Strawberry Fields Forever

Not too surprisingly, there's been a sharp drop in illegal immigration over the past few months. The border isn't sealed, but it's tighter than it was due to a combination of increased manpower (National Guards) and pressure on the INS ("Migra").

Also not surprisingly, an association of Santa Cruz County farmers announced yesterday that they're short of pickers right now -- way short. The radio story (sorry I can't provide a link) said that the farmers have only about two-thirds of the help they need to get the August crop in.

Picking strawberries is one of the hardest jobs there is, and to do it effectively and quickly enough to make money requires real expertise. I couldn't do it; I'd only get in the growers' way. The experts are people who have been doing it since childhood, and are physically fit enough to perform the job in an awkward, uncomfortable, not too healthful squat.

It's hard, honest work, and deserves respect.

It really should pay more, and due to the labor shortage, it soon might. But with fewer experts in the field, production will fall despite the higher outlay. Get ready for expensive strawberries.

Obviously we had to do something to get the illegal immigration situation under control, but we also really need to look closely at the laws, and ask ourselves how we can streamline the immigration process. We haven't determined carefully enough how many people we want coming here, where we want them to come from, and under what circumnstances we want them to come.

As it is now, it's becoming painfully obvious that we need the Mexicans and the Mexicans need us.

California does anyway.

All-Time Favorite Mondegreens

Mondegreens are mis-heard lyrics.

1. Just call me angel of the morning, angel;
Just brush my teeth before you leave me, baby.

2. You can burn my house, steal my car;
Drain my liver in an old fruit jar.

3. Do a little dance; make a little rum --
Italian ice! Italian ice!

4. Gimme the Beach Boys and free my soul,
I wanna get lost in your rock 'n' roll
And drift away...

6. Doughnuts make my brown eyes blue.

7. Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
The girl with colitis goes by.

Raptured Duck

Twice in the past four days, CNN has run segments seriously inquirng whether current events in the Mideast are the prelude to the apocalypse.

"The July 26 edition of CNN's Live From ... featured a nine-minute segment in which anchor Kyra Phillips discussed the Apocalypse and the Middle East with Christian authors Jerry Jenkins and Joel C. Rosenberg -- who share the view that the Rapture is nigh. At one point in the discussion, Phillips asked Rosenberg whether she needed 'to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I'm sorry for all the evil things I've done,' to which Rosenberg replied: 'Well, that would be a good start.'"

Jenkins is one of the co-authors of the "Left Behind" series of books.

Also on CNN, on July 24 Paula Zahn did a segment on "What the Book of Revelation tell[s] us about what's happening right now in the Middle East."

Apparently the intersection of politics and religion is now deep inside La-La Land.

Just as the formerly "nutty" ideology of the John Birch Society now informs the policies of the government and the opinions of the supposed "mainstream," what used to be the superstitions of religious extremists are now put forward as the standard doctrine, and are perfectly acceptable to the "respectable" mainstream media.

Regarding the rest of the world, maybe the right question isn't "Why do they hate us?" but rather "Why do they feel sorry for us."

Better lay off those genetically modified foodstuffs, America. They're doing more damage than you think.

Not So Radical

Obviously, neither major party, and I'm speaking here of the Democrats, is going to launch a program any time soon to dismantle the war machine which has gotten us into so much trouble.

However, there are ways to gradually scale back the defense budget which are beginning to look attractive even to moderates. It's irrational, for one thing, to continue to commit to programs designed to defend us against the now-extinct Soviet Union when Social Security is threatened and our bridges and electrical infrastructure are crumbling.

We could save 60 billion dollars a year and shift the money to programs which are actually useful -- rebuilding infrastructure, supporting education, and subsidizing healthcare -- without raising taxes or increasing the defecit.

Dr. Lawrence Korb, a defense expert formerly with Raytheon Corp. and an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan has authored a report detailing exactly what programs could be cut (PDF file) without adversely affecting the "war on terr" or our actual defense capacity.

In the introductory abstract of his report, Korb details where the money would come from:

"• About $14 billion would be saved by reducing the nuclear arsenal to no more than 1,000 warheads, more than enough to maintain nuclear deterrence.
• About $8 billion would be saved by cutting most of the National Missile Defense program, retaining only a basic research program to determine if this attractive idea, which has proven to be an utter failure in actual tests, could ever work in the real world.
• About $28 billion would be saved by scaling back or stopping the research, development, and construction of weapons that are useless to combat modern threats. Many of the weapons
involved, like the F/A-22 fighter jet and the Virginia Class Submarine, were designed to fight threats from a bygone era.
• Another $5 billion would be saved by eliminating forces, including two active Air Force wings and one carrier group, which are not needed in the current geopolitical environment.
• And about $5 billion would be saved if the giant Pentagon bureaucracy simply functioned in a more efficient manner and eliminated the earmarks in the defense budget."

These are ideas which are beginning to gain political traction. They've also been adopted by the political action group True Majority, which presents the same agenda in a cartoon called "Oreos". If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth watching.

Of course, for some of us, the ultimate objective is the piecemeal dismantling of the war machine and the "war first" policies it has spawned, which have brought us to grief in Iraq, Vietnam, Palestine, and elsewhere. The war machine now so dominates the economy and political process in this country that we seem helpless to perform such basic functions as repairing our bridges, policing our borders, or providing our kids with a competitive education.

I know not everyone wants to do away with the apparatus of war in this country. But even conservatives should be able to appreciate the wisdom of scaling it back a bit. After all, were only talking about a little bit of money here -- $60 billion. That's only fifteen percent of the defense budget.

I'm assuming, of course, that a Democratic Congress will be seated in January of 2007. This program wouldn't be feasible with a Republican-dominated legislature. If you live in a district with a Democratic incumbent, you might want to e-mail this post to him or her. If you're in a Republican district, find out who the Democratic candidate is and send an e-mail or write. The Korb Report is not overly long and is easy to read, and True Majority is a great resource.

Articles of Impeachment

There are four separate counts:

1. Warrantless surveillance
2. Misleading Congress on the reasons for the Iraq war
3. Violating laws against torture
4. Subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers

You might want to visit the web site and check out the write-up on the book.

There is also a political action committee (PAC) with a list of pro-impeachment candidates.

In order for this necessary and long-overdue action to occur the Democrats will have to win back both the House and the Senate in the November elections. It's doable.

I've written a lot of harsh words against the Democratic Party here lately, but revolutionizing that party and re-orienting it to address the nation's real needs is our only realistic hope.

As Rumsfeld said, "You go to war with the army you've got."

If we don't get this done, we're looking at two and half more years of unrestrained slaughter in the Middle East and the funeral and burial of our dead Constitution at home.

Thanks, Poor Man.

Frank N. Stein, Part II

While people generally were horrified and disgusted by the abomination he had created, Frank N. Stein refused to believe it was a monstrosity. Indeed, in his mind the creature of his devising was potentially the paradigm of beauty and virtue.

But Frank N. Stein had no capacity for insight. He was unable to admit that his work was a reflection of himself. He was, it seems, blissfully unaware of having any shortcomings.

He decided to go to a dinner hosted by a Slavic scientist, Bladdy Mere Pooty, who was attempting to create conditions hospitable to generating a Phoenix.

No sooner had the meal begun than Frank N. Stein, ever the acme of tact and courtesy, began harshly and loudly criticizing Pooty's methods.

"Well," Pooty resonded archly, "I certainly wouldn't want it to turn out like your little experiment."

"Just wait. Heh heh," Frank N. Stein wittily answered, half-chewed chicken Cordon bleu and mashed potatoes dripping from his slack jaw all the while.

Eventually the monster tracked down Frank N. Stein rowing a boat in the formerly frozen far nothern latitudes. He cornered the alarmed scientist, announced that he was shunned by all humanity and very lonely, and demanded that Frank N. Stein make him a bride.

"Should be no problem, Bucko," chirped the ever-optimistic mad doctor. "Ya see, there's this other Mooslim country right next door to you..."

Frank N. Stein

Wants upon a tom there was a mad scientist named Frank N. Stein, and he said "I will re-make the world according to a blueprint of my own devising, and then I shall be great as God. Bwah hah hah haaaa."

"They will call me 'The Modern Prometheus,'" he said. Frank N. Stein wasn't worried. His liver was already shot.

He decided to start by re-making a medium-sized country ruled by a brutal dictator who murdered his own people, and just coincidentally had enormous deposits of mineral wealth buried in its ground. He decreed that said country should be re-made in our own image.

"Don't do it, Frank N. Stein," said practically everyone who unlike the mad Dr. Stein had all his or her brain cells intact. But Frank N. Stein was endorsed by his train of sycophants, flatterers, garden-variety ass kissers, yes men, yes women, party hacks, lackeys, lubbers, twits, knaves, and war profiteers.

Soon Frank N. Stein realized he had created a monster. And in short order, the monster turned and began pursuing him.

And it will chase Frank N. Stein to the ends of the earth.

Ruins

Iraq is a smoking, stinking ruin, and Lebanon is well on its way to becoming one. This is the Bush legacy.

This is the bottom.

