Memorial Day: Post Traumatic Growth Disorder

Three or four times a day I see a story and think, "I should blog about that." Writing requires a measure of solitude, however, and what most hovers around me is usually cacophony. So instead of posts, little mental Post-It notes get written which then stick on each other, pile up and fade into the past. But one of those post-its boomeranged back from a week and a half ago, with personal connection, starting with a soldier going postal on a base in Iraq:

The 44-year-old signals specialist from the 54th Engineering Battalion, based in Bamberg, Germany, was charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault for Monday's shooting, which killed two military doctors and three soldiers, at a combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty, in Iraq.

Russell had been relieved of his weapon a week earlier, after making some "inappropriate remarks," his fellow soldier said, and he'd been referred to the stress clinic for counseling. But each day, the counselors "sent him back to his base," where Russell complained the doctors were refusing to take his symptoms seriously or give him the medication he thought he needed.

On Monday, the soldier says Russell was being transported back and forth to the mental health clinic by his staff sergeant escort.

After yet another argument at the clinic, he and his escort had just returned to Russell's brigade headquarters. That's when he "assaulted his escort, stole his weapon," and held him at briefly at gunpoint. Russell snatched away the keys for the vehicle, and drove back to the treatment center, where he allegedly opened fire.

The overpowered escort rushed inside to alert his command, and the battalion's physician's assistant immediately called over to the clinic, but it was too late. The call went through "just in time to hear the gun shots."

These "stress clinics" were supposed to be part of the answer, with hundreds of thousands of troops reporting symptoms of post traumatic stress, and the more severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

The clinic Sgt. Russell attacked had denied him medications he repeatedly asked for, and the new treatment he instead received is the brainchild of my wife's ex-fiancee, Major Thomas Jarrett. Shortly before a desperate, enraged vet shot up his clinic, he had this to say to a USA Today reporter:

Jarrett tells soldiers he is "fed up of hearing about" post-traumatic stress. He said he wants to talk of growing from trauma and becoming stronger because of it.

"Thriving through your combat experience" is Jarrett's mantra. All in-theatre personnel are urged to view a 90-minute video of his rap, and those who exhibit signs of PTSD will sometimes be discharged to Camp Victory to attend his "Warrior Resiliency and Thriving" class. That a positivist "Post Traumatic Growth" schtick has been enthusiastically adopted by the military should surprise no one; at this point, sending soldiers into reserve just because they're burned out by years of hunting Haji would mean calling the war off. As to the consequences, only 24 US soldiers committed suicide in the month of January, a militarily acceptable loss rate. Yet something of crucial significance is being obscured in the hokum, and bears a disquieting psychological parallel with a previous catastrophic American failure.

Can it be so bad, really? In a different way, yes it can. When soldiers in the Roman legions broke down and wouldn't fight, their comrades were gathered to watch them beaten to death. When German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War Two went AWOL ( or eventually, lost their weapons or ate too much food), they were executed. The US military isn't there yet, but in denying unpleasant facts and routinely giving its current and former soldiers the shaft, it has moved decisively in that direction. The Af-Pak war is heating up and troops are going on their 3rd and 4th combat tours. Neither legions nor SS units were asked to do the same, and war's intensity now is much higher, its operations more sustained. Including night operations, historically very rare and now routine. The psychological toll may be worse than anyone wants to admit, and Sgt. Russell represents far more than an unfortunate incident.

Following WWII, clinical psychiatrists analyzed personnel data amassed with the goal of learning how to better maintain combat effectiveness. Study results were unexpectedly and dramatically clear: all sane soldiers broke down if their combat exposure was longer than 90 days. Correlation between combat and acute breakdown was unpredictable, even curvilinear at first, but the correlation gradually tightened over time to almost 1:1. After 90 days of combat exposure, 98% of soldiers experienced incapacitating breakdown accompanied by lasting psychic distress. The 2% still functioning were psychopaths suffering from full-blown insanity, which combat progressively accentuates.

For the otherwise sane soldiers who came to the end of their ropes, the term "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" was coined. Based upon the data, the psychiatrists concluded that warfare had surpassed the ability of human beings to endure it. This insight in hand, the Pentagon soon set out to find a pharmacological means of adapting humans to industrial combat. (For a powerful overview of combat's psychological effects and the US military's generally futile attempts to ameliorate them, see Richard A. Gabriel's 'No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War.')

When I was a small boy, about 5 years old, I remember meeting a man named Sonny Seeley at a camp picnic. He was commonly referred to as Uncle Seeley, though not any known uncle of mine. He was not a common visitor, and seemed from some far-off branch of the family. As they prepared foods indoors, I heard my grandmother and Aunt Sophie talk about what beautiful letters he had written them during the war, but how when he got home he hardly ever said another thing, what a shame; my impression is his letters were from North Africa. As he sat in the aluminum folding lawn chair in the pleasant sun he didn't venture much, and would stammer what was to me an uninterpretable tremulo when someone came up to greet him or ask a question. His whole body was trembling badly enough to not be able to speak intelligibly. He shook when he sat, his knees shook when he walked all skinny and gangly, like a stick puppet over-tensioned, hunched, unable to un-slack, even 20 years and more after whatever he'd been through.

My grandfather and his brothers hosted that picnic, which may well have been on Memorial Day, and were all in that war in one service or another. They sent their wives to bring Uncle Seeley a plate of hot-buttered steamed clams, rolls and potato salad. They plied him with beer cans glistening from the cooler. While he struggled out his thank-yous and precariously worked to hold his paper plate level, I, being young and relatively free of good judgment, asked him why he was shaking. "Shell-shock," someone said in a deep hushed voice above me. "Go play with the Lawn Darts." Lawn Darts were not yet illegal and would arc meaningfully through the air, proving gravity, stabilized by colorful plastic fins. I don't remember ever seeing Uncle Seeley again, and hope he was able to find some measure of relief.

One of my wife's oldest friends, a social worker in Manhattan, once described Thomas Jarrett as "about the least empathetic person I've ever met, and I meet a lot of people." Jarrett's schtick is a bastardized version of some positivist themes of Albert Ellis, an influential psychotherapist he interned with for one summer in the late 1990s. His application for further work with Ellis was rejected, so he never finished his PhD. He never served in combat, and strongly implies that he did. Jarrett's one more fraud in a Fraud War, passing out candy-coated delusions.

Denial is one survival mechanism for when a truth is too painful to face; delusion is another, for when you're not interested in the truth at all. For when it's hanging by the teeth it embedded in your ass. When you stride about in front of grunts who have made fun of the dead and dish warmed-over dianetics, delusion is your friend. Admittedly, denial and delusion are endemic qualities, possibly even necessary to military life, and often aren't obvious. We're set up that way. Truth is harsh, believing in nonsense comes almost as naturally as the urge to spread it. There's more truth to be found in 5 minutes of myths and fables than an hour of nightly news. Speaking of parallels, folk still commonly blame or take credit for protests at home halting the war in Vietnam, a "stabbed in the back" variant. On the contrary, that war stopped because soldiers were increasingly turning weapons on their superiors, mutiny was in the air and there weren't enough combat-ready units left to conduct field operations. Nearing the end, everybody there was just going through the motions.

