My Thanksgiving Prayers Had Nothing To Do With This...

Vice President Dick Cheney was hospitalized for an irregular heartbeat today. Wouldn't it be just...terrible? And just in time for the holidays! Come to think, though, it probably would be terrible for whichever one of his clones they're planning to harvest organs from next.

This knowledge came to me via Young Goodman-Blogger Who is IOZ, who filed it under "Headlines We Love." Above the headline, IOZ put up a video of a pertinent dark song, so that inspired me to go Youtubing for a version of Nick Lowe's 'The Beast in Me.' It's a great song, and someone set the track to images of Henry the Eighth (VIII), and I hereby dedicate it to the health, physical and mental, of our dearest leaders.

Olympic Peninsula Thanksgiving

Lord Mother, at her secure location somewhere in the Olympic Mountains, roasted a dearly departed turkey with all the fixings yesterday while we traveled through a traffic guantlet to intercept it. The completion was made, the tryptophans, mixed with cranberries, squash, and stuffing, hit right on schedule. We all were thankful.

Today I breakfasted on leftovers and, later, can look forward to freshly smoked trout. Lord Running Boy will be taken to a suitable river to blow off some steam, throwing as many rocks as he can find, and then we will learn about oysters. He will surely pronounce judgement upon them as "vewy icky."

Venezuela: The Left And The Right

On the left side of the picture above, about 90% of people vote for Chavez. On the right side about 90% of people vote for someone else, form student unions to subvert the villainous paradigm, and get funding from shady US pro-democracy groups with intelligence ties.

The right side of the picture, on the whole, should consider itself lucky. Worse things could've happened than having to put up with a blowhard who gives three-hour long speeches and uses oil money to build schools.

The McDonald's Rule

Until there are Mickey Dees all over the Mideast, it won't be truly settled. "I'm hungry as a bulldog! Baby, how about you?"

The best McDonald's I've ever been to, and like the privileged in my empire I've been to quite a few, was opposite the train station in Basel, Switzerland. It could compete with any grandesions in Munich, London, Tokyo, trumping any quiet men in the hinterlands of Hungary or Prague. Jung and Marx and Freud and Lenin would've been happy meeting in my golden arches, right there in Basel, so close to their apartments. 50 years before, on that spot, they were fresh off their trains and razors' edges. Their lies were whoppers, announced on the special to expand the mindspace and the palate of homo sapiens. With the arches, they have a natural home.

As for the Swiss, well hey they don't make no bad burgers, and the fries...were all done to perfection. In some places, the concept of fast food is misbegotten, and we're still trying to learn how to make it better. Many were the days and nights when I had worked long, and was hungry. When I lacked food and was attracted by those Golden Arches. They meant the promise of a simulated meal, and some meat when I got down too low in the cold to take good care. The Arches were a few blocks from my apartment, beckoning and mocking my anonymity. When there was no one I could trust and my future reached for crutches, the McDonald's was still there.

(graphic via Cat in the Bag)

Chavmadenijad: Disaster Is Seen As Catastrophe Looms

Pay some attention to the men behind the curtain:

At the third OPE summit in 47 years, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that the price of crude oil could reach $200 a barrel. "The basis of all aggression," said Chavez, "is oil." During a private meeting that was accidentally televised, the oil minister of Venezuela suggested to the oil minister of Iran that OPEC stop using the crippled dollar for pricing; the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia countered that public discussion of the weak dollar would cause US currency to lose value. "Kill the cable!" shouted a security guard as he ran into the meeting room. "Kill the cable!"

Shorter Clinton, Shorter Obama

The Drudge Report has an "Obama Break-out in Iowa" ABC News Story up as its featured Big Red Link. Bottom line, Iowa's still up for grabs because it's difficult to trust Hillary (so much to not talk about). Barack Obama continues to have occasional lapses into sincerity, his staffers dreading the next I'm Not Nuking Iran Moment. So I thought of glossing over all pertinent detail to boil Clinton and Obama down into one bipolar statement each. Slogans encapsulating their pros and cons. You know. To try my hand at thinking...like a voter. Here we go:

Clinton: Health Care...For Corporations

Obama: A New Breed...Of Exercise Regimen

People sense these things intuitively. Hillary would get universal health care through, but she'll do so by freeing corporations from the burdens of providing it. People will, on average, pay even more for it. Obama represents a new way of doing things, which unfortunately involves eschewing the financial cocaine tray, getting into the gym, and sweating like pigs.