Wolcott says: "The war crimes of the United States compound by the minute, the hour, the day. I predict that George Bush, upon leaving office, will be the most despised president in American history. He will have his core support, the clotted, stunted brains that collect at sites like Lucianne.com and Powerline, but he will enjoy no Reaganesque orange sunset afterglow (or Nixonian self-rehabilitation), so deep, lasting, and tragic is the damage he's done, a damage abetted by a craven, corrupt political class and a press that even now, as the full dimensions of the disaster unfold before us, is unable to sound alarm...History will not forgive Bush or the United States, nor should it..."

And he goes on to link to several other articulate expressions of absolute despair, one of which addresses a topic frequently overlooked in the past week, from Robert Dreyfuss at TomPaine.com: "Iraq is engaged in a full-fledged civil war. For those remaining defenders of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, who argue that the United States needs to stay put in order to prevent civil war, it’s too late. It’s here, in all of its brutality and ugliness.
(snip)
"What’s shocking—especially if you’ve been paying more attention to the destruction of Lebanon by the Israeli armed forces and missed it—is that things in Iraq has gotten qualitatively worse in July. In June, Iraqis died at the rate of nearly 1,000 per week. In July, we can only speculate—but it’s not impossible that the toll is at least twice that, 2,000 per week. The word genocide comes to mind."

The atrocity underway in Lebanon is addressed by Paul Craig Roberts at Antiwar.com in an article posted today and appropriately titled "The Shame of Being an American:"

"Gentle reader, do you know that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon? Israel has ordered all the villagers to clear out. Israel then destroys their homes and murders the fleeing villagers. That way there is no one to come back and nothing to which to return, making it easier for Israel to grab the territory, just as Israel has been stealing Palestine from the Palestinians.

"Do you know that one-third of the Lebanese civilians murdered by Israel's attacks on civilian residential districts are children? That is the report from Jan Egeland, the emergency relief coordinator for the UN. He says it is impossible for help to reach the wounded and those buried in rubble, because Israeli air strikes have blown up all the bridges and roads. Considering how often (almost always) Israel misses Hezbollah targets and hits civilian ones, one might think that Israeli fire is being guided by US satellites and US military GPS. Don't be surprised at US complicity. Why would the puppet be any less evil than the puppet master?

"Of course, you don't know these things, because the US print and TV media do not report them.

"Because Bush is so proud of himself, you do know that he has blocked every effort to stop the Israeli slaughter of Lebanese civilians. Bush has told the UN "NO." Bush has told the European Union "NO." Bush has told the pro-American Lebanese prime minister "NO." Twice. Bush is very proud of his firmness. He is enjoying Israel's rampage and wishes he could do the same thing in Iraq.

"Does it make you a Proud American that "your" president gave Israel the green light to drop bombs on convoys of villagers fleeing from Israeli shelling, on residential neighborhoods in the capital of Beirut and throughout Lebanon, on hospitals, on power plants, on food production and storage, on ports, on civilian airports, on bridges, on roads, on every piece of infrastructure on which civilized life depends? Are you a Proud American?"

Finally, Wolcott gives us Larry C. Johnson at the blog No Quarter who clues us in on the shock that might be headed our way: "If the United States is perceived (emphasis on perceived) as encouraging or directing the Israeli response, the odds increase that Hezbollah will ratchet things up another notch by playing the terrorist card.

"We should not confuse Hezbollah with Al Qaeda. Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international network. Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international political and financial network. They have personnel and supporters scattered in countries around the world who have the training and resources to mount attacks. Hezbollah has no qualms about using terrorist attacks as part of a broader strategy to achieve its objectives. The last major Hezbollah attack against the United States was the June 1996 attack on the U.S. military apartment complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah also organized the attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994. But they also have exercised restraint when they felt they could achieve their objectives through political means. The ten year hiatus in major mass casualty attacks could come to a shattering end in the coming months, and American citizens are likely to pay some of that price with their own blood."

BushCo wanted war. They're getting what they wanted, only it's turning out to be more than they bargained for.

Be careful what you wish for.

I've never seen such despair.

Antediluvian Memories

The night was dark, the sky violet at the center point, the fourth chakra, the steadily-beating heart of the Arsenal of Democracy, where he struggles into life in the shadow of the Penis of the Plains.

At the center of everything.

This was the year before the beginning of the Slow Apocalypse, when the lease on the Redemption was up, when Jesus was called away from his desk due to a previous engagment, when the Fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil swelled diabolically and its shadow filled the entire earth and sea and sky, and the fuse on the pomegranate was lit and is burning still.

Then the action shifts to Vulcan's Smelter, where the Sacred Forge belches perpetual smoke and flame, and the shiny sheets and high-tensile tubes of Moloch's Divine Infernal Machine roll endlessly from the apertures of the Dark grimy Satanic Mills.

And in the shadow of the Forge, on a tree-lined street paved with red bricks, under a moistdripping sooty sky full of thunder, the genesis of thought and memory and awareness and words made with letters that are black marks on white pages, sometimes with pictures.

Only to return years later to find the Forge cold and silent, the Divine Infernal Machine now a rusted and shattered ruin, the degenerate hangers-on of this particular street depraved diseased lunatics, and of the old house, where the brain first engaged in a manner sufficiently cogent to generate memory, nothing but a hole.

Perpetual War

Gene Healy has a great post at his blog, Cato@Liberty, on the topic of the neocon war cult.

First he quotes a Washington Post article about how the hardest-core neocons are really mad at Bush right now for pursuing what they consider a timid foreign policy. "They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon," says the WaPo.

Healy comments, "Now, you could marvel at the brazenness of all this: the same people who helped lead us into the biggest foreign policy disaster in 30 years trying to push another war (or wars) on us without so much as a prefatory 'sorry about the whole Iraq thing, old boy.' But the current squawking also strikes me as a useful reminder of how very, very important war is in the neoconservative vision. It is as central to that vision as peace is to the classical liberal vision.

"For the neoconservatives, it’s not about Israel. It’s about war. War is a bracing tonic for the national spirit and in all its forms it presents opportunities for national greatness. 'Ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington,' David Brooks once wrote. And Washington’s never louder or more powerful than when it has a war to fight."

This is all true, but it also misses a point. The main reason for perpetual war, IMHO, is that it's the only feasible justification for the erection of the sort of tyranny we currently suffer under. How could you justify spying on your own citizens were it not for the "war emergency?"

By what means could you excuse rounding up suspected enemies, holding them without charging them, and subjecting them to torture if it wasn't for the extreme pressures exerted by the anxiety and danger of war?

How could you possibly get away with overthrowing Article I of your own government's founding document and usurping the power of the legislature with "signing statements" except under the dire threat posed by the ever-vigilant enemy.

And why would people tolerate blatant attacks on and threats against "subversive" newspapers such as the New York Times, whose right to report facts is constitutionally guaranteed. We've been told that this paper and others are endangering America's security by reporting facts inconvenient to the administration.

"Those are hard words, I know. But this country's at war!"

And why don't you let George Orwell tell you exactly why it's at war:

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

And how does one keep the structure of society intact, according to Orwell and Hermann Goering? By keeping people frightened, paranoid, revved up with fanatical anger, and stupid.

Hey, it worked for Hitler. It worked for Stalin. And it works for Bush and Cheney.

Make no mistake, the object of the neocon worship of perpetual war is their stimulation and your subjugation.

It's a policy that can take some strange twists and turns, however. While there is an auxiliary cult of "the ultimate sacrifice," which places the war dead on the same spiritual level as the early Christian martyrs, we are not allowed to see the individual flag-draped coffins as they are flown home from Iraq or wherever else the neocons have decided we need to murder people this week.

Seeing them might bring us a little too close to the knowledge that the remains of a human being are lying in that box.

But don't worry about that; just praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, and, as Healy concludes "Who we’re fighting is secondary. That we’re fighting is the main thing. To be a neoconservative is to thrill to the sound of gunfire. (From a nice, safe distance, generally.)"

Hug a Tree But Not a Joshua Tree

Workers and peasants of the Cyber Universe, stop it already! You have nothing to lose but your Visa cards.

And those ludicrous debts that go along with them. What did you actually get for those debts?

Gas is up. Housing is up. Health care is up. Have you noticed you're not able to buy as much shit as before?

The effects are monetary, but the solution is political. Uh oh, too bad our political system has failed.

A new political system will arise, one adapted to the new realities. We just don't know what it will be yet. So drop back ten yards and punt.

"War is not the answer," as a bumper sticker I saw on a Ford Expedition said the other day. Unfortunately, for that driver war is the answer. So do as George did (Clooney, not Bush), and buy an electric car.

You can't afford to heat and cool that McMansion any more. But you can probably afford a little piece of land and a tiny little house to put on it.

Forget about these clowns of the political circus. Be they George or Hillary or Howard or Tom, Dick, or Harry they can't help you.

Stop eating at McDonald's and donate to the food bank.

Take a beaver to lunch and save a tree.

Turn your thermostat up to 78 and don't forget to floss.

Hard Times

People begin lining up early at Food Now, an independent food bank in Desert Hot Springs, CA. Senior citizens go to the head of the line and are admitted first when the converted one-story house opens at nine a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

"You've got two baskets," a young female volunteer brusquely informed one old lady. "You'll have to leave one, because you're only allowed one." Single clients are allowed to fill a single hand basket, as the bank's resources are limited.