Vietnam produced more PTSD victims than any other war in American history, both in total number and frequency, despite the Pentagon's emphasis on instilling the desire to kill into recruits, based again on data from WWII and Korean War which indicated only a small fraction of combat troops actually tried to shoot an individual enemy. In their inevitable post-war analyses, the Pentagon fingered low morale of draftees as the primary fault, resolving to go into their future conflicts strictly with volunteers, ones who remain annoyingly human to this day. To quote Richard Gabriel:

"...war exacts a terrible cost in human emotions quite apart from the usual costs calculated in terms of dollars, dead, and wounded. It is a cost every soldier will pay if he is exposed long enough to the horrors of the battlefield. Weakness or cowardice has nothing to do with the probability that a soldier will collapse under the strain of battle. It is not man that is too weak; it is the conduct of war that imposes too great a strain for the sane to endure."

People think soldiers who break down under the strains of ongoing sleep deprivation, constant threat of ambush, seeing friends get blown apart and killing civilians are weak, defective, or somehow exceptions to the rule. They are the rule, it is a well-measured rule, one denoting a reality which does not mesh well with a politically cynical, inherently paranoid "Long War." If indeed we are in a Long War, rather than squander hard power and soldier well-being as if they were limitless, flushing them down strategically harmless hell-holes, the American people would be better served by leaders who recognize that sending troops on combat patrols and driving over IEDs for years straight dulls their effectiveness. Eight years of tactical Action-Jackson approach has served no military purpose but that of potential enemies, who gauge our exhaustion and impending poverty with glee. Modern war serves money, and Iraq and Afghanistan have so far done horribly even at that.

That's one skeptic's opinion. This is not: what's done abroad comes back home, and there is no such thing as "thriving through your combat experience." That's either craven or self-delusional bullshit conceived to advance one individual's career. Which it has, and which my wife foresaw. When she heard some years ago that Jarrett was going back into the military as a counselor, she immediately expressed a hunch he was going to damage a lot of people. The kind of damage that, she thought, might provoke one of his patients to kill him.

Naturally, when she told me about the news coverage of an ex's half-baked treatment scheme, I remembered the 20-year veteran sergeant who snapped and went looking for the ludicrous son of a bitch who told him to grin and bear it, killing 5 mental health staffers in the process. I thought of Uncle Seeley shaking, of grunts sent to Tony Robbins seminars, and of new-fangled fates worse than death.

It's All Fun & Games Until The Corpses Start Rotting, Pt. I

Scene: Early 2002,the Pentagon. Officers and bureaucrats are seated in bad chairs around an intelligence briefing discussing "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq. A Defense Intelligence Agency officer speaks:

"With all due respect, sir, our contacts in the Iraqi Army have reported Saddam ordered the destruction of all his WMD. They say he's been clean since 1998 and he's sending people around again to make sure it's all gone. Significant risk exists that we won't find anything."

Donald Rumsfeld frowns, turns to glare at the officer, raises his chin, and begins to speak:

"Clean? Clean?? To hell with your contacts. Your naivete is astounding. I personally gave Saddam nerve gas in 1987 so he could use it on the Iranians when they were kicking his ass. I gave him anthrax and then we taught him how to weaponize his own. I gave him enough VX to make cockroaches go extinct. I know what WMDs he has and how much so you had best get with The Program, which is about where."

That's pretty much how it played out. Rumsfeld gave the WMDs to Saddam at the behest of the Reagan Administration so Iraq wouldn't lose its war with Iran, a war which the State Department encouraged and green-lighted. So the assumption was understandable. The part about little balsa-wood rockets flying from Baghdad to gas Washington D.C.? They knew that and a lot of other stuff was BS. But they really did think Iraq had nerve gas.

Some more current assumptions leashing foreign policy hounds:

1) The CIA knows the Taliban is evil. Because they created it.
2) The Army knows the Taliban insurgency is well-armed. Because they're arming it.
3) The US government knows Iran will be a nuclear power. Because it provided the assistance to become one under a program called "Atoms for Peace."
4) Israel knows Iran will nuke it. Because its guilt complex is the size of apartheid South Africa.

The last two points, in which irony and hysteria perform a square dance, are worth watching.

Irony leads. The Ford Administration signed a directive in 1976 offering Iran a complete nuclear fuel cycle, in which the Iranian government would purchase and operate a U.S.-built plutonium extraction facility. Who ran the Ford Administration? Richard Cheney was the White House Chief of Staff; Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense. Their rationale was driven by oil deals: according to their strategy paper, "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals."

Henry Kissinger, who had to turn up in this story somewhere, was Gerald Ford's first Secretary of State. He had been isolated by Cheney and Rumsfeld, who both despised him, and he recalled in 2005, "I don't think the issue of proliferation came up." In other words, the Two Duh-migos sold off billions of nuclear goodies while muffling any objections. A 1974 CIA assessment reads, "If [the Shah] is alive in the mid-1980s ... and if other countries [in the region] have proceeded with weapons development we have no doubt Iran will follow suit."

So the bellicose curmudgeons emeritus most agitated about a nuclearized Iran are the ones who wanted it that way in the first place. You'd think it would be fun for a few journos to raise the point, as in, "Boy, you sure stepped in that one dinchya?" Too much to ask for, I know. Will move onto Israel's hysteria in the next post, because this week Israel's Threat-o-meter moved past the "Burning My Hand On The Stove" level to the near-maximum "Toxic Shock Syndrome."

"Give Me A Waterboard, Dick Cheney, And One Hour, And I'll Have Him Confess To The Sharon Tate Murders"

Jesse Ventura added this treasure to my trove of revenge fantasies during a Larry King interview, further stoked this week by the entire Cheney family, which collectively told us we should be down on our knees thanking them for keeping us safe from the Bad People.

Other punishment favorites include holding a "Birdshot Party," sending him out as a postal carrier in the slums of Damascus, a regimen of beatings with a baseball bat, and simple execution. Of course these are negative, violent things, and I'm an optimistic and constructive chap. So here's what should really be done:

1) force-feed him a diet of nothing but marijuana brownies, cheeseburgers and milkshakes
2) make him listen to music by black artists, with emphasis on rappers, for 6 months non-stop
3) if he's still alive after 6 months, start an intensive program of feminist consciousness-raising training

In short, he should be sent to a re-education camp which uses advanced psychological therapies designed to literally kill him with kindness. Should he somehow survive it, he'd at least come out a better, perhaps even more bearable person.

I could easily perform this service to the world in a finished basement, pre-equipped for these and similar purposes, and hereby offer my dungeon and time gratis. As for step #3, Lord Wife went to NYU so she can devise the curriculum. Hmm...I think the music would start off with a Martha and the Vandellas video like the one above, a truly frightening version of "Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide."

The Marquis De Sade Said It Was Okay

Watching the back-and-forth torture recriminations gestate into flames which are doused and weakly gutter up again, I've been wondering who will finally come out and state the obvious: "enhanced interrogation" is ritual sadism. It was prescribed to place captives and interrogators into a negative power-pain exchange system, trading information for political gratification. The safe words are defined by the whip-hand. Words like "I traveled to Iraq and recruited terrorists."

Similar methods were employed in the past by religious inquisitors blessed and protected by their system. Cardinal Richeliu sent one to Loudon to tease the Devils out of an outspoken priest critical of corruption, who legally condemned and burned the critic, unconfessed, at the stake. Earlier, Torquemada strongly supported the use of torture on suspected crypto-Jews, Muslims, and witches in Spain, but strictly limited the allowable extent. It could only be amplified click by click in response to stages of denial.

Cardinal Dickeliu (a.k.a. Richard Cheney) and his Guantanamo Inquisition have failed. Having tired with impoverished and impudent shepherds they turn their sights to a fat heretical Congress. The next inquisition will be "Democrats Torture Too," and if the magistrates try to hold hearings they will be brought to private rooms where they will confess, oh yes, to whatever misdemeanors are proffered. Few can withstand. I live a fairly clean life but would not want to endure that scrutiny. We're all guilty of something, most of all elected representatives who have to take money from merchants to finance election campaigns.