Psyche's News Roundup

Matthew Yglesias (November 18, 2007) - This Sounds Like a Really Fun Mission (Neocons ramping up for another war - not Iran)

James Watson: To question genetic intelligence is not racism - Independent Online Edition

Security experts: NIST encryption standard may have NSA backdoor

Stumper : Making the Case... for Hillary Clinton. By Sean Wilentz

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Guantanamo document confirms psychological torture - Wikileaks

mediabistro.com: FishbowlNY Strike Watch: 90 Percent of SNL Staff Was Fired

usa-historical-debt-as-a-of-gdp-from-1929-w2.jpg

ABC News: 9/11 Firefighters Plot Anti-Giuliani Ads

Raw Replay - Revisiting History - UK TV hits Giuliani on 9/11 record

Questions About Carville and CNN - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog (debate was rigged)

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | We're trapped in a prison and the walls are rising higher

Intelligent design, Creationism | Salon News (American creationism doesn't die, it just adapts)

Race and Intelligence | MetaFilter

Brain size does not predict general cognitive ability within families -- Schoenemann et al. 97 (9): 4932 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

g, a Statistical Myth

Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ + AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race


Evolutionary Map, Ten Thousand Million Years | histomap.jpg (JPEG Image, 3212x8748 pixels)

Art & Architecture | Guardian Unlimited Arts | Rembrandt reaches the web

Fortress Britain: Party Member Hauled Away, Held As Terrorist

England is the Blarney Stone of traditional Western freedoms. Magna Carta was made while commoners and royalty sat by the ancient sacred tree at Runnymede to invent habeas corpus, and courts which ran on rule of law. Much future intellectual and economic prosperity were granted solid foundations that day, so it is discomfiting to watch as England begins descending a steeper stairway into paranoia.

As the Labour Party held its conference in Brighton, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Britain was in Iraq for one reason only--to help the Iraqi government. At which point 82-year old Walt Wolfgang yelled, "That's a lie and you know it!" He was descended upon by security guards, and party members say they handled the old gentleman rather roughly while ejecting him from the proceedings.

Mr. Wolfgang is a Vice President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As he was being wrestled out, party chairman for Thamesmead Steve Forrest said, "Leave him alone, he's an old man." Forrest was immediately hauled away by more guards. Wolfgang, a refugee from Nazi Germany and Labour Party member since 1948, has no dearth of perspective:

"When you have an international debate that does not deal adequately with the international issues of the day, the least you can do, if someone is talking nonsense, is say so."

At first Sussex police denied that Mr Wolfgang had been detained or searched but a spokesman later admitted that he had been issued with a section 44 stop and search form under the Terrorism Act.

Mr Wolfgang said: "We have reached a situation where freedom of expression has been threatened. I am not surprised, because the Labour Party has been taken over by a gang of adventurers who are on their way out."

On their way out. Yes, rather...well, let's hope you live to see that day, sir. Until then I'm making a new tag entitled 'Fortress Britain.'

Leatherstocking High

Follow-up to last post, which provoked some fairly strong reactions akin to revulsion regarding children taking hunting rifles into school (hey...what could possibly go wrong?), Rasputin holding Czars in thrall, Columbine revisited, etc. Daniel, Bruce, Phil, Isabelita, and mom, yes, you deserve some explaining.

In the Mohawk Valley and the Adirondacks in 1980, we knew guns were dangerous. No one had to tell us that. But deer hunting season was paradise, and that meant guns. We were free, you see: we carried projectors of violence strong enough to slam a ten-point buck off its cloven hooves at 250 yards like it was hit by a pickup truck. Under our levity and joy, I'll tell you true. We felt the counterbalance of responsibility. It's no small thing to take a life, and even in my most bashful bonhomies, over all the beers a Buick's trunk can hold, I've made apologies to animals' spirits. Classmates I knew for years, they tried to hide their tears over the blood trails of dead deer. There's an implicit, perhaps sacred understanding that you're taking part in something wrong you can't come back from.

Some boys in my homeroom were true outdoorsmen, more inured to death and animal suffering. Darren Loucks, who sat right next to me over four years, checked his trap lines above Caroga Lake in the early mornings and sold beaver and muskrat furs. He was doing what his Hessian forebears had learned from the French Canadians who came down with their Algonquin wives to those rich lakes in search of pelts. Down to places where two of my great-grandparents came from. Grandpa Page was a hunting guide, Grandma Duquesne was descended not far from the Indian populations who made it through the smallpox.

To clarify, we're not so far removed from killing. The meat comes from somewhere, and the truth is, the problem for us wasn't in hanging thirty-ought-sixes and 12-guages in our lockers next to our wool hunting shirts. The danger was common to boys through the ages: we yearned to become men by gaining experience, by taking everything an innocent animal has, and risking our lives in the process. It's an ancient urge. Where can it go? From the comment thread:

The truly dangerous part was letting kids hunt with each other. Leatherstocking High is a world away now, in the town with the oldest continuously serving court-house in the US. They would let us out of school at 11:45 to go deer hunting, and we didn't imagine, say, shooting up the school with a Browning semi-auto 16-guage. Not part of the mythos yet. And few if any things would make a boy prouder than to put venison on his family's table.

I was near-missed once while climbing through pine boughs, inches away, and our quarterback shot the tips of his middle and ring fingers off when his shotgun discharged. Could just as easily have been his head, close enough to get powder burns, or one of ours.

All the same, I'm glad I wasn't there when they stopped letting us take guns to school, or not let us take off to go hunting. Can you imagine that kind of freedom, and trust? We had it once.