I asked Board Member Dale Derr if Food Now is servicing more clients now than it did at this time a year ago. "About 25 percent more" he said without hesitating.

"At least that much," store Manager Cheryl Calzaretta added, but neither she nor Derr can determine what percentage of Food Now's clients are working people.

"We have them fill out a form when they apply," Derr said, "that gives us an income figure, but that income might be from welfare or S.S.I.; there's really no way of telling whether they're working or not."

However, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank newsletter for spring, 2006 reports survey results indicating that nearly a third of its client households, 31 percent, have at least one working adult.

Food banks all over Southern California are experiencing supply crunches just as demand for their services is increasing. Fortunately, donations are up following sharp decreases during the latter part of 2005, due to the amount of relief flowing to the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, according to Michael Flood, president of the L.A. Food Bank. However, increased donations have been offset by funding cuts in the federal Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which serves seniors, pregnant women, and infants and children up to six years old. The Bush administration has threatened to "zero out" this progam in 2007.

What accounts for this year's escalating demand for food relief?

See below.

And the Good News Is...

Today the price of crude oil closed down $1.73, to $75.30 a barrel. Last week oil prices spiked wildly again, on news of fighting in the Middle East and instability in Nigeria, at one point reaching as high as $78.

How quaint last year’s all-time high prices (twenty dollars below this year’s all-time highs) now seem, and how comforting that three-, four- and even five-dollar gas is here to stay. We’ve known for a long time that the only way to moderate petroleum consumption with its attendant Middle-Eastern petroleum dependency is to use less of it.

And so we are. Even though there are more cars on the road now than 12 months ago, “Gas use last month was 0.6% less than a year ago, the American Petroleum Institute reported, because ‘high fuel prices have led to decreased demand for gasoline and other refined oil products,’” according to a story that ran in April in USA Today.

But that’s only half the story. As significant as gas and oil prices is the fact that retail sales have taken a sudden unexpected downturn. American families are waking up on Sunday morning and realizing that they can’t, on this particular Sunday, pile into the old Ford Explorer and go tooling off to a distant Mega-WalMart to buy Chinese tchotchkes and sneakers. Between the rising prices of gas, and food, and rent, and the tchotchkes themselves…well, you get the picture.

Nariman Behravesh, an economist with Global Insight in Lexington, Mass says the latest sales figures are another indication that gasoline prices “are beginning to bite and are beginning to squeeze consumers pretty hard.”

What he doesn’t mention in his estimation of the plight of citizens is that we “consumers” are also getting squeezed between stagnant wages (for all but the very well off) and escalating housing and health care as well as energy prices.

There are times when I want to stand on a soapbox at the corner of Palm Canyon and Plaza Streets and shout to the workers and peasants of Palm Springs that these hardships they are experiencing are not temporary, that they are in a regime of higher prices and lower expectations for the long haul.

“For the long haul” is a very harsh phrase. It means “from now on.”

To what can we attribute the historically noteworthy health, contentment, satisfaction, docility, and mediocrity of the American people? To a very high standard of living, of course, but now that has begun to change. And yet, this might be good news.

I encourage people to try making do with less. You really might be happier that way.

Don’t count on politicians to restore our overrated standard of living. The political system in this country has failed.

I’m not saying we should swear off politics, however. A new politics will arise, appropriate to the new realities. And as Pericles is reported to have said, “If you don’t take an interest in politics, be assured that politics takes an interest in you.”

But what form that new politics will take is a total question mark at this point. As John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail in 1774, “We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not.”

Ignoratio Elenchi -- Missing the Point

Why do I keep hearing talking heads on the boob tube saying, "Israel has a right to defend herself."

Did somebody say she doesn't?

Is there some particular reason that people are missing the obvious fact that Israel has been the aggressor in this conflict? Like, since about 1948?

Is no one aware that these crimes are being perpetrated with hardware we gave to the perpetrators? Greetings from the USA.

I've been sometimes listening to but more often avoiding media coverage of these tragic and heartbreaking events for the past couple of weeks. It's simply too nonsensical to bear. All I can say about it is that there's got to be a pony in it somewhere.

Crude

New record today -- $78.35/barrel.

Get ready for four-dollar gas.

According to the AP story: "Light sweet crude for August delivery settled at a new high of $76.70 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, then continued climbing in after-hours electronic trading, when volumes are significantly lower, to $78.35. The rally came as fighting between Israel and Lebanon intensified, explosions hit Nigerian oil installations and a diplomatic standoff dragged on between the West and Iran over its nuclear program."

This should come as no surprise since, as I'm fond of repeating, I told anyone who would listen this was going to happen back in january of '05.

I told them to read Jim Kunstler's book, "The Long Emergency," or in lieu of that, take an occasional look at his blog (the link to his "Clusterfuck Nation" is directly to the right of what you're reading this very moment; check it out).

For my trouble I got called "Chicken Little" and other epitheta opprobria.

Dig it: if you have credible reasons to believe that a disaster is brewing, the thing to avoid is the instinctive ostrich-like reaction of blanket denial and rationalization. The thing to do is get ready, and deal with it.

So I'll say it again: five or six or seven years from now we will NOT be living the way we're living now. We won't be jumping into our cars every time we need something from the store, or have to go to work. We won't be building endless tracts of McMansions farther and farther out from urban clusterfucks like Atlanta and Houston. It won't be possible.

So do the smart thing and get ready.

Eighty bucks a barrel is right around the corner, and sometime next year it'll hit a hundred.

Magic Marker Moustache

Who said this? Was it Adolf Hitler, or the Coultergeist?

Take the quiz and see how little fascism changes over the decades. I thought I would do well, because I imagined there must be some historical markers in the quotations.

I was wrong. I didn't do well at all.

Really, truly, without any exaggeration whatsoever, there is now very little difference between the "good Germans" of the 1930's and '40's and the "patriotic Americans" of the first decade of the brave new millenium.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

Few Americans have heard of David Addington, Vice-President Cheney’s long-time legal advisor, and his chief of staff since the demise of Scooter Libby. Yet Addington, more than any other individual, is responsible for the authoritarian and increasingly dictatorial course the Bush administration has pursued over the past five and a half years.

Cheney’s influence on the president is famous, and a common topic of political conversation in and out of Washington. But Addington’s influence over the vice-president, though less notorious, has been just as, if not more important in the birth and implementation of key administration policies: the use of torture, the incarceration of uncharged terror suspects, illegal wiretapping of American citizens, and particularly the practice of amending legislation with presidential “signing statements,” in which the chief executive frequently declares his intention to ignore provisions of bills he has signed.

Sometimes referred to by Washington insiders as “Cheney’s Cheney” or “Cheney’s hit man,” Addington is this administration’s best-kept secret because he is obsessively private. He never speaks to reporters and doesn’t allow photographs to be taken for news stories. The door to his office is always locked, and he has left no public paper trail. Although he has worked in government his entire professional career, he has never run for elective office.

But now Addington has become the subject of two high-profile articles in nationally-influential publications, and informed observers are rapidly becoming better aware of his role in the shaping the Bush administration’s radical and sometimes bizarre assertions of presidential power. Jane Mayer’s article “Hidden Power” appears in the July third New Yorker, and draws on a wealth of named and unnamed governmental sources, several of whom are former members of the current administration, to describe Addington’s pivotal role in creating the Bush team’s legal strategy for the war on terror, which they have dubbed “The New Paradigm.”

For example, she quotes Bruce Fein, a “Republican legal activist,” Bush supporter, and a deputy attorney general in Reagan’s Justice Department, who says the current administration has “staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration. This President has made claims that are really quite alarming. He’s said that there are no restraints on his ability, as he sees it, to collect intelligence, to open mail, to commit torture, and to use electronic surveillance. If you used the President’s reasoning, you could shut down Congress for leaking too much. His war powers allow him to declare anyone an illegal combatant. All the world’s a battlefield—according to this view, he could kill someone in Lafayette Park if he wants! It’s got the sense of Louis XIV: ‘I am the State.’ ”

Mayer’s New Yorker piece closely followed the appearance of Elizabeth Drew’s “Power Grab” in the June 22 New York Review of Books. Concentrating mainly on Bush’s use of “signing statements” as a means of usurping Congress’s lawmaking authority, Drew notes that this practice “received little attention” since Bush’s assumption of office in 2001 “because it has been carried out largely in obscurity. The press took little notice until Bush, on January 5 of this year, after signing a bill containing the McCain amendment, which placed prohibitions on torture, quietly filed a separate pronouncement, a ‘signing statement,’ that he would interpret the bill as he wished.”

But these “signing statements” are not a new development. Bush has claimed the right to ignore more than 750 laws since he took office. His supposed right to do so is based on two legal justifications, according to Drew: “One is the claim of the ‘inherent’ power of the commander in chief; second is a heretofore obscure doctrine called the unitary executive, which gives the president power over Congress and the courts. The concept of a unitary executive holds that the executive branch can overrule the courts and Congress on the basis of the president's own interpretations of the Constitution.”