The Democrats were complicit, and they are. It was politically popular to kick ass, even gratifying to subject captives to the lash. They knew all along and deserve every bit of what's contained in the Cheney Files. Now their mouths are frozen, their wills stemmed rather than have their sins shouted from the rooftops. The truth will still out if it takes 25 years or 50, but if it does not do so soon, a good traditional form of governance will give way like a breached dike. Another form more honest and brutal grows in many nations across the globe as it does here, its proto-brand is Don't Tread On Me, and it offers to pick up the toxins strewn by capitalism. It can embrace both democracy and religion and collect the garbage on time. I am theocratic, and I vote.

I empathize with Dick Cheney and am from the same place. I would love to go back to the A&W with my best baton-throwing blond with Jesus on the dashboard looking down on her great gams and the nicest ass in three counties. We would order cheeseburgers and root beer floats, roll the driver-side window halfway down and wait for the waitress in short-shorts to roll over on skates and hang the tray off it. We would ratchet the seats back as far as they would go and bask in the scents of rendered fats while we shared ketchup packets planned our futures and made out on Friday night. When we were finished I fired up my fuel-injected 327 Corvette and laid rubber 50 yards past the stop light, all the way into third gear. God was great.

No matter how many confessions are suffocated out, no matter how many resistant asses are kicked or suspicious wedding parties are bombed, those blessed days aren't coming back. Our desires yearn for easy paths leading back to where everything is right again, we can put it straight again, insulate it against space and time so we can be the way we used to be. Sadism is pardoned by racism and xenophobia and I understand what Cardinal Dickeliu is trying to do: have our cake and eat it too. If the President said it was okay, it was legal, but globalization happened and they were the ones who made it so. There are fewer and fewer places for them to go. Do you remember hot fudge sundaes?

Swine Flu Blogging

My household has been in the grip of Swine Flu for the past three days. Our youngest got it first, exhibiting symptoms on Wednesday at 3 AM, angry because he doesn't yet know how to snort and clear the snot clogging his nasal passages, and his anger lasted until he fell back asleep at 10 AM.

I took ill yesterday, body and joint aches, low fever, plehgm and respiratory complaints. In the morning, there was that unmistakable Got Hit By a Truck feeling and I've stayed in bed most of the last two days. Then a family friend staying with us came down with it this morning, and Lord Running Boy's flushed cheeks, reasonable affect, hot forehead and slowed mien confirmed his case tonight. Only Lord Wife is symptom-free so far, and I hope she catches a prophylactic case of it.

People are joking we should have a Swine Flu Party because they intuitively think it's better to get it now rather than later. They're right. If you're exposed to the mild version, you've gained antibodies against the one that'll come roaring back in the Fall. In my previous post, I didn't mention my real reason for worry. This thing was first created in labs, combining the most genetically lethal versions of H1N1 Spanish Flu from cadavers with the 50% death rate H5N1 avian flu. It was taken from cadavers and designed for maximum death, for worst-case scenarios.

That's what they were so afraid of. They made it in Petri dishes back in 2004 and tried to make vaccines before toying with weaponization and genetic targeting. They think labs aren't part of nature, they can be walled off with doors. Atoms, crystals, molecules, structures communicate with each other through morphically resonant primordial soups none of us can see and few of us apprehend or understand. The rule is this: once it exists, it communicates and it proliferates. It's not so bad, just a lethargy and inability to concentrate on something so long as a movie or writing a blog post.

Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again

WASHINGTON—After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about.

In addition, citizens are requesting that the phrase, "It will only get worse before it gets better," be permanently replaced with, "Things are going great. Enjoy yourselves."

"I thought I wanted a new era of transparency and accountability, but honestly, I just can't handle it," Ohio resident Nathan Pletcher said. "All I ever hear about now is how my retirement has been pushed back 15 years and how I won't be able to afford my daughter's tuition when she grows up."

"From now on, just tell me the bullshit I want to hear," Pletcher added. "Tell me my savings are okay, everybody has a job, and we're No. 1 again. Please, just lie to my face."

Via The Onion...

Aporkalypse Now

As a parent and human I've been watching the "Let None Call it Swine" Flu with vigilant caution, cramming virology and medical anthropology. When Max von Sydow played chess with death in the movie 'The Seventh Seal' (clip above), he might have won if he had consulted the Net.
The media exist in an information marketplace, always trying to take share away from competitors. If things are too quiet, it's in their edgy interests to go blow something up, so when a story comes along which can be used to elicit a strong emotional response, it's conflated and milked until the last drop. For them, a deadly flu should be perfect. When they start telling everyone, i.e. themselves, to remain calm...my gut has me start edging towards the exit sign. What scared them so badly? In short, we've got medical mysteries which together do seem to warrant a strong response by officials. That, and we appear to have a return of the Spanish Flu.

Swine Flu can again be referred to as such because the first case was just confirmed in Canadian pigs, which became infected by a worker returning from a trip to Mexico. Swine Flu is also a misnomer, as was Spanish Flu, since both are and were really forms of an originating avian flu strain, specifically the endemic Influenza A virus subtype H1N1. Two viral proteins, hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), are the basis of subtype designations, proteins which all viruses contain. The structure of these proteins differs from version to version due to very rapid genetic mutation in the viral genome, with the relevant H and N digits depending on which numeric forms of each the strain contains. Because of mutation's rapidity and unpredictability, the lethality of even the baseline can vary widely. It is typically not possible to develop appropriate vaccines, though the WHO previously urged the CDC to do so for Spanish Flu. They tried, failed, and they're afraid this is the Big One.

Reports from south of the border, whilst perhaps not very reliable, have all so far indicated a mortality rate higher than the dreaded 1917-1919 influenza A (2.5-5.0%) which broke out near the close of World War One and killed upwards of 70 million people. Coincidentally, the most virulent strain of H1N1 was re-created in international disease study labs five short years ago after exhuming the bodies of well-preserved victims. The blogosphere is, of course, teeming with reports that the flu threat is either a) way overblown, or b) a bio-engineered Great Die-Off. Each extreme or neither or both may be valid.

The Spanish Flu was exceptional in that it killed by using a sort of judo on human immuno-response systems. It tended to kill the healthiest people, particularly healthy adult males, by causing a cytokine storm; the stronger your immune system, the more likely you were to trigger the storm and die, usually from a viral pulmonary consolidation which mimicked pneumonia and could later morph into its bacterial form. As the Mexican version appears to do. The one toddler who died in Texas was from a prominent Mexican family; otherwise the Latino victims have been young, consistent with cytokine storm mechanisms, as with the victims of the 2005 outbreak of H5N1 Bird Flu. So far this outbreak hasn't killed any non-Latinos and the US has been fatality-free so far, with broad-spectrum and mild symptoms.

Mass media have not yet investigated the source of the outbreak. Had they done so, they would've found it started in the small town of La Gloria in Vera Cruz, starting in February:

'Sources characterized the event as a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.’

February is typically the end of flu season, not the beginning, thus the 'strange' descriptor. Yet the timing is nearly congruent with the North American outbreak of Spanish Flu, the first case observed at Fort Riley, Kansas on March 4th, 1918. La Gloria is the home of Granjas Carroll de Mexico, a factory hog operation owned by Smithfield Farms. It produced a million carcasses last year, along with enough manure lagoons that local residents began demonstrating against it. (Smithfield Farms is a supplier to McDonald's and Subway, and its then US-based operations were fined $12.3 million in 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act. It moved to Mexico after NAFTA's passage.)