Between you and me: I've never recovered from that freedom. It was delicious. Not sure I want to extend it to my society, or even to my son. Odds are you'll wantonly kill something innocent, mourn its glazing eyes, and struggle to understand what people keep out of sight. Yet it's what we've always done. Once you've had it, everything else is sharper. You can't buy a steak in a store without knowing, down in your gut and up in your nose, where it came from.

"Mr. Gunwrench"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Figures Painting

Impressive and fun. (But where's Mohammed the Prophet? Ok, ok, just kidding!) Click here for larger view and download options.

Psyche's News Roundup

Woman has 200 orgasms every day | News of the World (Ha! That's nuthin!)

On the fake campaign trail | Salon News: Hillary evades every question (I feel your Meg Ryans)

Glenn Greenwald - Salon - WSJ Op-Ed decries hatred of the president (Don't Cry for Me, Wall Street Journal)

AlterNet: Blogs: PEEK: Bush Still Refuses to Admit Ever Making An Error As President (Jesus...send another pretzel)

Bush vetoes domestic spending bill on health, education and jobs - International Herald Tribune

Judith Regan Sues Murdoch Empire - November 13, 2007 (Tapes of Bernie Kerik!)

Think Progress: Majority believe Bush has committed impeachable offenses

F.B.I. Says Blackwater Guards Killed 14 Iraqis Without Cause - New York Times

AlterNet: Dick Cheney's Sadistic Passion for Shooting Tame Animals

Fifty states face voting machine lawsuits | Clarksville, TN Online

Are reporters doomed? | Media | The Guardian | Citizen journalism is here to stay. But in the rush to embrace new media we risk destroying the soul of traditional reporting

US dollar will get stronger: Bush (another doobie, Mr. Preznit?)

Why we need a recession -- soon - MSN Money (this is new...)

GE Fund Latest Victim of Subprime, Mortgage Losses - Financials * US * News * Story - CNBC.com

NPR : In Drought, Upscale Homeowners Dig for Water

Wikileaks - Wikileaks

Real Geek Heart Beats in Xkcd's Stick Figures

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Delay' in ADHD children's brains

Gene Expression: James Watson Tells the Inconvenient Truth: Faces the Consequences (*)

Zombie Attack at Hierakonpolis

Twenty Sided Blog Archive DM of the Rings I:The Copious Backstory

"The human whose name is written in this note shall die."| MetaFilter

There once was a girl named Lenore | MetaFilter (old but brilliant Mefi)

reddit.com: Figureheads of Mankind (incredibly detailed painting) | World Figures on Flickr

Maintaining Illusions Of Control

"...one major trend in twentieth-century power politics, the rise of the superpowers, as beginning to interact with another, newer trend--the political fragmentation of the globe. In the Social Darwinistic and imperialistic atmosphere that had prevailed around 1900, it was easy to think that all power was being concentrated in fewer and fewer capitals of the world. Yet the very arrogance and ambitiousness of western imperialism brought with it the seeds of its own destruction; the exaggerated nationalism of Cecil Rhodes, or the Panslavs, or the Austro-Hungarian military, provoked reactions among Boers, the Poles, the Serbs, the Finns; ideas of national self-determination, propagated to justify the unification of Germany and Italy, or the 1914 Allied decision to assist Belgium, seeped relentlessly eastward and southward, to Egypt, to India, to Indochina.

Because the empires of Britain, France, Italy, and Japan had triumphed over the Central Powers in 1918 and checked Wilson's ideas for a new world order in 1919, these stirrings of nationalism were only selectively encouraged; it was fine to grant self-determination to the peoples of eastern Europe, because they were European and thus regarded as 'civilized'; but it was not fine to extend these principles to the Middle East, Africa, or Asia, whre the imperialist powers extended their territories and held down independence movements.

The shattering of those empires in the Far East after 1941, the mobilization of the economies and recruitment of the manpower of the other dependent territories as the war developed, the ideological influences of the Atlantic Charter, and the decline of Europe all combined to release the forces for change in what by the 1950s was being called the Third World."

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers Paul Kennedy, page 392

"I feel that we have been lied to and betrayed by this Administration. A crime has been committed against the Constitution. It is the duty, the obligation of every soldier, and specifically the officers, to evaluate the legality, the truth behind every order — including the order to go to war. How could I order men to die for something I believe is wrong?"

Happy Veteran's Day: Lieutenant Ehren Watada

A lieutenant from Hawaii stationed at Fort Lewis was the first officer to do it. He refused to go to Iraq, and when pressured to knuckle under, he made a public statement. The Army threatened him with jail time, and he said "OK." He accepted a 6-month sentence. The Army found that response unsatisfying, so it court-martialled him with full measures of wrath and bureaucratic mendacity, seeking to put him away for six years. Watada stood firm as a kangaroo court stooped to nonsense. Last Thursday, he won his case. I doubt the Army will pursue an appeal, and preferring to devote its energies to keeping the outcome quiet (if you've heard of this in the MSM, please let me know). Via Truthout:

On Thursday, November 8, Hon. Benjamin Settle, a federal court judge, issued a preliminary injunction halting any further court-martial proceedings of 1st Lt. Ehren Watada and effectively ruling against the Army on virtually every issue in the case. This injunction not only extends the stay until the conclusion of the habeas corpus proceedings, but also addresses the specific request for relief from further legal proceedings, stating, "the remedy sought by Petitioner, while rare, is appropriate."