And who might be the inventive legal mind who authored these expansive theories of constitutionally mandated, unlimited executive power? Drew’s article answers that question too: “Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, formerly his counsel, are understood by most informed observers to be mainly responsible for the expansive interpretations of the president's powers, as well as the unprecedented secrecy with which the administration conducts public affairs.”

Mayer, quoting a Boston Globe article on Addington’s influence, asserts that “Addington has been the ‘leading architect’ of these signing statements, which have been added to more than seven hundred and fifty laws. He reportedly scrutinizes every bill before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power.”

In addition to being the principal author of the theory of the “unitary executive,” which supposedly legitimates these signing statements, Addington has worked tirelessly to implement the “New Paradigm” with its nearly unlimited view of the president’s powers as commander in chief, not just of the armed forces but of the entire nation during wartime. He is the author of Office of Legal Counsel memos claiming that there is no valid legal prohibition against the inhumane treatment of foreign prisoners held by the C.I.A. outside the U.S. He secretly drafted the memoranda which set up the military commissions to try these foreign prisoners, so that the executive order of November 13, 2001 which established them took many members of the administration totally by surprise, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice among them.

It was also Addington and Cheney who secretly, without even alerting the top Pentagon lawyer in charge of supervising the National Security Agency’s legal advisers, held meetings with the N.S.A.’s legal staff in Cheney’s office and advised them that the president as commander in chief had the constitutional authority to override F.I.S.A. and engage in warrantless domestic electronic surveillance.

Taken altogether, the Bush administration’s record, under the direction of its most important legal advisor, David Addington, has been one of unprecedented assault on the U.S. Constitution with its system of governmental checks and balances. And as Elizabeth Drew points out, “(T)he Bush White House has made the executive branch less accountable than at any time in modern American history. And because of the complaisance of Congress, it has largely succeeded in its efforts.”

This rush toward dictatorship and the imposition of a police state went largely unimpeded for the Bush administration’s first few years, especially in the wake of 9/11, but lately the other branches of the federal government have shown some first stirrings of resistance against the rising tide of executive encroachment. On June 29, by a five-to-three vote, the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s military tribunals which Addington had engineered to try the terror suspects (or “illegal combatants”) held at Guantanamo, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

More recently, on July 11, one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives, Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra, harshly criticized the Bush White House for its failure to inform Congress about “significant activity” involving secret intelligence programs.

“It is not optional for this president or any president or people in the executive community not to keep the intelligence committees fully informed of what they are doing,” Hoekstra said.

However, whether such squeaky protests will help restore constitutional government in this country remains to be seen. Drew concludes her New York Review of Books article with a quote from Madison, author of The Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” All the more so, one might add, when such concentrated power is exercised in secret star chambers by secretive individuals who issue secret orders, possibly because they know that what they’re doing won’t stand the light of day.


Sources:

Jane Mayer’s “Hidden Power,” from the July 3 New Yorker, is available online at the magazine's website.

Elizabeth Drew’s “Power Grab” from the June 22 New York Review of Books is available at that publication's internet address.

The Dictator

The Bush administration is a dictatorship. This president has assumed the power to re-write the laws Congress sends to his desk, and has reduced the legislature to a cipher, just as Augustus, the first Roman emperor, did with the Roman Senate. His justification for subverting the Constitution and establishing what he and the architects of the dictatorship refer to as the "unitary executive" is 9/11.

Two important articles analyzing the workings and progress of the dictatorship have recently appeared in high-profile publications. Elizabeth Drew's "Power Grab" ran in the New York Review of Books on June 22, and is mainly a catalogue of the extent and impact of the so-called "signing statements" by which Bush alters or announces his intent to ignore legislation which he signs, then amends. In addition Drew speculates about the ways in which old laws may have been altered or destroyed by the dictatorship.

She also names Vice-President Cheney and, most particularly, Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington as the principal and most important architects of the dictatorial policy. Addington, of whom many Americans have never heard, is probably the most influential spokesman within the administration pushing for executive usurpation of Congressional powers and the establishment of one-man rule, even though he is not directly answerable to the president.

Not surprisingly, then, Addington is the primary subject of Jane Mayer's July 3 New Yorker article "The Hidden Power", which analyzes the relationships of power within the administration and focuses on Addington's singular role.

Of course, as both writers point out, the attempt to establish a military dictatorship as the government of the former democratic republic of the United States would have come to nought if Congress had not rolled over and accepted the administration's blatant and bald-faced usurpation of the legislative function.

Palast Looks at bin Laden

Al-Qaida's primary objective is to inspire Muslims to restore the Ummah, or pan-Islamic nation formerly known as the Caliphate. By 750 CE the Muslim world was also a political unity which stretched from present-day Pakistan in the east to the Spain in the west, and was ruled by a single individual who styled himself the successor of Muhammad. A restored ummah would unite all Middle-Eastern and North African Muslims in a political and religious unity which would control the lion's share of the world's petroleum resources, and hence control the world.

The first step in the reconstitution of the Ummah, according to bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places" is to drive out the "crusaders" from the Arabina Peninsula not only because it's the cradle of Islam, but also because "(T)he presence of the world largest oil reserve makes the land of the two Holy Places an important economical power in the Islamic world."

As Greg Palast has noted in his analysis of bin Laden's "Declaration" (which appears in the first chapter of his new book, "Armed Madhouse"), "Bin Laden's causus bellum for war on America: The presence of the U.S.A. Crusader military forces on land, sea and air in the states of the Islamic Gulf is the greatest danger threatening the largest oil reserve in the world.

"Threatening Islamic oil reserves. Osama even launches a sophisticated tirade against the suppression of oil production by U.S. operators in the Gulf. This wealthy engineer knows the petroleum biz, that's for sure."

Closely following the historical record, Palast penetratingly notes that after bin Laden's successful leadership role in helping rid Afghanistan of the Soviet invaders, "Osama's next target was not The Great Satan America but The Little Satan: Iran. In Osama's view, Iranians are Shia 'dogs and lackeys' who hold, infuriatingly, OPEC's third largest oil reserves." Not only that, but the Shia are always a threat to unconditional Sunni/Arabian Peninsular domination of bin Laden's coveted pan-Islamic nation -- his ummah.

However, Palast's analysis of the "Declaration of War..." is overly cynical. While bin Laden may be guilty of a certain amount of unconscious hypocrisy, no one could read this document without concluding that his primary motivations are profoundly religious

"O you protectors of unity and guardians of Faith," bin Laden exorts his potential Mujahadeen recruits, "O you descendents of the ancestors who carried the torch of guidance and spread it all over the world. O you grandsons of...those pious companions who fought Jihad alongside them; you competed to join the army and the guard forces with the intention to carry out Jihad in the cause of Allah, raising His word and defending the faith of Islam and the land of the two Holy Places against the invaders and the occupying forces. That is the ultimate level of believing in this religion!"

Therefore, I must disagree with Greg Palast when he concludes of bin Laden, "What motivates Osama? Same thing as George and Dick. It's all about the oil." Because Persian Gulf oil is only a means for controlling the world, but what is bin Laden's purpose in wanting such control? Only that it would give a decisive advantage to those who wish to propogate what he sees as the One True Faith.

07/04/06

Frederick Douglass gives us some appropriate words for this particular Fourth of July, via Brad de Long.

Brush up on the life of Douglass, escaped slave, orator, and writer extraordinaire, here.

Terrorism

Terrorism is a type of warfare fought with inexpensive weapons.

It's also the name applied by the western imperialist nations, particularly the United states, to the irregular armies ranged against them throughout the Muslim world and concentrated most intensely at the moment in Iraq and Palestine.

Characterizations of the enemy as "terrorists," or "Islamofascists," or "illegal combatants" may be emotionally gratifying to those who use such loaded terms, but they are neither accurate nor useful.

On close examination, Mr. bin Laden proves remarkably similar to President Bush, with a couple of significant differences. One is that bin Laden and his ideological counterparts don't have a trillion dollar, technologically advanced armed force at their disposal, so in prosecuting their side of the current war they have to use cheap weapons, or even improvise free weapons such as stolen commercial airliners. Another difference is that bin Laden is much more intelligent and articulate than Mr. Bush, and possesses a learned grasp of history, something the American president is totally lacking.

Their ambitions, however, are identical. Bin Laden's 1996 Declaration of War reveals that he hopes to inspire Muslims to restore the Ummah, or pan-Islamic nation formerly known as the Caliphate. It would stretch from Pakistan in the east to the Straits of Gibralter in the west, would control the lion's share of the world's petroleum resources, and hence control the world.

The first step in the reconstitution of the Ummah is to drive out the "crusaders" (not surprisingly, the "terrorists" also possess pejorative terms with which to characterize their enemies).

The Ummah would be united politically under a single faith, and at its center would be the "two holy places" of Saudi Arabia. Its legal system would be based on Koranic law -- Shar'ia.

I would strongly urge anyone who's interested in knowing the real al-Qaida, rather than than the ideologically informed, chauvinistic construct of wingnuts and neocon ideologues, to read this document, even though it's long (21 standard single-spaced pages in Microsoft Word), repetitive, and frequently tedious.