Local residents in La Gloria directly attribute the flu outbreak to the pig plant, where the animals are packed into a close muddy proximity similar to trench conditions in France in 1918, where millions of fresh American soldiers were jammed ass by jowl. Oh, and Fort Riley circa 1918 was not just a military base. It was also a high-output pig and chicken farm.

How much to worry? Opinions differ greatly. In a Wednesday article in the LA Times, Wendy Orent, the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease" argues that because of past human exposure, rapid viral mutation cycles, and the lack of human proximity this particular version of H1N1 poses little reason for panic:

And we can predict the virus will only spread more easily over time: Natural selection ensures, by definition, that the most transmissible strains will be passed on. Fully adapted human flu is explosive -- no quarantine, no isolation, no Tamiflu can contain it.

Natural selection theory also tells us that whatever we will face, it won't be another 1918. As Ewald has argued for years, only packed conditions allowing deathly sick hosts to pass disease repeatedly to the well can produce highly virulent strains of flu -- for animals or for people. The usual sort of human crowding will not do it. Even massive, densely populated Mexico City, with more than 20 million inhabitants, won't produce the kind of lethal strains that the Western Front did in World War I. People died in Mexico because they were close to the epicenter of the disease, to the probable emergence of lethal strains from crowded pig breeding. But natural selection's corrective action is swift and predictable: The strains spreading across the world are milder.

While that may be true in terms of general virology, Orent's analysis discounts at least three obvious and contradictory possibilities:

1) early indications of higher lethality amongst children who have dimmer genetic memories of their forebears surviving other nasty forms of H1N1;

2) artificial introduction of easily transmissible but still deadly genetically-targeted versions which originated in a lab;

3) and natural mutation from mild into deadly strains as previously occurred in H1N1 following its emergence in early 1918.

Call me a yokel, but it seems viral evolution does not necessarily proceed in one direction towards lesser severity, increased transmission rates are known to augment and encourage mutation, and close-quarters air travel as a percentage of populace now far surpasses that of ship crossings undertaken a century ago. More people fly over the seas in one day than the total number of Allied soldiers who steamed across them throughout all of World War One.

Spanish Flu's recorded American outbreak in March, 1918 seemed to cause a brief blip in influenza deaths, after which the death rate returned to and remained at or below baseline from March of that year until November, when it suddenly rose to 25 times normal.



The mobility and proximity of doughboys in trenches is not unlike the recycled-air bubbles we hop into for international travel. And the lowest national death rates from Spanish Flu were in those countries which restricted travel (such as American Samoa and Japan) via preventative blockades, warding off ships from other places.

Firmly in the "Mostly Harmless" Camp, the Canadian pig farmer whose herd was infected had this to say:

"The chance that these pigs could transfer virus to a person is remote."

Probably true, unless you happen to have been drinking water laced with a 7% solution of pig shit, showered in same, or were bitten by a fly recently born in it. Then the chance seems far less remote. Furthermore, what does this perversely incented dumb-ass know? Orent's article also indicts factory poultry farms in Asia for the outbreak of H5N1 Bird Flu, a corona virus which scientists have derided as something not possible from nature, a force which had previously not seen fit to stuff hens into 10 by 12 inch cages and driven pigs so insane they chew each other's tails off on their crowded lot as antibiotics course through their veins and they root their futter out of common excrement reaching up past their hocks.

Current governmental recourse advises the immediate application of Tamiflu upon notice of flu-like symptoms. Tamiflu is owned by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman La Roche and is a patented derivative of Chinese star anise, a substance long used as a hallucinogen. Where it has been widely employed, the horrifying side effects profile of Tamiflu gives a pause roughly equal to the possible dangers of Spanish Flu:

Japanese health authorities ordered doctors not to prescribe Tamiflu...to patients aged 10-19 following dozens of deaths and injuries among teenagers over the past six years.

More than 1,300 people have exhibited neuropsychiatric symptoms since Tamiflu went on sale in Japan in 2001, of whom 71 have died. Twenty-seven, most in their teens, fell from buildings.

Last month the health ministry announced new clinical trials to establish whether the antiviral could cause delirium, delusion and other neuropsychiatric symptoms. The ministry had previously ruled out any link.

Twenty-seven patients taking Tamiflu , "most in their teens" fell to their deaths from buildings in Japan since 2001, and an 8-year old kid committed suicide. The Bush Administration FDA issued a ruling that Tamiflu is safe for children, and it's being pushed as the global influenza solution. Hmm. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a virologist. I'm just a dad who loves his children, and I'm on this like a screaming eagle. I will personally claw the eyes out of the interested dickheads who set this up and use gravity to drop their bloody skulls on shattering rocks.

We have a box of Tamiflu, four doses. We bought it back when SARS started making its rounds. If history and evolution are any guides in their doubt-ridden complexities, well hopefully they won't be and we're already past the worst. But the viral onslaught might start in November and if it does, Tamiflu, a creation of a cynically profit-driven Pharma, might best be employed as a very last resort.

Neko Case, "Hold On, Hold On" Music & Lyrics

A little mental vacation on a sunny cumulonimbus-free afternoon in the Pacific Northwest. Tickets to Neko Case's June shows at the Paramount in Seattle start at two hundred and twenty dollars and you can't even find her music on a jukebox in a bar. Her album Middle Cyclone is taking her over the top music industry be damned. She writes it, she belts it, great musicians back it and a vocal accompanist adds a 12th-part Jimmy Martin high lonesome harmony to all the right places. Amongst her musical influences are Hank Williams, Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn, Neil Young, Nick Lowe, Charles Bukowski and Ralph Stanley. Lord Wife got tickets in Portland for my splendid birthday, at the Crystal Ballroom. The lyrics:

The most tender place in my heart is for strangers
I know it's unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous
Hangin' round the ceiling half the time
Hangin' round the ceiling half the time

Compared to some, I've been around
But I really did try so hard
That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on"

In the end I was the mean girl
Or somebody's in-between girl
Now it's the devil I love
And that's as funny as real love

I leave the party at 3AM
Alone, thank god!
With a valium from the bride--
It's the devil I love
It's the devil I love...
And that's as funny as real love
And it's as real as True Love

That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on!"

That echo chorus lied to me with its
"Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on!"

Thank Your Free Markets For Tamiflu...Brought To You By Donald Rumsfeld

Countries are stocking up on Tamiflu at the behest of health officials, based upon 297 world-wide cases of a common flu which has probably been afflicting humans for centuries. The threat level will be raised to maximum this weekend. While prudence is warranted, so also is a little trip down Memory Hole Lane to inspect other motives:

October 31, 2005: 10:55 AM EST
By Nelson D. Schwartz, Fortune senior writer

NEW YORK (Fortune) - The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it's proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that's now the most-sought after drug in the world.

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)'s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

The forms don't reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead's stock from $35 to $47. That's made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

Rumsfeld isn't the only political heavyweight benefiting from demand for Tamiflu, which is manufactured and marketed by Swiss pharma giant Roche. (Gilead receives a royalty from Roche equaling about 10% of sales.) Former Secretary of State George Shultz, who is on Gilead's board, has sold more than $7 million worth of Gilead since the beginning of 2005.

Another board member is the wife of former California Gov. Pete Wilson.