Although the Army issued a press release claiming to "look forward to the opportunity to further explain to the District Court judge the full extent of the protections and safeguards that are afforded to a military accused," (Seattle Times, 11/9/07), anyone who glances at the court ruling will agree that the Army's only lingering hope is to appeal this ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Settle wrote "for several reasons ... it is likely that [Lt. Watada] will succeed on the merits of his double jeopardy claim" (Order, p. 22; a copy of the order is attached). The court held that the military judge acted "irrationally, irresponsibly, precipitately" (Order, page 31) in failing to consider feasible alternatives to a mistrial, and there was no good reason to stop the proceedings.

This ruling came after the repeated refusal of the military appeals courts to free Lt. Watada of the burden of a second court-martial. Lt. Watada's attorneys have consistently argued that the military should not be allowed a "do-over." The military judge halted the first court-martial in the wake of admissions by prosecution witnesses regarding Lt. Watada's integrity and statements that Lt. Watada's decision not to deploy was an act of conscience.

Read More...

It takes one kind of bravery to storm a machine-gun nest to save what's left of your comrades. It takes another to storm a hostile establishment to save what's left of a nation. A few people have both kinds. Thank you, Lieutenant Watada.

Giuliani's Bernard B. Kerik Complex

If you like Rudy Giuliani as a presidential candidate, or know someone who does, here are the only two words and valid in any language, that you will ever need: Bernie Kerik.

In today's NY Daily News, Sports writer Mike Lupica updates us on the latest moves of the former Passaic county jailor, Giuliani driver/bodyguard, NYC Corrections Commissioner, NYC Police Commissioner, Judith Regan trystee, Homeland Security Director, and Administrative Authority of Iraq thug-or-other. In short, Kerik may be going to jail on the 30 counts he was recently indicted with, and Lupica finds this ironic. Not least because Giuliani re-named "The Tombs," Manhattan's infamous detention center, the Bernard B. Kerik Complex. He waited a whole three months after 9/11 to extend that honor (what, don't you want to have a prison named after you?), and to make Kerik a partner in his firm, Giuliani Security. The firm's relationship with Taser International, earth's largest maker of human stun guns, has earned Kerik more than $6.2 million in pre-tax profits through stock options he was granted and then sold, mostly in November 2004.

Wait a minute. Giuliani. Kerik. Security. Right. Giuliani and Kerik know a lot about security. For example, on the morning of 9/11, as a kerosene cruise missile flew over my unwitting head to spear WTC 2 like a shish kebab, Giuliani and Kerik were conducting a chemical warfare drill with the Federal Emergency Management Agency at Pier 19. It's about a mile north of the trade center off the West Side Highway. What a view they must've had, huh? Kerik must've looked at Rudy and said, "Gosh. We were just in there...for a fake terrorist attack...and there's a real one...right out here! Holy cat-houses, Batman. Ain't that a coincidence!?"

Weird. Admittedly, it's not as weird as Giuliani leading the all-important "Polls." Still. But, umm...America? This is nuts. It's like inviting Tony Soprano's crew over for dinner. Do it only if you're serious about adding some real excitement to your life. Mental note to nation, and self: when Giuliani runs things? Just because things are fascist doesn't mean they're secure. In fact they, ahh--how do I say this? They blow up.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Heading away for a blog absence this weekend to Port Townsend, a.k.a. The City the Railroads Forgot. Other than being a good harbor and the once and future-planned capitol of Washington State, it doesn't really have a good excuse for existing. So the iconoclastic sorts who stayed there, and now move there, made a bunch of reasons up, like kinetic sculpture races, theatre, artist collectives, jazz and wooden boat festivals, restaurants people (literally) fly to, topped off with Victorian architecture made with the best and most plentiful timber of the late 1800s. From Wikipedia:

Originally named 'Port Townshend' by Captain George Vancouver (for his friend the Marquis of Townshend) in 1792, Port Townsend was immediately recognized as a good, safe harbor, which it remains to this day. The official settlement of the city took place on the 24th of April, 1851. American Indian tribes located in what is now Jefferson County in the mid-19th century included the Chemakum (or Chimacum), Hoh (a group of the Quileute), Klallam (or Clallam), Quinault and Twana (the Kilcid band — Anglicized: Quilcene).

Port Townsend is also called the "City of Dreams" because of the early speculation that the city would be the largest harbor on the west coast of the United States.