The Americans' ambition is likewise control of the Persian Gulf region and its oil resources, and hence control of the world. Like the so-called "Islamofascists," the Americans, who were once a secular and a civilian society, have reverted to tribalism, and are united by a religion. It's not, however, the religion of Jesus Christ, who for all but the most fundamentalist Christians is something of an auxiliary totem, but a fanatical worship of patriotism, the military, including the death cult of the "ultimate sacrifice," and their flag, whose desecration is about to be prohibited by an amendment to the dead, departed U.S. Constitution.

There is no such thing as "terrorism." The so-called terrorists are soldiers on one side of a two-sided tribal conflict for control of the world's most valuable real estate and resources.

OK, Remind Me, Who's Always Saying "Never Again?"

Wolcott says, "(T)oo little heed is being paid to the horrendous actions being waged against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."

Dennis Exposes Crimes in Gaza

...and the rest of us really ought to listen and take heed.

The Israel-Palestine war is an endlessly tiresome, depressing, and trying topic, I know, but ongoing serious war crimes demand our attention, and the blood of the victims cries out to us from the ground. The subject may be monotonous, but it's real, and real people are really dying and suffering.

Syriana

"Syriana" was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan. It stars George Clooney and Matt Damon. Clooney was also one of the producers.

If you're planning to watch "Syriana," my advice is, "Don't blink." As one reviewer commented, this movie is like a two-hour version of a six-hour television miniseries.

The film narrates a complex web of interrelated events involving the CIA, Texas oil gazillionaires, the familial conflicts within Arab oil sheikhdoms, dissipated Iranian weapons brokers, turncoat Levantine terrorists, corrupted corporate and government attorneys, layed-off migrant oilfield roughnecks seduced by Wahabbism, the counterfeit justice of the U.S. Justice Department, and an energy/financial consultant driven by personal tragedy. Almost needless to say, it's a Byzantine and convoluted mix which demands a viewer's full attention.

Now that "Syriana" has finally been released on DVD (on June 20), cinephiles will be armed with an advantage not afforded by theatre viewing: you can rewind and re-watch scenes as many times as needed to keep the story straight. Even then, this movie assumes intelligent and dedicated viewers, and will elude the ill-informed and unsophisticated. For that, it deserves five stars.

However, the film's strength is also its weakness. Except for Clooney's character, the CIA agent and old middle east hand Bob Barnes, there is almost no character development. "Syriana" is so intricately plotted and so concentrated on unspooling the narrative that the players are reduced to their politico-economic roles in the story line. Only Clooney/Barnes has enough on-screen time to develop anything resembling ambiguity, or internal conflict.

As the story opens, Barnes is desperate to find a rocket launcher after it is stolen during one of his covert weapons-selling stings in Tehran.

"Syriana's" second intertwined element involves the merger of two corrupt Texas oil companies, one of them headed by a braying jackass skilfully rendered by Chris Cooper, and the payoffs, browbeating and looking the other way that allows the deal to subvert antitrust regulations. That process is facilitated by young, ambitious attorney Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright), who smooths the path for Justice Department approval of the deal.

Meanwhile, a smooth-talking energy analyst/oil broker, Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), after suffering a family tragedy manages to harness his grief-generated energy into a blockbuster deal with a Persian Gulf prince (Alexander Siddig), who vows to end his country's long history of American petroleum exploitation and bring its economy out of a chronic depression. What these two don't know is that the U.S. oil companies, operating on the advice of their own Rasputin, a high-powered lawyer masterfully brought to life by Christopher Plummer, plan to undermine the prince's claim to the throne and force his father, the Emir, to name the prince's shallow, frivolous, vain, and pliable younger brother as his successor.

While all this is going on, layed-off Pakistani oil field workers in the Emir's kingdom on temporary visas are recruited by Muslim extremists operating a Madrassa and turned into suicide bombers who end the movie with a bang, connecting the story's conclusion with its opening and tying up the plot's loose ends.

Got enough on your plate yet?

As an exposition of the complexity of political, economic, social, and ethical reality I would rate "Syriana" very highly. The problem is, that kind of reality is too complex to reproduce in a two-hour film. So as a drama I have to say it's only partially successful, but it still gets four stars. This movie is highly recommended.

P.S. There's no end to this movie's subtleties. The name "Syriana" is an obscure geographic term referring to the trans-Mediterranean region occupied by the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. It's the same area sometimes called the Levant.

I Feel Guilty Eaves Dropping

From a conversation heard on another site...

Davidstein says: One of the most inspiring images of World War Two has been 4 soldiers raising a giant American flag at Iwo Jima. Statues or sculptures of the flag raising are major monuments around the country. One of the soldiers raising the Iwo Jima flag is a Native American Indian named Hayes. Indians accord him great honor. They're very proud of him.

The loss of a battle or surrender of a nation is when the flag is removed. The national anthem mentions that.

You're committing a crime when you place another flag higher than the United States' flag. It's like watching the Japanese flag raised where the American flag had once been.

you can say you support America's enemies, but doing anything to support them, during war time is treason. Generally, there are few people who burn flags or commit public treason because American citizens still defend the flag even if their government doesn't defend it. You see Americans privately stop flag burnings, by physically attacking the person doing the burning.

As one person put it, you have the right to burn a flag, and I have the right to punch you in the nose for burning it. You don't see anyone in America republishing Danish cartoons, because Moslems took the an even stronger attitude. Call it private censorship.

catboxer asks: Question: What is the only legal, officially prescribed method for disposing of a damaged or used American flag?

The proposed constitutional amendment would be an anti-thoughtcrime measure.

Round up the usual suspects.

combatkoala says: Guess its time to lock up the boy scouts, and the VFW, not to mention those Military members who have the nerve to burn the flag in special ceremonies on post.

catboxer says: Yeah, Koala, but they're not suspects, and even though they burn the flag, they don't think subversive thoughts while they're doing it. So they're o.k.

Which is exactly why this amendment is nothing more than a baby pacifier for drooling idiots. What's being proposed is that we actually prohibit not an act, but a thought.

Thoughtcrime.

See George Orwell's 1984.

Stitch813 asks: But what happens if the boy scouts burn the flag at the same time they are chanting Down with Bush? Maybe that is what the congressmen were worried about?

catboxer replies: Excellent question. And what happens to girl scouts who, while reciting the pledge of allegience, are thinking about mounting a terrorist campaign of planting explosives in the cookies and selling them in government buildings such as CIA headquarters...

Not doing those things, mind you, just thinking about them.

The rule is that if you commit thoughtcrime, sooner or later you'll be found out. Your guilty facial expression will reveal you. Then the thought police will come and get you.

And then it's room 101.

Thirty-Five Whirlpools Below Sound

Financial service senses worries of 35 whirlpools below sound 1846, 45, 44, A.D. Augusta City treasury, Richmond County treasury, United States Treasury of Mississippi River flood area. Gentlemen will you come to . . . and idenafy none minastrative body that receives the life generated by fourth patented generative below sound. Further arrange financial credit for same. Would like two bedrooms at up town Hotel and convenient to roof garden. Until you gentlemen decide further what my occupation is you may as well announce me as comforting 35 whirlpools below sound. May you gentlemen have gray eyes and thick bones as the flat sense minastrated are very valuable in idenafying me...

...was a writing sample from a schizophrenic patient in a locked ward. It was collected by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, author of "The Mask of Sanity" (first ed. 1941), a study of psychopathic (a.k.a. "sociopathic") personality disorder.

The book is an out-of-print classic. Amazon has a few used copies going for $70 and up, but I found a place to download it as a free PDF file.

Cleckley, now deceased, was an unusual shrink in a number of ways. His views were not always flattering to the standard practices or practitioners of psychiatry and psychotherapy. He didn't shy away from making moral judgments. Unlike your typical scientist who tends to be afflicted with logorrhoea, he was a highly skilled and marvellously entertaining writer, with a gift for understatement.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. highly recommends "The Mask of Sanity" and so do I. Besides being a great read, it will familiarize you with the seriousness and extent of a problem that continues to plague the psychiatric profession, society at large, and (Vonnegut claims) the upper reaches of the U.S. government and our largest corporations.

If I wasn't so old I'd go back to school and pursue the systematic study of psychology. I find it endlessly fascinating.

Emerging Republican Theocracy?

That's the name of a Kevin Phillips article currently posted on the front page of Beliefnet.

He makes a pretty good case for the ruling clique's attempt to cobble together what looks like a theocracy, but they're not going to be able to construct a real one. It'll be a counterfeit, hence ineffective theocracy for a couple of reasons.

First of all, I can't prove it, but I suspect many of many of these church-going Republican big shots are secretly closet atheists, whose kingdom is "of this world."

Take Tom DeLay, for instance. He's a scrupulous Christian, right? If I ever saw a guy who'd be willing to do absolutely anything for a dollar and a good piece of ass, it's the Honorable Mr. DeLay.

Also, as was pointed out to me in discussing this yesterday, most of the neocons are disciples of Leo Strauss, late of the University of Chicago where he taught the dark Macheavellian arts under cover of political philosophy. The mentor of little Pauly Wolfelafelwitz and others, Strauss's schtick was founded on the premise that there is no God, but that religion should be used by those in power to manipulate the ignorant masses. Like all congenital fascists, he believed in the natural right of the powerful to oppress the weak, which has ever been the foundation of right wing politics.

