no easy answers, no blame, no Santa Claus. Here's Isabelita's reply, about as well put as can be:

I could accept that message, even in a religious context, if more so-called christians acted on it.

Amen, sister. I'll try to act more better, and hope you found more chocolate in that last Advent box.

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.

Republican '08 Front Runner Giuliani

Two words: Bernard Kerik. (OK, a few more words: churlish ex-wives.)

9/11 Rosetta Stone

A BBC reporter, Jane Standley, did a live story on the horrific collapse of the 47-story Salomon Brothers building, also known as WTC 7. Strangely, Standley started her presentation 20 minutes before it fell, with that very building visible, still standing, behind her left ear and shoulder. If a building could talk, it would've been saying, "Wait! Reports of my demise are being greatly exaggerated. Umm, do you know something I don't??" Fortunately for the reporter's career, her video feed to the BBC's London studio was lost 5 minutes before WTC 7 would have actually collapsed behind her air-filled head. As the BBC has noted in response to people who point out the discrepancy, "there was much confusion on that day."

Explaining WTC 7's collapse a few days after the event, the World Trade Center's owner said something interesting on TV: "maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it." Industry slang for demolishing a building is to "pull" it. The free-speaking owner's full quote:

"I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building [WTC 7] collapse."
Larry Silverstein, Owner, World Trade Center

The implications of his statement were later vigorously re-butted, but Mr. Silverstein was unable to collect on his insurance policy. And really...what team of professionals could prepare a burning 50-story building for demolition over the course of a few hours in the 9/11 disaster area? A job like that would normally take weeks of nit-picking engineering analysis prior to ever laying explosives and wiring them together. So it's impossible he was referring to a controlled demolition, right? WTC 7 is the key to understanding what happened on 9/11; if you watch video of the building fall neatly in its own footprint at 5:20 PM, the right questions arise. This BBC video is, as they say in Texas, the piece o' resistance.

Most Americans believe 9/11 was an inside job. To dispel the debilitating miasma of ant-patriotic skepticism, the US government simply has to de-classify all its videos and recordings from that day. Once it does, those who doubt 19 foreign bozos took a few Cessna lessons, evaded the most sophisticated, bristling air defenses in the world and flew jumbo jets like fighter pilots, can start to regain confidence in their leaders.

The Dance Of The Seven Realignments

To know, know, know her is to love, love, love her. Condi Rice just laid out the most transparent, nakedly comprehensive foreign policy since Andrew Jackson told Kit Carson to go West and kill every Indian he saw.* Writer David Ignatius has a chat with her and surfaces some quotes from it. Not to put too fine a point on it, Ignatius is a transmission device for national intelligence, and in "Rice's Strategic Reset," he gives her room to unwind and bask in the effects of her recent policy efforts. Bottom line, Condi is feeling pretty good about how the Mid-East is shaping up, and is ready for her Nobel Peace Prize.

There does appear to be progress at first glance. The US has been breathlessly explaining the threat posed by Iran to nations in the region, and has pimped the benefits of forming a coalition of NATO, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel to contain Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. Choosing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the primary battering ram is natural, since it has been expanding membership steadily eastwards over the last decade to keep Russia in its place. Now NATO is conducting joint operations with Israel and Pakistan, and the US wants to induct both as full knights of the realm, even though they're a looong way from the North Atlantic. NATO as the security apparatus explains why there are British and German naval vessels presently patrolling off Beirut backing a Christian politician in Lebanon. Here is why Condi finally had a good hair day:

The administration's tougher stance against Iran arguably has already produced some results. Iran's firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appears to be in political trouble with the ruling mullahs, in part because his reckless talk alienated other Muslims. But the strongest leverage against Iran appears to be the West's unified diplomatic coalition. "The Security Council resolution [condemning Iran's nuclear program and mandating mild sanctions] has had more of an effect than I thought it would," Rice said.

The UN Security Council Resolution against Iran's nuclear ambitions was a Dance of the Seven Veils, useful for amusement and distraction. Much as I love Condi, if she thinks China or Russia will enforce any of the Resolution's specifics, her head's not right. Iran has reined in the rhetoric of its President because it wins by waiting. Allow me to translate Condi's Miss Universe acceptance speech: by promising to maintain the status quo and apportioning future slices of the oil pie, the US feels it can move natural enemies to rapprochement and contain the Persian Plague they all hate. The State Department took the basic building block defined by the Iraq Study Group and started off by saying, "We can all agree that the specter of Iran with nukes is a bad idea, right?"