Psyche's News Roundup

Daily Kos: Suddenly, Impeachment Hearings Are Looking Like a Strong Possibility

Senate Deal on Immunity for Phone Companies - New York Times (The Fix is in)

FRONTLINE: spying on the home front: watch the full program online | PBS

Bush presses Musharraf to hold elections: ("You can't be the president and the head of the military at the same time," Commander-in-Chief Bush said)

Israel says UN nuclear chief should go for failure over Iran - Yahoo! News (Israel - 300 nuclear bombs, non-member of Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, not subject to IAEA inspections)

Think Progress Lieberman: .Paranoid, Hyper-Partisan, Left-Wing Blogs...Wrote Conspiracy Theories On Iran

Think Progress Poll: Iraq war opposition at all-time high

Glenn Greenwald - Salon: Democrats in big, big trouble because of the Great Iraq War -- again

TPMmuckraker | Talking Points Memo | U.S. Aid to Musharraf = Largely Untraceable Cash Transfers (Sleeza: "We gave to the Pakistani people")

Bloomberg.com: Exclusive Bankruptcy Law Backfires on Banks as Foreclosures Offset Gains

The dollar | Ready for a rout? | Economist.com: Decline accelerates

Calculated Risk: WaMu and The Rep War

Global Markets-Dollar fall hits stocks, boosts gold | Reuters

Democrats adopt new campaign plan - John Bresnahan - Politico.com (Become Catamites Now?)

Dept. of Criminology: Dangerous Minds: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: Criminal Profiling 101

Study: Vets a quarter of the homeless - Military Affairs - MSNBC.com Study finds that veterans constitute a quarter of America's homeless (supporting the troops)

Truthdig - Reports - The Cancer From Within ( Air Force Academy wing of Evangelical Christianity)

There You Go Again: Orwell Comes To America (your corporate media at work)

Encrypted E-Mail Company Hushmail Spills to Feds | Threat Level from Wired.com (Hushmail not so quiet)

Silver And Gold, Silver And Gold

As the graphic from the Onion above says, are we suddenly in "Fear of everything but gold?" Not quite, but we get the picture. Gold settled at a record nominal high today. The previous high was $825.50, set Jan. 21, 1980, or $2,128.09, adjusted for inflation, according to the Minneapolis Fed Calculator. Official US inflation estimates have been laughably conservative through much of that period, so the all-time high probably clocks in nearer to USD $4-5,000 per ounce in today's value.

Gold, the stock markets, and oil are starting to correlate as as you would traditionally expect, meaning they're starting to move in opposite price directions. This is news because it has not been the case for much of the past several years, when both gold, oil, and stock indices had surprisingly strange correlation patterns. This amongst other things led some observant market-watchers (such as the Canadian Govt. Pension Fund) to conclude that a) US stock markets were being gamed back upwards via derivatives buying, and b) that the US, or somebody, was selling its gold reserves in order to finance such buying.

If those sound like conspiracy theories, one might bear in mind (rimshot) that the Soviets emptied their gold reserves via under-the-table sales in the early 1980s while their armies were fighting protracted asymmetrical conflicts with Islamic insurgencies. Of course our government, being so fiscally conservative, could never suffer a similar fate in a million years. But you do have to put your money somewhere.

There are other places offering relatively good value besides gold. For example, Jay-Z, a popular rapper, is flashing Euros like Japanese folding fans in a music video while Gisele Bundchen no longer accepts payment in dollars. Wholesale drug dealers started switching to the Euro three years ago...which means American intelligence agencies are also now, insofar as possible, Euro-denominated. Meanwhile, the Canadian dollar is at an all-time high, as silver nears its nominal all-time peak. Rolls of ordinary copper wire at Home Depot have nearly tripled in price since 2005.

Not espousing any sort of panic here, just an eye to conservative diversification. Besides, everything's FINE!! The city of Cleveland is allocating $100 million to demolish vacant homes. Plenty of building opportunities there, and the new construction markets are still going very strong in Iraq, Africa, and Central Asia. Citicorp, America's largest bank, may have lost a third of its value over the last few weeks, but it hired former (Clinton) Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to more effectively grovel for a bailout at the Fed's door. Speaking of the Fed, it pumped another $40 billion shot into the credit markets last Thursday. Best of all, the American economy grew at a faster-than-expected rate, unemployment is lower than expected, and the core inflation rate is clocking in at, oh, about 2% or so. Mother Russia would be proud.

History Never Repeats...But It Can Rhyme

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

-Tristero at Digby's Hullabaloo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psyche's News Roundup

Talking Points Memo | Rice to face subpoena in spy case (call Abe Foxman)

"The Torture Litmus Test" by Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine) - Federalist Society

Think Progress: DoJ Official Experienced Waterboarding, Told WH It's Illegal, Was Fired

Balkanization: How Low Can They Go? (Daniel Levin and waterboarding)

Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime - washingtonpost.com

Poll Finds Americans Pessimistic, Want Change (No! Really?) - washingtonpost.com

No email privacy rights under Constitution, US govt claims (Founders Blogged Like Crazy, However) | The Register

Balkanization, Too: When Diane Can't Read (DiFi: the new Joe Lieberman)

Whiskey Fire: Idiot Princess (MoDo)

YouTube - George W. Bush Interview (Irish TV)

The Raw Story | CNN: Price of Iraq war 10 times pre-war predictions (Bush charged the cost to you and your children)

The Raw Story | Times: Bush plans to keep Pakistan from being mockery of democracy 'fell apart spectacularly'