So I think at some point the neo Baptists and the neo Cons are going to part ways, and become semi-enemies.

Betty Bowers Blatantly Bites Badass Bitch

Ouch! Betty Bowers reviews Ann Coulter and her book. It ain't pretty.

Bowers is a very good writer, and she taps out an entertaining review, but it's really a little too easy to make fun of the village idiot.

And she did slip one misplaced modifying prepositional phrase, the one about the black leather miniskirt who's never been married.

And I must admit, picking on the handicapped -- mea culpa -- I've done it myself, many times on the Beliefnet U.S. politics board, while assuming my alter ego, Catboxer. So now I'm going to go write 50 times on my chalk slate that I'll henceforth refrain from such nefarious activity.

Bowers's one-woman jihad against the media star is noteworthy, though, because it rises to the level of world-class vituperation, as when she says of Coulter:

(S)he is less like June Cleaver baking pot-roast than she is like Samantha Jones baked on pot. Indeed, this is no piously serene Christian wife, but a braying loud mouth who wears super-slutty clothes, powders her bony nose more often than Lindsay Lohan (if you know what I mean), knocks back scotch with an alacrity that eludes Ted Kennedy since the advent of rheumatoid arthritis, lives only in cities filled with homos and screws anything willing to bang an anorexic skeleton.

Really? I had no idea Ann Coulter was allegedly an alcoholic, cocaine-addled nymphomaniac. I'm only familiar with her more serious character defects.

I Dream of Gini

The most reliable indicator of economic inequality is the Gini Coefficient, named for an Italian economist and statistician.

It works like this: if a society consisted of two families, one of which had everything and the other of which had nothing, the Gini coefficient of that society would be 1.0.

If a society consisted of 10 families, one of which owned half that society's wealth, the coefficient would be .5.

According to my source, "most developed European nations tend to have Gini coefficients between 0.24 and 0.36, the United States Gini coefficient is above 0.4, indicating that the United States has greater inequality."

During the time Krugman talked about in his speech, the Eisenhower days, the U.S. Gini coefficient was about .375. By 1970 it reached its low point: .353. In 2000, just before Geo. W. Bush took office, the last year for which the figure is available, it had climbed to .43.

With Bush's tax cuts and other corporate welfare programs, it is rapidly moving toward .5, if it hasn't got there already.

This is an intolerable level of economic inequality. It spells widespread poverty. The cause of it is greed, or to put it another way, the "free" market.

Free for whom, I'd like to know.

Accept No Substitutes

People are buzzing about Gore. "Who could we find who's just as good," they ask, "if he refuses to run?"

Sorry, but there's no one that can take Gore's place right now.

One reason for this is that Gore is totally relaxed and loose as a goose, thanks to his reflection on the experience of getting mugged and rolled in the Y2K election. He's developed a certain quality of ironic detachment, and he really doesn't give a damn how people react to what he says. Not surprisingly, he's totally unrestrained and says exactly what's on his mind, unlike active career politicians who feel they have to carefully triangulate every word that comes out of their mouths. Even the good ones like Kucinich do this.

Last night on Olbermann's countdown, Gore said "The people who still say that global warming isn't real are actually in the same boat with the flat earth society. They get together and party on Saturday nights with the folks that believe the moon landing was in a movie lot in Arizona."

I love it. Tape of the whole interview here.

The Navel of the Vortex

With the Iraq War now in its fourth year and showing no signs of ending anytime soon, it's time to take a new look at that conflict from both sides of the debate.

Robert Dreyfuss has done that with an important article entitled "Permanent War?" It's long and complex, but very much worth a thoughtful reader's attention.

The reason the Iraq War is so important -- much more important than Vietnam was, really -- is that it's where all the threads of current American policy, foreign and domestic, come together. Control of Iraq, of the Persian Gulf, and of the oil resources of that region are essential to the American way of life continuing as we know it for any length of time.

We're talking of course about the pursuit of empire, oil dependency, a nation of suburbs and automobiles and strip malls, global warming and lax environmental policy, and the international corporate business model supported and backed up by a heavily-armed military establishment.

This is the way of life that Dick Cheney has declared "non-negotiable." And the viability of all these things depends on victory in Iraq.

The commonplace liberal verdict is that victory in Iraq can't be had -- "We can't win militarily," as John Murtha says. And while the war is going badly in a number of ways, and Dreyfuss lists them, he challenges the notion that victory is impossible, and writes:

The Bush administration's strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.

To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their "footprint" in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests.

True, there is no sign right now that the U.S. is winning this conflict. But there is no sign that the insurgency is winning either. And in view of what's at stake, we have consider at the possibility that this thing may not end with Bush's departure from the scene; we could be in for the long haul. Dreyfuss continues:

Indeed, this war would have to be sustained not only by this administration, but by the next one and probably the one after that as well. For over three years, the United States has supported a massive military presence on the ground in Iraq, while taking steady casualties. It may be no less capable of doing so for the next two-and-a-half years, until the end of Bush's second term - and during the next administration's reign, too, whether the president is named John McCain or Hillary Clinton. At least theoretically, a force of more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers could wage a brutal war of attrition against the resistance in Iraq for years to come. Last week, in a leak to the New York Times, the White House announced its intention to leave at least 50,000 troops in Iraq for many years to come. Last week, too, the son of the president of Iraq (a Kurd) revealed that representatives of the Kurdish region are in negotiations with the United States to create a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq's north.

We need to start looking both at the Iraq War and the shape and direction of American society with a new pair of glasses. This might be the first time since the Civil War that we are forced to ask ourselves the most fundamental question of all: Exactly what kind of society and government are we going to have? What is to be our constitution, i.e., "plan of government?"

What is the role of militarism to be in our society and government? of international monopoly capitalism as represented by companies like Exxon? of oil and gas and coal and electricity? of our attitude toward the planet we live on? What is the basis of our moral outlook?

Someday, as Dreyfuss argues, the Iraq War may be brought to a "successful" conclusion. But that might be the worst failure of all. For there is one thing above all about this war we need to remember (Dreyfuss again): The war in Iraq was not a "mistake." It was a deliberately calculated exercise of U.S. power with a specific end in mind - namely, control of Iraq and the Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its goals were unworthy and remain so.

In other words, the continuation of the American way of life is dependent on the successful prosecution of a moral outrage.

Dreyfuss does not end there. I find his conclusions to this thought-provoking article genuinely frightening.

I urge everyone who thinks seriously about these matters to read it.

Respectfully,
Dave B

Don't Feed the Troll

"I agree that Coulter was rude," says a poster at another site, "but she makes a good point."

She'd make a good vanishing point if she disappeared, and in my world she already has. Who pays attention to media whores and clowns anyway?

The only thing that distresses me about the recent Coulter flap is that far too many people on both sides of the left/right divide appear to take this publicity hound seriously. I feel sorry for them, as I do for people who take those stupid Simpson sisters seriously.

I like Dennis Perrin's (Red State Son Blog) take on Annie:

"The Coulter obsession, by both media and liberals, has gotten pretty fucking ridiculous, but what can you expect in a celebrity culture? As (you) know, I don't spend extensive time on rightwing media creatures, simply because they are howling caricatures of a deeper American psychosis, long on sensation but lacking serious texture. They are a tawdry part of the Spectacle, as any Situationist will tell you, or any seasoned carny will confirm. Freak shows and cheap rides still draw crowds, and it's only natural that what passes for American political discourse plays shamelessly to this. Coulter knows how to get rubes in the tent, even if they hate her -- hell, especially if they hate her. It's a demented symbiotic relationship that shows no sign of ending."

(Full text of Perrin's remarks.)

Forget this bitch. She's just another commodity, like Madonna and boy bands.

By the way, if you're not in the habit of reading Dennis Perrin's blog, "Red State Son," do yourself a favor. If you're anywhere to the left of Heinrich Himmler you might enjoy him. And if you're a prowar vampire, consider him a prescription.

Anyone can recover.

Knots in the Pipeline

The big oil companies and big refiners would have you believe that the current high price of gasoline American drivers are dealing with is simply the result of market conditions. "Tight supplies and increasing global demand," they will tell you.

But the truth is that big oil is restraining production, both in the fields where the raw material is extracted, and at the refineries where the final product is readied for the gas pumps.

A chapter in Greg Palast's new book, "Armed Madhouse," describes how the oil corporations, led by Shell Oil USA's former CEO Philip Carroll, blocked the Pentagon's initial plan to sell off the Iraqi oil fields to private developers on the open market -- the administration's original plan for financing the Iraq War. Neocon policy planners also hoped that implementing the sell-off scheme would destroy OPEC "through massive increases in production above OPEC quotas," according to a 2005 article by Palast.

But Carroll, who took control of Iraqi oil production for the U.S. government a month after the invasion, stalled the sell-off plan and managed to have it replaced by another secret scheme favored by the oil industry. The new plan, deatails of which were obtained from the State Department by and published by Harper's Magazine under the US Freedom of Information Act, called for creation of a state-owned oil company favored by the US oil industry. It was cemented in place by Carroll's successor, a Conoco executive.