"I don't know of any biotech company that's so politically well-connected," says analyst Andrew McDonald of Think Equity Partners in San Francisco.

What's more, the federal government is emerging as one of the world's biggest customers for Tamiflu. In July, the Pentagon ordered $58 million worth of the treatment for U.S. troops around the world, and Congress is considering a multi-billion dollar purchase. Roche expects 2005 sales for Tamiflu to be about $1 billion, compared with $258 million in 2004.

Rumsfeld recused himself from any decisions involving Gilead when he left Gilead and became Secretary of Defense in early 2001. And late last month, notes a senior Pentagon official, Rumsfeld went even further and had the Pentagon's general counsel issue additional instructions outlining what he could and could not be involved in if there were an avian flu pandemic and the Pentagon had to respond.

As the flu issue heated up early this year, according to the Pentagon official, Rumsfeld considered unloading his entire Gilead stake and sought the advice of the Department of Justice, the SEC and the federal Office of Government Ethics.

Those agencies didn't offer an opinion so Rumsfeld consulted a private securities lawyer, who advised him that it was safer to hold on to the stock and be quite public about his recusal rather than sell and run the risk of being accused of trading on insider information, something Rumsfeld doesn't believe he possesses. So he's keeping his shares for the time being.

The Need To Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs, by Arlen Specter

The tachometer swings, momentum builds. Senator Arlen Specter released the above-titled article in that respected journal of congressional politics, The New York Times Review of Books. Admittedly, it's full of juicy disclosures, and was published just as he was switching parties. Short-short: Specter fingers Dick Cheney as being responsible for using the telecoms to spy on "tens of millions" of Americans and for sabotaging previous legislative efforts to restore the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) and the rule of law. Nothing we didn't know, but any Pug who said that two short years ago would've soon been found with a Dead Girl and a Live Boy.

Coupled with the recent leak of the existence of NSA eavesdropping transcripts on conversations Rep. Jane Harman had with unnamed Israeli lobbyists, a.k.a. spies, a move clearly meant to threaten Harman, and you've a pretty good indication Cheney has active stay-behinds in the apparatus. If so, he can still use past and possibly present surveillance to put the fear of exposure into politicians and bureaucrats on both sides of the aisle. In Harman's case, she's a Dim who sits on the Intelligence Committee and has visited Israel 22 times in the past few years. She's vulnerable as hell, and all Cheney had to do was note the mere existence of transcripts to back her down.

(Note: since the transcript is about the Israel Lobby promising to get Harman put on the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections in exchange for keeping a couple of their red-handed own out of jail, there are different, more hopeful interpretations for the source of the leak. However, the leak was a naked demonstration of power, and Harman is now the most vocal defender of the Bush Administration's use of surveillance. Gonzales had previously quashed congressional exposure of the surveillance and protected Harman, by then an indictable criminal. Now, as threatening legislation looms, boom! The embarrassing leak. Cui bono? Veep Throat. My money's on Cheney as source.)

Evidently the NSA and "Veep Throat" have nothing on Specter. If they do, we'll hear about it soon. There were huge problems with the 2006 version of his same basic bill, including executive ability to order ISPs to hand over all communications without going in front of a judge. Still, they're playing in a different stadium now. To name but a few examples, the Pravda, I mean Washington Post, stated this week only 21% of Americans now identify themselves as Republican, House minority leader John Boehner actually used the word "torture," and a civil war is being fought in the former goose-stepping-in-unison RNC.

If he gets the anti-surveillance, anti-signing statement legislation through as described, I'll take back (most of) the bad things I've said about the Senator from Pennslovania:

In the seven and a half years since September 11, the United States has witnessed one of the greatest expansions of executive authority in its history, at the expense of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers. President Obama, as only the third sitting senator to be elected president in American history, and the first since John F. Kennedy, may be more likely to respect the separation of powers than President Bush was. But rather than put my faith in any president to restrain the executive branch, I intend to take several concrete steps, which I hope the new president will support.

First, I intend to introduce legislation that will mandate Supreme Court review of lower court decisions in suits brought by the ACLU and others that challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless wiretapping program authorized by President Bush after September 11. While the Supreme Court generally exercises discretion on whether it will review a case, there are precedents for Congress to direct Supreme Court review on constitutional issues—including the statutes forbidding flag burning and requiring Congress to abide by federal employment laws—and I will follow those.

Second, I will reintroduce legislation to keep the courts open to suits filed against several major telephone companies that allegedly facilitated the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Although Congress granted immunity to the telephone companies in July 2008, this issue may yet be successfully revisited since the courts have not yet ruled on the legality of the immunity provision. My legislation would substitute the government as defendant in place of the telephone companies. This would allow the cases to go forward, with the government footing the bill for any damages awarded.

---

---

Further, I will reintroduce my legislation from 2006 and 2007 (the "Presidential Signing Statements Act") to prohibit courts from relying on, or deferring to, presidential signing statements when determining the meaning of any Act of Congress. These statements, sometimes issued when the president signs a bill into law, have too often been used to undermine congressional intent. Earlier versions of my legislation went nowhere because of the obvious impossibility of obtaining two-thirds majorities in each house to override an expected veto by President Bush. Nevertheless, in the new Congress, my legislation has a better chance of mustering a majority vote and being signed into law by President Obama.

To understand why these steps are so important, one must appreciate an imbalance in our "checks and balances" that has become increasingly evident in recent years. I witnessed firsthand, during many of the battles over administration policy since September 11, how difficult it can be for Congress and the courts to rally their members against an overzealous executive.

Numerous war powers statutes remain at legal loggerheads with citizens' rights in a time when the definition of war itself has been widened and loop-holed. At least this bill opens the way for ACLU lawsuits to engage the courts for definition. Arlen Specter...I've had stranger bedfellows, but none I care to disclose at this time. The rest here.

The Permanent Republican Majority's Specter

Senator Arlen Specter's staff denied queries today that he was turning coats to become a Democrat, denied again, and then confirmed. Politically, the impact will be huge.

Keeping tabs on Specter is not a task which fills my heart with joy, so I don't know when his re-election bid rolls around but would give 3:1 odds it's soon. He is the Senate's 12th most senior member and one of its most powerful. He has chaired the Intel and the Judiciary Committees, as well as Veteran's Affairs. He is one of the people who sit around and decide where the grease goes, and how much of it.

He has lymphoma, just undergoing chemo to control it again last year, so maybe he simply craves having some political relevance again. (See Obama's tactic of making deals to peel off moderates and isolate radicals, two posts previous.) Given Specter's stature, it wouldn't be surprising if this marks the start of a trend.

Financial Vortex & Possible Happy Effects

There's arguing amongst the money people over what to call what we're in. Some of them go with "Depression," noting that deflationary pressure, sharp and sustained job losses, and lack of money supply warrant the use of that word. Others cite that few prices have dropped, on the contrary most are still increasing, and we're going through a Recession perhaps akin to Japan in the 90s. Still others recall Stagflation, a coin termed in the 1970s when inflation raged and stimulus had little desired effect.

Stagflation would seem a better avenue to understanding what we're experiencing, and it resulted from structural similarities. From 1973 onward, America's economy reeled, net wages dropped, wealth was transferred offshore and overall quality of life diminished. Vietnam War expenses caused Nixon to nix the Gold Standard in 1971, eroding confidence in the currency. Domestic energy production had peaked, so OPEC struck with disruptive embargoes. The Fed printed money for stimulus, but it didn't get to consumers and inflation took off. Trade deficits widened and businesses failed as political policies and corporate strategies were exposed for having been out to lunch.