Open Access to Research Funded by U.S. Is at Issue

Raw Look at Immigration Crucible - washingtonpost.com

Atheist News: Is America Unofficialy A Theocracy? Make Your Next President Answer It

The Washington Monthly: All-Time Wingnuttiest Blog Post Contest

Did you know that by law the US guarantees Israel's oil supply - no matter what? | Wake Up From Your Slumber

Unique Results from Swedish Study of HIV vaccine - Startpage - ki.se

Bystander Stem Cells Keep Original Neurons Humming, Restore Memory: Scientific American

50 years after his death, supporters promote scientist's work - Boston.com

Never Underestimate The Power Of Carefully Worded Nonsense

(Update: There's probably a Third Upside to Martial Law in Pakistan in addition to the two below...if the US and UK "distance themselves" from Pervez Musharraf, might this not be good for him domestically amongst certain, shall we say, "authority-minded people?" In other words give him more credibility amongst islamic fundamentalists, and thus more room for manoeuvre.)

The US and UK are maintaining shocked moues of disapproval re: Musharraf's Martial Law frolics. Does anyone seriously think Musharraf, who gets his military aid from (and has his personal wealth in) the United States, failed to inform the disapproving parties exactly what he was going to do, and when? Pakistan is claiming both the White House and Downing street sanctioned the crack-down. Hmm...whom ta believe?

Even if you're not a fan of dictatorships (might be time to bone up on them!), Musharraf is still one seriously smart, very effective guy. If he's pulling out the stops now, it should be telling us something. There are at least two immediate upsides, one obvious, one less:

1) keeps the lid on a Boiling Pot
2) distracts attention away from Iran

If You Forgot What Leadership Looks Like

I took a couple of political tests, one passed along by Lord Mother and another by Psyche, designed to point me to my "match" candidate. The first matched me with Senator Chris Dodd, the second with, I think it was Stephen Colbert. Zoey & Me from Cat in the Bag gives a nice summary of Dodd's stands made lately, one which proves that not every Congressperson is a wholly-owned, warmongering corporate-critter:

"In addition to saying unequivocally that he will get our troops out of Iraq when he assumes the role of Commander-in-Chief, Dodd has voted for troop withdrawals at every opportunity since Democrats took control of Congress in January and has been a leader in all efforts to end the Iraq quagmire.

But Dodd has been at his best most recently in showing immense leadership and the truest understanding of our nation’s meaning in standing strong against attempts by the Bush administration to let telecommunications companies off the hook for aiding and abetting the White House in their illegal domestic spying on American citizens. Despite little support from his Senate colleagues and eerie initial silence from his fellow presidential candidates, Dodd came out and said last week that he would place a Senatorial “hold” on any bill granting immunity to companies that have assisted George W. Bush in spying on Americans without required warrants and announced that he would filibuster any such legislation to keep it from passing."

Not that Mr. Dodd will be allowed to win, or anything. But it is nice to know that he's there, and is making himself relevant.

From One Royal Family To Another

Lord Mother passed this one along. What is it with royal families, anyway?

Foreign Entanglements

"A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.

Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification."

(George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)

Psyche's News Roundup

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Musharraf imposes emergency rule

AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Bill Maher Interviews Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson: "Cheney, Rove, Libby...Are Guilty of Treason" [VIDEO]

Top US analyst hits back after death threats over Citigroup downgrade - Times Online

Hullabaloo - Let's See What You've Got, Babe

Open Left:: The Religious Left Runs Against Porn

Media Matters by Jamison Foser (Tucker Carlson, dumbass)

Glassbooth (find your Presidential Candidate)

Bowling with Others

Say goodbye to Blockbuster | Tech news blog - CNET News.com (another end of an era)

LOLinator: i can haz websiet?

The History of LOLCatsVideo

The most important Evangelical you've never heard of | MetaFilter

Frank Schaeffer Goes Crazy for God

The G-Shot: Viagra (in a needle) for women? | MetaFilter

Richard Holloway: How to Read the Bible (mp3 podcast download)

Root and Branch (more than half of Americans believe God created the first human beings less than 10,000 years ago)

Ask A Scienceblogger - Which parts of the human body could you design better?

Hillary Clinton refuses to sign the Freedom Pledge The Political Inquirer (keeping war and torture options open)

Talking Points Memo | Dean on Mukasey

Bush Attorney General Nominee Gets Boost - Politics on The Huffington Post (Schumer and DiFi cave)

Obama introduces Senate resolution on Iran - Usatoday.com

Glenn Greenwald - Salon - Mukasey's nomination and the sudden opposition to "waterboarding"

AFP: 'Unwelcoming' US sees sharp fall in visitors since 9/11 (tourism down 17%, 16bn lost)

The Raw Story | Kucinich says he will force House vote on Cheney impeachment

Pakistan Declares Martial Law

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

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

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

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

Raising Kids Today

The many-talented HopeSAT over at Deep Confusion somehow found the picture above, which perfectly sums up what it feels like to raise a young child today. Lead toys to the left of them, melamine to the right of them, and a Consumer Product Safety Commission that would approve of a cheese-grater slide behind them. It seems the head of the commission (Nancy Nord) has been accepting gifts and trips from the toy-makers she's supposed to police. Nancy Pelosi called for her resignation, but I'll bet she stonewalls for another year and a half or so. To quote Hope:

Former Reichmarshall of "New Mexico Lawyers for Bush," Nancy Nord was made head of the government agency that is currently making sure all those lovely lead toys make it into your kid mouth. WaPo has the scoop and Jon Carroll at SF Gate piles on. If I had children, they would be screaming, "Mommy make the scary lady go away!!"