Under the oil companies' plan, Iraq will remain a member of OPEC, and its production of crude oil will be limited to whatever quota the cartel sets for it. The oil giants fear that unrestrained Iraqi production would both drive down the currently record-high price of oil, and undercut Saudi Arabia's primacy as the world's leading producer, straining Saudi-American relations.

Iraq is the final big question mark in determining the total amount of global oil reserves. It has proven reserves of 112 billion barrels, second only to Saudi Arabia. But unlike Saudi Arabia, its oil wealth has remained largely unexploited and has not even been completely evaluated. It may be the last place on earth where there are very large, completely unexploited reserves.

As Palast's book makes clear, industry suppression of Iraqi oil production capacity in the interests of keeping prices elevated has a long history, dating back to the 1920's. And today, of Iraq's 74 known large oil fields, only 15 are in production. Thus we can expect OPEC to keep Iraqi production restrained to the two-million-barrel per day limit imposed by the U.N. under the oil-for-food regime.

Possibly even more pertinent to the current price crisis at the gas pump is the deliberate damping down of the supply of refined gasoline, in support of high profits and restraint of trade, by big American refiners, detailed by James Surowiecki in an article in the June 12, 2006 New Yorker.

The last American oil refinery to be built came on line in 1976, and existing capacity has not kept pace with demand. Recently the Department of Energy has been urging oil companies to build new refineries, and Congress is offering to ease environmental regulations that would add to the expense of doing so.

"Unfortunately," Surowiecki points out, "the lack of capacity that Washington sees as a crisis looks like an ideal business model to oil refiners," for only in recent years has refining become a wildly lucrative business. "Last year, refiners' profits jumped thirty-nine percent," and this increase, which represents billions of dollars, "has gone straight into refiners' pockets."

In addition, over the past fifteen years the larger refiners have been buying out the smaller ones, and this cannibalization has led to the formation of a tightly consolidated industry, whose main players are easily able to combine in restraint of trade.

"In 1993," Surowiecki reports, "the five biggest refiners...controlled thirty-five per cent of the market. By 2004 they controlled fifty-six per cent...(and) in California, ninety-five per cent of the refining market (is) in the hands of just seven companies.

The bottom line is that America desperately needs more oil refining capacity, but the refiners have no need for it at all. When the disastrous hurricanes of 2005 shut down two Marathon Oil refineries, the price spike that resulted meant that Marathon made more money than it would have if all its facilities had been running.

The refiners are very much aware that less production capacity they have, the higher prices will go, which means by limiting production they will enjoy both higher gross income and lower overhead expenses, and hence greater net profits. They are also hesitant to build expensive refineries to process what is ultimately sure to be a declining resource, for while oil production and refining might be suppressed today, by the mid- to late twenty-first century, it won't have to be. Global supply will be in serious decline.

There is no conspiracy among oil producers and refiners. They don't have to conspire to know what conditions are required for them to increase their profits and power. Their moving in concert reflects economic realities rather than secret conspiracies. However, the drive for greater profits also necessitates the concentration of decision-making powers into fewer and fewer hands.

As Surowiecki's article concludes, "High gas prices usually provoke one of two explanations: either they're evidence of a conspiracy or they're just the result of the free market at work. The good news is that there's no conspiracy. The bad news is that there's also no free market."

Cynicism. It's a Good Thing.

A friend of mine keeps getting swindled in various ways. Once it was by a crook who "borrowed" money. Another time he put his own rep on the line to secure a job for someone who's your basic standard-issue screw-up.

Since my friend used to be (many years ago) intimately connected with a certain criminal organization of Sicilian origin which shall remain nameless here, I'm always surprised and baffled when he gets shafted. How could these things happen to someone as knowledgeable in the ways of the world as he?

I think maybe he's actually an idealist.

And I know I'm not.

Is there such a thing as "human nature?" Christians think there is, and they believe it's nasty -- that human nature is essentially evil. That's the point of Chapter One, Adam and Eve in the Garden. Given a choice, they chose badly.

If our fundamental nature wasn't evil, there'd have been no need for Jesus -- no need for redemption. I'm always amazed how many happy, sunny, "think positive" Christians don't understand this underlying, unavoidable premise of their religion.

However, this knowledge, for knowledge I believe it to be and not merely opinion, isn't limited to the Christians. Buddhists are convinced of it as well, although they put the matter a little differently. Their founder declared that the natural state of the human being is not evil, but "delusion," which amounts to the same thing. A delusional person's behavior is destructive, and ultimately self-destructive.

As in the case of Christians, Buddhist cynicism is tempered by hope. Enlightenment (i.e., Christian "redemption") is possible, but requires an unconditional surrender of the the ego.

The same realization is reflected in the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous, for whom the natural state of the alcoholic is drunkenness. But there is a solution. See above.

I have no positive expectations of human behavior. I always anticipate people will behave selfishly and hypocritically, without realizing they're "digging up their own roots," as the Buddha is said to have expressed it.

This way, I'm always pleasantly surprised on those rare occasions when I see someone acting as he or she should, i.e., with the self-interest of others, and hence one's own self-interest, as the primary concern. And make no mistake, I don't act that way nearly as often as I ought to.

I think my friend is getting "hoist on his own petar," that his expectations grow out of an idealism which is a product of ego.

There are people who want help and people who need help. If I try to help people who simply need help, but don't want it, what good am I doing? For them or myself?

The first requirement for effective action is to see things as they are.

Armed Madhouse

Greg Palast is a political writer. Other than that, he's a pure writer -- a real one. I'm in awe of this guy's style.

Working For Change (dot com) is serializing his new book, "Armed Madhouse." Part one is here. It's hilarious, and very much worth the few minutes it'll take you to read it.

Palast seems to be able to write about several topics at once without confusing the reader, or maybe it's just his extremely fast pace that makes it seem that way. He documents every assertion, links seemingly unconnected malfeasances together in greasy chains, and is very funny on top of it all.

Though he's British, Palast specializes in analyzing the sewage of the American political system. It was he, you might remember, who wrote the book on the stolen election of Y2K, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."

My friend and bandmate, Steve (lead vocalist for ShangPupShoo), who's also a journalist, interviewed Palast once. He told me that if it hadn't been for his pocket digital recorder the interview would have been a bust; there's no way anyone taking notes could keep up with Palast.

"You just turn him on and he goes nonstop," Steve said. "He's a mile a minute, and everything is connected to everything else. It's an endless stream, and really funny at the same time."

Terror Balloon

On 9/11/2001 the Saudi Wahabbists of al-Qaida and the current administration (hereafter referred to as BushCo) both got lucky. Al-Qaida's attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon succeeded beyond their expectations. And BushCo got the cataclysmic event they had been hoping for which would justify their launching of the Perpetual War.

Never has the fakery of the so-called war on terror been more obvious than in the case of the late Abu Zarqawi. Zarqawi was an American product, a phantom conjured up in the steamy heat of the neocon mythology kitchen, and his successor, whomever it might be, will be the same kind of "made in U.S.A." inflatable doll for conservatives to fantasize with.

In her story on Zarqawi which appears in the Atlantic (accessible only to subscribers) this month, Mary Ann Weaver says, ""During my time in Jordan I asked a number of officials what they considered to be the most curious aspect of the relationship between the U.S. and al-Zarqawi, other than the fact that the Bush administration had inflated him. One of them said, 'The six times you could have killed Zarqawi, and you didn’t.'"

I guess for a time we needed him alive, just like we still need Osama. You need something scary to conjure up and keep the children (in this country called "the voters" or "public opinion") in line.

Patrick Cockburn at Counterpunch says, "The ease with which Iraqi police and US special forces were able to reach the house after the bombing without encountering hostile fire showed that Zarqawi was never the powerful guerrilla chieftain and leader of the Iraqi resistance that Washington has claimed for over three years."

Cockburn also observes that with Zarqawi snuffed, BushCo will have to find some other bearded, scowling Islamist boogeyman to put on the scary wanted posters they put up in the post office and run on Fox News.

Jawohl!

Jim Kunstler over at the "Clusterfuck Nation" blog posted a great piece this morning about the beautiful Bellingham to Seattle Amtrak run, which the old grouch found so refreshing it seems to have actually made him happy.

It's not very long, and very much worth a read.

I love Kunstler, ever the Jeremiah of modern times, whose self-appointed mission is to lament, with very good reason, the disasters that are confronting us as a people even now, and the imbecilic responses of both the powers that be and the public at large. However, perpetually contemplating this bleak and depressing landscape seems to have given him a permanent case of dyspepsia. So I was glad to see that there are still a few things that can relieve his choleric melancholia, and actually make him smile in print.

Carwash

Living with less money ("Less than what?" you ask; "Less than I used to have," I answer.) isn't easy. It requires some fine tuning.

So this morning after my run into town, I did something I'm still getting inured to, and washed my car. It was tough, but not that tough. The sun was beating down by ten a.m., but I still took my time, did a good job, saved fifteen bucks, and did my part to slow illegal immigration.

I also mowed and raked my own yard yesterday, although to be honest the strip of grass we installed strictly for dog comfort only takes fifteen minutes or so.

Ever seen a gringo sweat? It's probably good for him, if he doesn't overdo it.