Well...no. The "we" in question can't agree, not even on that. This realignment, reset, whatever you want to call it (regurgitation?) is built on flimsy, flammable gauze because it ignores one key ISG recommendation, one uncomfortable reality, and one looming, incredibly telling and stupid contradiction.

First, the ISG recommendation it ignores is the necessity to engage Syria and Iran. Here is Her Bad Self on the subject:

The Bush administration's thinking about realignment helps explain why it has resisted engaging Syria and Iran, as recommended by the Baker-Hamilton report. As Rice put it, "You have a 'pan' movement, across the region. The war in Lebanon crystallized it for everyone. You can't just leave it there. . . . If you concentrate on engaging Syria and Iran, you may lose the chance to do the realignment."

In other words, the US blames Iran and Syria for Israel's defeat in Lebanon. This is funny-ha-ha. Didn't Israel first invade Lebanon, then get its ass kicked? It's not like Iran gave Hezbollah fighter planes to bomb Tel Aviv. Condi's plan assumes that Sunnis hate Shiites enough to be divided and conquered along an Iranian fault line. But the US is supporting Sunnis against Shiites, and vice-versa. Pitting tribal peoples against one another is a proven method for disuniting them, true, but the US is supporting Sunnis against Shiites in Lebanon and Afghanistan, then simultaneously supporting Shiites against Sunnis in Iraq. If I can notice the forked tongue flicking, the Saudis and the Pakis can, too. The "Reset" also ignores the fundamentally important fact that Iranian-style self-determination offers a better political solution to the peoples of the Mid-east than we do. It offers a way to balance Islam, parliamentary nationalism, and social modernism. They've got a better formula. That's why they're winning.

Second, the uncomfortable reality of Israel pollutes everything in the Mid-east. As the article states, the plan relies on peace between Palestine and Israel...later. Israel isn't getting out of Palestine. There is not even the slightest demonstration of an Israeli quid pro quo, and from Detroit to Jakarta, Palestine is a potent symbol for the West's oppression of Arabs and muslims. So you have to wonder where the optimism...oh, right...there is civil war blossoming amongst "the natives" in Lebanon and Palestine, and Condi can pat herself on the back for just having given billions of dollars to sow them (Sinoria and the Sunnis vs. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas vs. Fatah in Palestine). So there's the old colonial divide-and-conquer fallback, but there are limits to how much to rely on that tendency. If I recall correctly, Saudis and Pakis were dancing in the streets when Israel was beaten in Lebanon. Of course, I could be wrong, because staunch allies would never do that.

Finally, there is an internal contradiction which shoots this plan through the head like a 7.62mm AK-47 bullet: if democracy spreads in the region any further, the administration might have to turn it into a parking lot to make it cooperate. When Islamic people vote, they elect Islamic democracies. Get it, Condi? That's where the trouble is coming from in Lebanon, and Palestine, and Iraq! It's BECAUSE they held elections, you preposterous fools!!

And elsewhere, where Islamic people can't vote, they're losing patience faster than they would've if the region had remained democracy-free. Getting very grumpy, in fact. For example, the Musharraf regime in Pakistan will be lucky to last another year before it falls to the generals, whose troops are largely Taliban sympathizers. When Taliban fighters cross the Pakistan border and head into Afghanistan to make attacks, they go through the border checkpoints manned by Pakistani soldiers, and these soldiers lift the gates and say, "Happy hunting, brothers! Bring us the head of an English-man!" Inviting Pakistan into NATO makes about as much sense as inviting Osama bin Laden to sleep in Lincoln's Bedroom. But then maybe that would make sense, because if Pakistan or Saudi Arabia have democratic elections, they'd both elect Osama as President.

Honestly, I think Condi is doing pretty well with a bad hand and doing a glorious job (as usual) of lying her ass off. The Realignment makes perfect sense within the philosophically institutional straitjacket of the Bush Administration. All the US can do is forestall its eclipse in the region for an intermission. The Faisal royal family will soon retreat from Saudi Arabia into cushioned exile, and the Bin Laden family will openly rule what it already runs: a pan-Arabic Islamic coalition. And then Iran, because its social revolution offers a better template for livable, prosperous compromise between Islam and modernism, will become dominant in the region over Saudi wahabism, which, socially, represents a return to medieval feudalism. Iran has already won politically, and the US would be far more effective in its diplomacy and its wars if it recognized that fact. Apparently, it would rather back unsteady allies propped athwart failing regimes, give them a make-over, strut, and hope for the best.