Hope also has an interesting travelogue of her trip to Cozumel, where she and her active-duty Air Force doctor husband were exposed to two vacationing Blackwater mercenaries. There was a casualty involved.

Iran Facts Update, Pt. II: Strategic Fulcrum & Schwerpunkt

(Note: big research credit owed to Church and Empire, since this is basically his post. I'm plagiarizing like crazy below, I'm just not entirely sure yet from whom.)

Washington has now shifted into full "All Iran, All The Time" mode. This should be a big tip-off to what may be coming next. Rumors circulate that an Executive Order has already been signed for attacking Iran. Someone with access to Cheney's office leaked the preferred scenario: an Israeli attack on the Natanz reactor project, followed by an Iranian response against Israel, followed by a "shock and awe" bombing campaign from the US targeting Iran's entire infrastructure, including bridges, utilities, pumping stations, and ports.

While you or I might not think it's a good idea to bomb a country which hasn't attacked anything since the 18th century, and while a bombing campaign is likely to provoke even the dissident Iranians into hating the US, it might be helpful to know why, under certain strategic analyses, "It Must Be Done." And now, I must hand the blog for a suitably brief period to Mr. Paul Wolfowitz:

"Defense Planning Guidance for 1994-99", Paul Wolfowitz

• "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union..."

The War Department is always looking to nip new threats in the bud. That's natural. But the focal point of its attention was further expanded as follows:

...to ensure that the United States - and no one else - controls the energy supplies of the Persian Gulf and adjacent areas of Asia.

The first part of that sentence has been the most basic precept of US foreign policy since the 1950s. In fact, written in invisible ink on the door of the Oval Office is this phrase: Don't Lose the Gulf, Dipshit! (It was a class trip, the tour guide looked away...what can I say?) Now, the Bush Doctrine goes much further. "Adjacent areas of Asia" covers a lot of ground. The Vulcans radically expanded the Carter Doctrine, and turned away from, even trashed, the Eisenhower Doctrine (better known as "Containment"). Amongst other things, the Bush Doctrine clearly stipulates that Iran has to knuckle under. Even if that's impossible.

In short, the Bush Administration wants access to all the oil and gas in the Caspian Sea, which is currently (mostly) under Russian control. Iran happens to be blocking the way of "our" pipelines with "their" pipelines. Even worse, Iran is undermining the Petro-dollar standard by selling its oil directly to countries, for example to Japan in exchange for Yen. Big no-no in Bush World. Chavez is a gnat in that mental sphere, whereas Iran is a bee-hive.

So, having secured the White House and a pretext for wars intended to control pipelines, BushCo wasted no time in taking its spiffy new Doctrine out for a spin in early 2001 by:

• unilaterally pulling out of the US-Russian Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
  
• announcing new high-tech arms sales to Taiwan

The Russians and the Chinese did not miss the significance of these gestures. How could they? Warm spit was dripping off their expression-frozen faces. The Cold War was back on, baby. Following these opening provocations, a sizable, sustained, and fairly successful effort was made to destabilize the goverments of the obscure new countries (sometimes referred to as "Trashcanistans") surrounding the Caspian basin. Then, on May 4, 2006 Vice President Dick Cheney went to Lithuania, and made some rather blunt public statements which could be considered hilarious, insane, or hypocritical, but probably above all rude. Among other things, he accused:

• Kremlin officials of "unfairly and improperly" restricting the rights of Russian citizens
  
• Russia using the country's abundant oil and gas supplies as "tools of intimidation [and] blackmail" against its neighbors
  
• Moscow of attempting to "monopolize the transportation" of oil and gas supplies in Eurasia
  

The next day, Cheney flew to Kazakhstan, urging them to:

• ship their plentiful oil through a US-sponsored pipeline to Turkey and the Mediterranean rather than through Russian-controlled pipelines to Europe.