Gone are the days when we had a gardener, a housecleaner, various maintenance men, the regular carwash stop, and did nothing but work and pay other people to take care of us. And it's really better this way.

When you have a small income, you think in more modest terms. Eat less meat and cheese, eat more beans and greens. Save your dimes in a piggy bank and turn them into grocery money when the pig gets full. Think twice about driving. Throw your credit card out the window (but be sure to shred it first).

I don't think money has much to do with happiness, unless a person has so little money that it becomes difficult to keep a roof over one's head, or keep body and soul together.

Whodunnit?

An important new movie: "Who Killed the Electric Car" by Chris Paine. It was profiled on PBS's "Now" last night.

We all should be driving electric cars right now. They began showing up on California roads in 1996, but somebody somewhere made the decision to get rid of them.

Look to the usual suspects: big oil companies (for obvious reasons) and auto makers (because electric cars are virtually maintenance free).

This is more than a high-price-of-gas issue. It's a national security issue. The Iraq War proves it; our policy toward Saudi Arabia proves it; the fact that we are exposing ourselves to danger and humiliation throughout the Mideast in pursuit of oil proves it.

As voters and participants in a supposed democracy, we're allowing ourselves to be grossly endangered by the greed and duplicity of giant corporations at the same time they're picking our pockets and cleaning out our bank accounts.

Isn't it time we stopped hollering quasi-religious, superstitious slogans about "free" enterprise and "evil" government, and began to develop rational and practical economic, transportation, and foreign policies?

We can sure as hell do better than this.

The electric car is one sure-fire solution to several of our worst problems, but I don't expect it too soon. That would make too much sense. However, we should absolutely demand from the auto makers a hybrid that can be plugged in overnight and at the job site, and refuse to buy anything less. I think that's coming within the next couple years.

Melquiades Estrada

"The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," directed by and starring Tommy Lee Jones, is the best movie of the decade.

Jones and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga walked away from last year's Cannes Festival with the best actor and best screenplay Palmes D'Or for "Melquiades," but the grand prize went to Jim Jarmusch's "Broken Flowers" which I haven't seen. I think Jones probably missed the trifecta by inches.

A story of the harsh life, an accidental death, and one man's redemption along the U.S.'s southern border, "Melquiades" is like a skilfully-rendered minimalist drawing in which characters are fleshed out completely and revealingly with just a few bold strokes of dialogue. Jones has said that one of his influences in making this film was Kabuki, and he certainly was inspired by Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece "Rashomon," in which a single crime is viewed through the eyes of several different participants.

Pete Perkins (Jones) hires then befriends Estrada (Julio Cesar Cedillo), an illegal drifter who describes himself accurately as "just a cowboy." Guileless, simple and decent, Melquiades only speaks Spanish, but Pete is fluently bilingual, and as the two grow closer the Mexican asks the gringo to promise to take him home for burial if he should die north of border. He doesn't want to be laid to rest among the billboards, and gives the old foreman detailed instructions on how to find his home, Jimenez, smaller than even a fly-speck on the map of Coahuilla state.

Of course, Estrada does die not long after, shot in an accidental misunderstanding by Mike Norton, a cocky, immature, emotionally repressed Border Patrolman played by Barry Pepper. Pepper has been working Hollywood and playing mostly smaller parts for about eight years, but he's maximized his main chance here by uncorking what must be the performance of a lifetime. His intensity is incredible throughout, and at times he becomes so physically involved in his part he's hard to watch.

When Pete realizes that the cynical and corrupted local sheriff (Dwight Yoakam) is not going to follow up on Estrada's death, even though he knows who the killer is ("He was a wetback," says Sheriff Baxter), he realizes he has to make good his promise to Estrada and at the same time appoint himself as a one-man vigiliance commission. He decides to take Norton into custody.

Norton's wife, a sad little bottle blond (January Jones) bails out of their loveless marriage, departing with an over-the-shoulder postscript that he's "beyond redemption," one of the movie's main themes expressed, as always, with spectacular economy. Neither is there any preaching or moralizing about the other philosophical threads Jones and Arriaga weave here -- racism, cultural chauvinism, corruption, the loss of simplicity as a virtue, alienation, and the universal need to find a moral purpose, something beyond the self.

Filmed mostly on Jones's Texas ranch and in the Mexican Mojave Desert, this was the long-time star's directorial debut. If his next effort is half this good, it'll be a masterpiece.

Zarqawi: Rest in Pieces

Beloved Leader expects that everyone will joyously celebrate this significant victory in the Global War on Terror. Our brave fighters in East...I mean Eurasia will certainly be safer now that the evildoer Zarqawi has been eliminated, and we can expect a quick and glorious outcome to this conflict.

Only thought criminals and enemy infiltrators can fail to be impressed by such a welcome event.

Please remember to practice safe sex, and make your next vehicle purchase a hybrid. Don't forget to use your zip code at all times.

Scary Day Blues

Now it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the sixth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the desert springs...

OK, it's nothing as dramatic* as all that. A number of people have made a big deal about the day's numbers, but I haven't thought about this occult combination very much. However, it was an exceedingly unusual day here, with the air menacingly still, a thick, low cloud cover hiding the sun, and uncharacteristicly intense humidity altering the landscape and atmosphere ominously. The birds were mute, the animals invisible, the people nervous.

I went looking for work today. Why has everyone grown younger than me? I felt like a chaperone. The settings were familiar, the people in them as they had always been, but I've been, as if all of a sudden, transformed into a grandfatherly figure, or perhaps a ghost.

However, no one seemed afraid of me, and they were respectful enough. So maybe there's spot for me, off in an obscure corner of some large firm, computing arcane tables of alchemical formulae which it is my assigned task to hand down to the next generation.

*See the opening lines of Chapter One of the King James O.T. Book of Ezekiel

Through the Looking Glass

Yesterday while idly clicking through the cable channels on a hot afternoon, I stumbled across the BBC's 1998 made-for-television version of "Alice Through the Looking Glass." I was fortunate enough to see most of this 86-minute masterpiece (accompanied by at least 86 minutes of commercials) which I had not previously known about.

This "Alice" uses lots of computer-driven special effects, some animation, a platoon of wonderfully crisp, classically-trained British actors, and a script which religiously follows the original (someone named Nick Vivian shares screenwriting credit with Lewis Carroll, but what we get is the undiluted original). "Looking Glass" is, I believe, superior to "Underground," and no previous adaptation of either of the Alice books that I've seen is anywhere near this good.

Of course, some will take issue with the casting of Kate Beckinsale as Alice (this was back before her big breakthrough in "Pearl Harbor," when she was still an artist). At age twenty-five, Beckinsale was so ridiculously beautiful she could probably induce heart attacks in more than a few of us mouth breathers lucky enough to catch sight of her. This is decidedly not a child-Alice, but she still manages to impart a childlike aura to the role, albeit in precise, graceful, elegant and educated British diction. Heartbreak city.

Clean, beautifully enunciated, carefully articulated language is one of the distinguishing characteristics of this production, honored even by the Cockney twins Tweedledum (Gary Olsen) and Tweedledee (Marc Warren). Besides Beckinsale who appears in every scene and carries most of the film, other notable performances are rendered by Ian Holm as the White Knight, who delivers an inspired rendition of the poem "A-Sitting on a Gate," Desmond Barritt as Humpty-Dumpty, and the incredibly charismatic Sian Phillips (she played Augustus's wife Livia in PBS's "I, Claudius" series) as the Red Queen.

Many reputable people don't like the Alice books. Flannery O'Connor, someone I really admire, called them "regrettable" or "unfortunate" or something like that. Some, I suppose are offended by the puns and the sometimes childish word play and non-sequiturs. But there's more to this nonsense than juvenile whimsy, and if a reader delves deeply enough to break through the patina of silliness, he or she will find that Carroll, outwardly careful and conventional, secretly harbored tremendous rage and resentment against the mores -- moral, philosophical, and theological -- of polite, proper, and repressed Victorian society. Innocuous-seeming humor was the only means he had of expressing it.

Take Two

Exactly two years ago tomorrow I retired from teaching and moved to a new home, all within just a few hours.

It's a sad day when you leave the old school in tears, drive to the house you've lived in for a decade and a half, pack up the cat, and drive 150 miles to a world unknown. Sad is hardly a word to describe it. The sense of loss was acute and exquisite.

What one expects and what one gets are seldom, if ever the same. I expected, leisure, learning, and a comfortable if somewhat penurious life lived in harmony with those around me. What I got was ennui, boredom, melancholia, discord, grinding poverty, and rapidly declining health due to my own weakness and character defects.

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
--Hamlet, Act I, scene 2

So tomorrow, the second anniversary of the arrival of that holy grail everyone looks forward to, when you don't have to get up at five, I'll get up at five, go get the Sunday paper, and start actively looking for work, which has now become a necessity for a number of reasons.

And at 5:01, I'll take my medicine "like a man" as people used to say, and begin restoring both body and soul. I'll either do it or literally die trying.

Things never turn out the way we expect them to.

If it weren't for the unexpected and the unwanted challenge, our lives would be unbearably predictable. It's really better this way. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it in a not-so-famous Unitarian hymn, as long as we have the strength to carry on, we get The Life that Maketh All Things New.