Meditating on these slow-motion explosions, however, Stagflation doesn't begin to capture the magnitude of events for which the languages of economics or finance themselves are inadequate. Those disciplines too are in the midst of altering precepts and analytical frameworks, struggling to keep up with commoners in the wake of an unprecedented World Property Bubble. The experts haven't seen this beast before either.

So, what is it? We have a hyper-inflationary spiral and a demand-destruction (thus deflationary) spiral going on at the same time. When you've got two strong opposing spirals, you've got a tornado. Or a Vortex. General Motors, the twentieth century's greatest company, is getting sucked up into it, the cold air keeps hitting the warm air and when it comes time to rebuild, we'll have to call the East Asia Insurance Company. This when we're in massive debt, are printing tons of hundred-dollar bills to drop out of helicopters, and are stuck in unwinnable "dumb wars" whose cost is already comparable to WWII. Call me a neophyte, but I'm not seeing a handy storm shelter to climb into.

Maybe the dollar will get sucked through that Vortex along with GM and get spit out as a minority slice in a basket of international currencies, one which prominently includes China. For many of us going forward, this will be good news. It will mean we can't finance wars or more complex weapon systems by selling bonds and then paying them off with funny money, and we'll have to figure out how to peg the dollar's value to something other than the world's oil reserves. Our economy, imaginations and energies might be forced back to living within its means, to making helpful things, real things of actual value. Would that be so terrible?

Obama The Nudgeocrat

Here are a few posts I composed in my head over the past couple weeks but didn't get around to publishing:

1) Tim Geithner Must Be Attacked With a Broken Beer Bottle (Fox-Built Hen-House, Economy)
2) Is Barack Obama An Idiot (Land War, Asia)
3) Damn You Human Xanax (Look Homeward, Asshole)
4) He Will Kill Us All (Negative Affect, Schizophrenia)

Plenty of pundits have been handing out report cards on the first hundred days, during which time I've been holding off from lambasting the 44th President, with the exceptions of the Bail-In and Afghanistan while watching the mess closely, biting nails and tongue. There is much to be not happy about. Aside: do you remember those old-fashioned vacuum-tube television sets? When you threw a can of ptomaine-ridden tomatoes through one's screen at the town dump, it was truly a vacuum and would violently suck air and glass inwards before spitting out silver dust, mercury vapor and various fine particles of deadly heavy metals. Deeply satisfying.

These days when you hurl a dense object like an unopened can of beer at a TV all the screen does is fracture into tiny outwardly radiating visual shard-fields and triangles, some lit, some not. You can still watch the random segments and try to reassemble a skewed digital kaleidoscope into coherence. Which is not satisfying at all. Media has changed a great deal since then.

We have a process-oriented centrist at the helm after two full terms of a gut-driven, divisive strength of convictions knee-biter. We could arguably use more of the latter now, and one trouble with process-oriented people is they're hard to figure out. Another is they patiently employ methods which countenance delay. Example A:

"Words are good and understanding is good, but ultimately it has to translate into concrete actions...These things take time, and the idea is you lay the groundwork and slowly, over time, if you make small efforts, they can add up into big efforts."

Obama made that statement in a town hall with Turkish students on the last day of his opening world tour through Europe and the Subcontinent. Repeat: town hall meeting. Not here. With students in Turkey. Why? He was following a rigorous process. Here it is:

1) talk with the animals; learn their languages
2) make some of them happy and offer a deal
3) let their radical fringes cut themselves out of the deal
4) wait for the needles of their opposing opinions to shift in your direction

This technique beats out consensus like dust out of a rug on a clothesline and Obama is nudging badly soiled processes back to better directions. When he met Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a sworn enemy of the United States, he smiled, shook the dictator's hand and said, "Como estas?" Chavez beamed like a kid with ten bucks in a candy store, and it was cheap. It was easy. You take what you can get and in so doing you start to load the bases before maybe hitting a double, a triple, a home run.

When he met with the House and Senate Minority Leaders about health care legislation, on the other hand, he reminded them seven times that they voted party-line against the stimulus package and said in effect, "I'm disappointed. You are acting like radical fringe who want to cut themselves out of the deal." He doesn't need them to pass what he wants by October under a technical process known as reconciliation. He warned them he's going to ram it home, and their continued bitching won't mean squat because we all want it. Get with the Program.

The remaining Pug choice is to shift left or be further marginalized. They are brittle and conflicted and have not yet burst asunder, so it's hard to tell what they'll do. But when Obama took office, only 8% of Americans polled thought the country was "moving in the right direction." Now 50% do. That's a 42-point shift in 100 days. I can rail about wedding parties being blasted in Afghanistan or Geithner felching gerbils with his friends on Wall Street, but there was a tremendous turnabout in opinion and many public hallmarks of masterful leadership in that time.

Arguing over the merits of Obama's tactics is unwise. The Nudge is working, and is effectively applied. Some arguments are even more fundamental. Bigger questions beg and sniff around if there's enough time to fix what could not be broken, yet is, and if it's really worth trying to restore our Standing in the World.

Born To Run: Lyrics, Bruce Springsteen

Was waiting in the car outside the East-Side credit union today avoiding the news and listening to classic Rock when 'Born to Run' came on. Reflected how text is obscured when it goes into song even for the Boss. Wanted to understand more about the New Jersey of his artist eyes. Fished the iPhone out of my pocket and searched for the lyrics to confirm, read them and said yep the poetry he wrote is different from the song of the proper laureate of my America. He saw the same things we did. He just took the time to grab a scrap of paper to sketch it down with a pen right then and there and beat the ore out later like a blacksmith melting language until it answered back with the right curves and tings. The words:

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American Dream.
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
sprung from cages out on highway Nine, chrome-wheeled
fuel injected and steppin' out over the line.

Baby this town rips the bones from your back.
It's a death-trap, it's a suicide rap,
we gotta get out while we're young...
cuz tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Wendy, let me in. I wanna be your friend--
I wanna guard your dreams and visions.
Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims
and strap your hands across my engines.
Together we could break this trap,
we'll run till we drop, and baby we'll never go back

Will you walk with me out on the wire?
Baby I'm just a scared and lonely rider,
but I gotta find out how it feels.
I want to know if love is wild, girl,
I wanna know if love is real

Beyond the Palace hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard.
The girls comb their hair in rear-view mirrors and the boys try to look so hard;
the amusement park rises bold and stark. Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist.
I wanna die with you Wendy on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive.
Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide.
Together, Wendy, we'll live with the sadness
and I'll love you with all the madness in my soul.

Someday girl I don't know when, we're gonna get to that place
where we really want to go and we'll walk in the sun.
But 'til then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

The Torture Crack In The Bush Administration

When the NY Times felt compelled to write an anti-torture op-ed which called for the impeachment of federal judge Jay Bybee, he who was instrumental in writing the Torture Memos, it was a happily ironic moment. "Happily" because it would duly trigger a major turning point in Obama's stupid See-No-Evil policies regarding sins committed in our names; "ironic" because the New York Times chose not to at least acknowledge its past prominence in warmongering and rah-rahs in support of torture. My thought upon seeing the op-ed was this:

"Ah-ha! Finally #*@%-$^ gettin' somewhere. NYT thinks it's time for CYA."

Torture, as long predicted here, is the aperture in which to shove the crowbar for rupturing the Bush Administration asunder, and that vulnerability is sufficiently appreciated by the perpetrators. The fact that they can in domestic and international law be taken all the way down (in theory) to an execution chamber is why Dick Cheney regularly emerges to warn What Will Happen if we reverse torture policy. Now, he may sincerely believe the Taliban will attack Lake Placid and al-Qaeda will invade Wyoming. But primarily he's just trying to cover his ass and understandably so. If you were guilty of ordering war crimes, you might play a little CYA, too.