In tag-team bonhomie, on June 3, 2006, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld went after China by pointing out:

• Beijing's "lack of transparency" with respect to its military spending "understandably causes concerns for some of its neighbors"
• plans for increased spending on the F-22A fighter and Virginia-class nuclear attack submarines, weapons only useful in an Armageddon War for which there were just two possible adversaries - Russia and China

So they're right. This is a Long War. Whether it should be fought or not is a good question, but the economic prizes are considerable. If you look at a map of new US military bases in Africa and Asia, the correlation with proximity to oil assets is nearly perfect. For its part, China has been extremely aggressive in securing energy resources, often paying unbelievable sums of cash (dollars, of course) for lease and development rights. After Kerry fumbled in '04 they went around the world signing deal after deal...it was like watching Mike Tyson and his entourage on a shopping spree for new bling-bling, only instead of being the youngest heavyweight champion of all time, China is the world's oldest civilization, with trillions of suddenly accumulated dollars to get rid of. In addition, it is willing to fight proxy wars in pursuit of energy reserves and is addressing its biggest military gap by:

• use of arms transfers and other military aid as inducements to such countries as Iran and Sudan to gain access to energy reserves
  
• acquiring warships "that could serve as the basis for a force capable of power projection" into the oil-producing regions of the planet

Where's Iran in all this? Stuck right between the US, Russia, and China. Geographically, the country:

• spans from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, positioning Tehran to play a significant role in the two areas of greatest concern to the nuclear powers
• owns part of the vulnerable Strait of Hormuz - a narrow waterway from the Gulf to the Indian Ocean, the bottleneck which moves over one-quarter of the world's oil every day
• is the most obvious transit route for the delivery of oil and natural gas from the Caspian countries to global markets, especially those in Europe, India, and Japan

• supposedly possesses the world's second-largest reserves of petroleum - an estimated 132 billion barrels (11.1% of the world's known reservoirs); and also the second-largest reserves of natural gas - 971 trillion cubic feet (27.5 trillion cubic meters, or 15.3% of known reservoirs)

Bush policies seem almost intentionally designed to drive Iran into Russia and China's arms. China, in particular, benefits from the US shunning and sanctioning Iran:

• US firms are barred from investing; European companies face US economic penalties if they do so
  
• China signed a US$50 billion cash deal in 2004 to develop the massive Yadavaran gas field
  
• China signed deal to purchase 10 million tons of Iranian liquefied natural gas annually for 25 years.

Russia's designs on Iran are primarily defensive, but the two countries have extensive ties. Russia's perspective:

• major strategic loss if Iran falls under US control
  
• primary supplier of nuclear equipment and technology, future role in developing Iran's energy infrastructure
• Russian firms are completing the construction of a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southwestern Iran
  

So if the US could pull off regime change in Iran, it would hit another "Trifecta." Not only would complete control of the Persian Gulf be ensured for a generation, but oil companies would (continue to) make more money than God, and the US would be able to...umm....what was that Cheney phrase again? Oh, yeah: "use abundant oil and gas supplies as tools of intimidation and blackmail."

Now wouldn't those be handy tools to have? A self-respecting Empire wouldn't be caught dead without them. The only flaw in all this brilliant logic is that the Bush Doctrine's distinctive flair for execution has been, to be kind, dubious and underwhelming:

• Long-term US prospects in Central Asia have seriously dimmed
  
• US-European relations weakened, halting if not tenuous
  
• The Coalition of the Swilling sham doesn't hide that Europe stayed on the sidelines
• Our closest allies are interested in securing Iran's oil flows for themselves
• Turkey has refused to provide airbase support for bombing Iran
• Encouraging a separate Kurdistan gives Turkey and Iran a common interest
  

Bottom line, the American Corporate State is bankrupt. By its leaders' calculations, however, taking Iraq's oil cost only a trillion dollars and is worth thirty trillion. A return of 3,000%! The Empire is saved. (Chipmunks demonstrate better math competency.) The pink-red areas on the map above represent ethnic Shia populations. How happy will they be if Iran is bombed...for not having The Bomb? Meanwhile, the Russians and Chinese are solvent, right next door to Iran, and accumulating increasingly large gobs of cash. My friend Jon in Wisconsin recently quoted his drinking buddy Sun Tzu, who summed up the Bush Doctrine and dumb-assed Vulcans pretty well:

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first, and then seek to win."

Joni Mitchell, Free Man In Paris: Karaoke Stars

On the laquered Thai chicken-cage in which we keep our stereo and music, we played Joni Mitchell's most popular all-time CD tonight. Lord Wife pointed out that Joni Mitchell's song 'Free Man in Paris' was specifically written about her extremely talented, music-loving record producer (David Geffen) and about the anonymity and freedom he once enjoyed in Europe. So I just searched on YouTube for it, and this excellent karaoke version of the song came up on the first hit. Listened to it, and didn't notice at first it wasn't Joni Mitchell. It's very close and very well done, from somewhere in Japan. You don't have to be closeted like David Geffen to dig it, too. But I'm starting to understand.

The lyrics:

The way I see it, he said
You just cant win it...
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You cant please 'em all
theres always somebody calling you down...
I do my best,
And I do good business!
Theres a lot of people asking for my time,
They're trying to get ahead,
They're trying to be a good friend of mine!

But I was a free man in Paris,
I felt unfettered and alive!
There was nobody calling me up for favors,
No ones future to decide.
You know Id go back there tomorrow
But for the work Ive taken on.
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song...

I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
Id just walk through those doors
And wander...
Down the Champs d'Elysees
Going from cafe to cabaret
Thinking of how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine.

I was a free man in Paris,
I felt unfettered and alive!
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No ones' future to decide.
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
stoking the star maker machinery
behind the popular song.