Senator Russ Feingold is on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he's angry on both moral and turf grounds. He seemed the best hope in view to get the crack spreading out into a real Ass-Raping of the Evil-Doers, so I've occasionally written his staff to rant about the evils of torture, and have signed every petition about it I've come across. Here's what The Crowbar had to say recently when counter-punching a Sunday Talking Head:

"Part of what troubles me are the lawyers -- we should see their law school degrees -- who consciously wrote these memos justifying and explaining full well those outrageous arguments," the Wisconsin Democrat said on Tuesday in reference to the Bush-era torture memos released last week. "I cannot join the president, or his spokesman, or [chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel, who said we aren't going [to prosecute these people]. I can't. I just disagree with them."

"If you want to see just how outrageous this is, I refer you to the remarks made by Peggy Noonan this Sunday," he said, referring to the longtime conservative columnist's appearance on ABC's This Week. "I frankly have never heard anything quite as disturbing as her remark that was something to the affect of: 'well sometimes you just have to move on.'"

"It is truly horrifying and unforgivable that anybody operating under the auspices of the United States of America had involvement in any of this," he said. "So I'm not even completely ready to [cede the argument] that people who devised these techniques should be off the hook. I understand the argument. I also remember when people said that they were just following orders. So that troubles me and I am thinking about it."

Obama advisors like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have suggested that prosecution of Bush officials is likely off the table due to political sensitivities, to not looking backwards, to Jupiter not yet being aligned with Mars, etc. Right. These two men are devout Jews, and yes, I am explicitly pointing out an inherent religion-based pro-torture bias against Muslims on the part of the Obama Administration. On the part of our entire paranoid country.

Look. We haven't been torturing Evangelicals and Born-Agains in our midst, and do thousands of them not espouse fiery cataclysms on the District of Columbia on a weekly, if not hourly, basis? As these dangerous assholes stock up on assault rifles for probably a dozen Church Shoot-Em-Ups over the next year, why, may I ask, have electrodes not been placed on their genitals in order to save their future victims?

And god help us if we were to ever torture a single Jew for, I dunno, plotting to take over the international banking system. Because then there would be books! Movies! Ongoing outrage, in memoriams, anti-defamations and never-agains ad infinitum. Even if they've trade-marked the Holocaust, why are we not torturing an Israeli security encryption provider which spies on federal and local law enforcement agencies which use its services? (Note: I refer to a company in my profession.)

We torture Muslims. Not Xtians. Not Jews. Bowing to pressure from the left and after being outed by Feingold, the New York Times reported today that White House "aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques." There's a long way to go from here to hand-cuffs, much less ass-rapings or executions, but the crack is getting closer to the source. And now it's going to speed up.

UPDATE: Feingold responds to Obama's statement that he is open to prosecutions of some Bush officials:

“I am pleased that the president made clear that he has not ruled out investigations or prosecutions of those who authorized torture, or provided the legal justification for it. Horrible abuses were committed in the name of the American people, and we cannot look the other way, or just ‘move on.’ The final decision will be up to the attorney general and the president, but I urge the Justice Department to take this matter very seriously."

Texas Governor Threatens To Secede From Union

This just happens to be what I wished for when I blew out that last birthday candle. Thank you Birthday Fairy!!

This move by Governor Rick Perry dovetails beautifully with the Dungeons and Day Jobs State's ad campaign: Texas...It's Like A Whole Other Country.

Umm, exactly. Houston we have a problem. Maybe America really is a failed experiment when your Constitutionally protected right to be a murderous hypernational boob-tard hits critical mass and people are walking in to places and opening up with automatic weapons fire already, a depressingly common event in the past 30 days, is it really so bad if we let them go? And if it does really happen, do not say it can't, it would be like having Uganda or Mexico right next door, except they would give those bastards in the UN a what-fur by not showing up to their "wimpy commie-fests."

Evil Day Bob Job, a blogger who happens to be the #1 hit if you entered "f*%@ texas" into a Google search, proposes the next tourist ad:

So, when you're looking for scorpions, poisonous snakes, scorching heat and human rights abuses, don't go all the way to Mexico! You can get all that and more right here in Texas! "It's Like A Whole Other Country That Was Founded By Your Abusive Brother-In-Law Next Door."

I can't wait to not go, and I'm scared to google-image the same phrase.

Note: Be afraid, be afraid, do not image-search that phrase unless Safe Search is set to "China."

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.

Maple Syrup Slurpings

Lord Running Boy hosted a sleep-over one recent Friday with his cousin, whose tribal nickname is Beatee. They requested pancakes for the next morning. This was Beatee's plate.

Be Careful Of Your Brain's Reflexes

I'm watching 'America's Next Top Model' while reading a written interview Osama bin Laden gave September 28th, 2001. The juxtaposition is just about perfect. Afghanistan makes Vietnam look like the La Jolla yacht club. If Obama is serious about expanding the war into Pakistan, he has traded in his cigarettes for crack. Here's what everybody in Pakistan already knows:

Daily UMMAT: You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington. What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?

USAMA BIN LADEN: In the name of God, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the Earth as an abode for peace, for the whole humankind. Allah is the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad for our guidance. I am thankful to The Ummat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant and true Muslim people of Pakistan who refused to believe the lies of the demon (Pakistani military dictator General Pervez Musharraf).

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United States which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam.

The U.S. has no friends, nor does it want to keep any because the prerequisite of friendship is to come to the level of the friend or consider him at par with you. America does not want to see anyone equal to it. It expects slavery from others. Therefore, other countries are either its slaves or subordinates. However, our case is different. We have pledged slavery to God Almighty alone and after this pledge there is no possibility to become the slave of someone else. If we do that it will be disregardful to both our Sustainer and his fellow beings. Most of the world nations upholding their freedom are the religious ones, which are the enemies of the United States, or the U.S. itself considers them as its enemies.

The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the U.S. itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.

Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usama and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance.

I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other U.S. President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes.

What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks.

Yoanna won the model competition, even though all the judges including Tyra Banks admitted to liking Mercedes better as the war machine grinds its way 8 years later into Pakistan. They're calling it the Af-Pak War now. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll, ten thousand ships have traveled thee in vain.

Daily UMMAT: Are there other safe areas other than Afghanistan, where you can continue jehad?

USAMA BIN LADEN: There are areas in all parts of the world where strong jehadi forces are present, from Indonesia to Algeria, from Kabul to Chechnya, from Bosnia to Sudan, and from Burma to Kashmir. Then it is not the problem of my person. I am a helpless fellowman of God, constantly in the fear of my accountability before God. It is not the question of me but of Islam and, in Islam too, of jehad. Thanks to God, those waging a jehad can walk today with their heads raised. Jehad was still present when there was no Usama and it will remain as such even when Usama is no longer there. Allah opens up ways and creates loves in the hearts of people for those who walk on the path of Allah with their lives, property and children. Believe it, through jehad, a man gets everything he desires. And the biggest desire of a Muslim is the life after death. Martyrdom is the shortest way of attaining an eternal life.

Daily UMMAT: What do you say about the Pakistan Government policy on Afghanistan attack?

USAMA BIN LADEN: We are thankful to the Momin and valiant people of Pakistan who erected a blockade in front of the evil forces and stood in the first file of battle. Pakistan is a great hope for the Islamic brotherhood. Its people are awakened, organized and rich in the spirit of faith. They backed Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union and extended every help to the mojahedeen (freedom fighters) and the Afghan people. Then these are very Pakistanis who are standing shoulder by shoulder with the Taleban. If such people emerge in just two countries, the domination of the West will diminish in a matter of days. Our hearts beat with Pakistan and, God forbid, if a difficult time comes we will protect it with our blood. Pakistan is sacred for us like a place of worship. We are the people of jehad and fighting for the defense of Pakistan is the best of all jehads to us. It does not matter for us as to who reforms Pakistan. The important thing is that the spirit of jehad is alive and stronger in the hearts of the Pakistani people.

- Source: Ummat, Urdu-language daily newspaper based in Karachi, Pakistan - Friday, 28 September 2001 - pages 1, 7. http://www.khilafah.comhttp://www.khilafah.com/1421/category.php?DocumentID=2392&TagID=2

Why The Charges Were Dropped Against Former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens

There is a core of about 12 senior Senators and Reps who control the portions of wealth and privilege to most actors in government and their clients. It's kind of like a consulting firm in which the most important things to keep straight are shifting motives and where the bodies are buried, and they can't be in the core without earning black belts in corruption. Ted Stevens was there for a long time, but he got pushed out of the Circle of Trust, out of the Tree House when he openly cried on the Senate floor, "You're all going to pay for this!" So it was no surprise when corruption charges were levied against him.

Still, I was puzzled and disgusted when the new Justice dropped the charges. With that and so many other things, however, the former Department was dealing Stevens a hand from the same marked deck as it did everybody else. In a highly competent and intellectually unsparing post, the Bee Keeper's Apprentice lays out why Eric Holder did the right thing in dropping the charges. The prosecutors had messed with the Rules of Evidence:

For the last eight years, we have all seen what can happen when the highest prosecutors in the land are ruled not by the rules of evidence and law, but by the rules of cronyism and politics. This is why I believe that President Obama hit it out of the park when he appointed Eric Holder as Attorney General. Holder seems to know, and respect, the rules of evidence and law. We don't have to be happy with his decision to drop the case against former Senator from Alaska Ted Stevens, but we do have to respect Holder's decision. Stevens, who was indicted and convicted of ethics violations for not disclosing "gifts" in excess of $250,000, will walk free on a technicality. And I agree that he should walk.

Notes were found in the former prosecutors files. Notes that would have helped Stevens defense attorneys to cross-examine the testimony of Bill Allen, whose testimony helped convict Stevens. Notes that were not provided to the defense team during discovery. Notes that might have cast doubt on Allen's testimony, which suddenly doesn't look quite as bullet-proof as it once did. Notes that were required by the rules of evidence to be turned over to the defense.

How typical. They stacked the deck, and didn't even need to against Stevens. Bee, a legal beagle by day, clarified not just this case but also its over-arching umbrella. The first and most important thing for our country to do is start playing by the rules again, by our good well-proven rules. Helluva post, read in full if you want here. In turn, Bee triggered a related insight.

There's a different angle on prosecuting Bush: his modes of behavior aren't going to change. He is a professional criminal. It's what he does. He has in no wise gone straight and he's going to do other illegal things going forward. If I were Holder's boss, I'd tell him to leave the past to Congress and assign a small team of smart kids to keep an eye on W and his transactions. He will transgress further because of what he is. Guaranteed. The opportunity to impeach or prosecute him for the past was already gone, but there is plenty of uncertain future ahead, and the game is about making the rules re-apply. Even to him.

Globalization Gothic

Politico is reporting Obama told a meeting of Bank CEOs, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” Just as my natives and I were reaching for the farm implements, he picked up the meme. Coincidence or not, let's get out the whetstones for a few minutes while we sharpen our blades and prongs.

Consider the cheap-o gifts to England's PM and the Queen. DVDs and an iPod. What message do they send? These tokens don't have to be painstakingly wrought by hand from a brass cannon on the HMS Victory into a pen-holder to be culturally valid. You get them at Best Buy. The gifts were cheap and commonplace yet powerful. They were chosen carefully for their symbolism to refute and say it's ok for a head of state to give a simple gift which is not an everlasting obligation.

Michelle Robinson Obama, a black American woman descended from slaves, steadied the old Queen of England with her right arm on their first meeting, and Elizabeth demolished protocol by embracing her back. Kenya used to be one of England's troublesome colonies when the Queen was a young woman. I would invite you to read Plutarch's Lives and find symbology more powerful.

Our fearless leader is on a tour of Europe and held a town hall in Strasbourg. I've been there, had a fantastic five-course meal for twelve bucks and it's long been a No-Man's Land between France and Germany. Obama chose it as the venue for a Town Meeting. What other President would have? None other. He restored much lost world goodwill this week.

We are still being looted, and ask not what your banks can do for you...ask what you can do for your banks. The bleeding continues, and our currency is on IV. This guy has studied long at the feet of the Masters, and he is out-doing them. I don't know if it's fixable, it probably is not. But he is no Blair, he knew the train wreck he was striding into and I would have none other.

Obama knows his job above all else is to set the tone, to level a framework tilted out of whack. He is doing that job well. Evil details race astray like innumerable cockroackes and while Obama is an economic naif it doesn't really matter because that prostituted pooch was already screwed. I want to see malefactors frog-marched more than anyone else because I understand what they did but I also know that politicians are scapegoating bankers and honest brokers for the bribes they took and the laws they, the legal gatekeepers, sold and allowed to be changed.

Obama is a politician. That's what he had to become and it's a dirty business. But even in the dirt there can be standards, regulations even, and he is out to restore them.

Pitchforks and Torches

While Joe Klein and the rest of the D.C./New York punditocracy insists that either A) the public really isn't all that angry at the kleptocracy and the anger is just a made up fantasy by opportunists or B) that public anger is just momentary, a new Quinnipiac poll tells the crystal clear truth:

David Sirota :: Poll: Yes, It's True, The Public Is Extremely Angry

Despite President Barack Obama's efforts to calm the populist rhetoric, Americans remain mad as hell and want to vent their anger on corporations, the wealthy, and anyone else they see as privileged...What we are seeing in public opinion polls is a wave of populism that shows no sign of cresting. It is likely to remain high, and perhaps grow... Consider this: Four out of five voters think politicians in Washington, D.C., should limit the pay of executives at companies that get federal bailout money. Three in 10 voters embrace the historically un-American notion that government should control the pay for executives of firms that don't get any cash from Uncle Sam...Or, how about the finding that only one in seven thinks executives of companies that needed federal help were victims of adverse economic circumstances they could not have anticipated. Three-quarters of Americans think these business leaders were either incompetent or crooked. Perhaps that is why almost half of Americans want federal prosecutors to be more aggressive in pursuing criminal charges against these business leaders, compared to one in 10 who wants them to be less aggressive. Of course these numbers are very, very frightening to those who spend their time defending the status quo from the gilded ramparts of the Establishment media. So I understand the self-interest of Klein and ass-cleaners like him who to try to use their platforms to tamp down the anger. But no amount of spin can obscure these kind of numbers. Yes, newsflash - people are enraged. The problem isn't the anger, as the media would have us believe - it is what everyone is rightfully angry at.* The sooner the Village accepts this, the sooner it will start reflecting reality. * Based on his rhetoric, President Obama (as opposed to many of his aides) seems to grasp exactly this, and thus his poll numbers remain encouragingly strong, which is a very good thing.