Rovemail

When Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy issued a subpoena for Karl Rove, the White House advisor and political operative sometime known as "Bush's brain" last Thursday, there he made clear he was attempting to compel Rove's testimony in the matter of the ongoing U.S. attorney firings scandal.

"The evidence shows that senior White House political operatives were focused on the political impact of federal prosecutions and whether federal prosecutors were doing enough to bring partisan voter fraud and corruption cases," Leahy said. "It is obvious that the reasons given for the firings of these prosecutors were contrived as part of a cover-up and that the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort."

In private, Rove was not shy about sharing with people like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or presidential counsel Harriet Miers that he wanted the heads of several of the U.S. attorneys because they were not, in his view, aggressively pursuing trumped-up voter fraud cases against Democrats in their districts, as the White House had ordered them to do. Leahy knows this.

What Leahy may or may not know is that for several years, Rove, in conjunction with the Bush Justice Department, has been actively engaging in precisely the kinds of spurious manipulations of voter rolls which he falsely accused the Democrats of.

The same day that Leahy issued his subpoena for Rove, the website Truthout.org revealed the existence of previously undisclosed documents which show how Republican operatives under Rove's tutelage mounted in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign, concentrating most heavily on Ohio where George W. Bush was trailing the Democratic candidate John Kerry.

Emails obtained by Truthout show that Tim Griffin, a Republican National Committee staffer in 2004 and later appointed interim U.S. Attorney for Little Rock, Arkansas (a post he resigned when the U.S. attorneys scandal broke) led the Republican effort to purge black voters from the rolls in Cuyahoga County, Ohio as well as targeting minority voters in several other "battleground" states -- New Mexico, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Nevada.

The method Rove and Griffin used to try to suppress minority voting is an illegal tactic known as "caging." Political operatives send registered letters to the homes of registered voters. If the targeted voters fail to respond, the operatives try to convince local authorities to remove them from the rolls.

The RNC was caught engaging in this practice in 1981 and 1986. During the latter part of 1986 Republican National Committee officials signed an agreement to abstain from voter caging in the future, but that was 21 years ago, before Karl Rove was the White House's enchilada grande of political technique.

The two sets of documents obtained by Truthout also show that the RNC strategy for 2004 included contingency plans for contesting the results of the election in the event of a Democratic victory, by challenging the eligibility of voters in the same states where the caging efforts occurred, using the same lists of targeted voters employed in the pre-election suppression attempts. This strategy is laid out clearly in an email, dated September 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and in the RNC, with the title "voter reg fraud strategy conference call."

Truthout reporter Jason Leopold adds that "Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson referred to the documents as a 'goldmine.' The valuable documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections."

Clearly, the RNC and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign were preparing for a scenario reminiscent of their tampering with voter rolls and subsequent suppression of a recount in Florida during the 2000 election. The full story of how that tainted election, which propelled Bush into office, was monkeywrenched by Republican operatives is detailed in Greg Palast's book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."

Rove is scheduled to answer Leahy's subpoena this coming Thursday, August 2, but will probably not show up, moving the constitutional confrontation between the White House and Congress to the next level. In a letter to Rove and White House aide Scott Jennings which accompanied the Senate Judiciary Committee's subpoena, Leahy wistfully reflected, "I am left to ask what the White House is so intent on hiding that it cannot even identify the documents, the dates, the authors and recipients that they claim are privileged."

Leahy is being somewhat disingenous. He knows perfectly well what the White House is hiding in the matter of the U.S. attorneys scandal. What is less clear is how much he knows about the deep background of the scandal -- the extent of the Republican habits of voter manipulation and election fraud which they piously accused others of engaging in as a pretext for a partisan purge of the Justice Department. It would be surprising indeed if Leahy was completely ignorant of these matters, and if he didn't have a few pointed questions for Karl Rove concerning them, once Rove is compelled by court decision to show up at the hearings and honor the hot seat which has been reserved for him with his ample posteriors.

Readers can view a more detailed account of this breaking story at http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/072607A.shtml.

Coarse Correction

The stock market experienced a very coarse correction of the "irrational exuberance" of the past few weeks by sliding 300 points or so on Thursday.

The experts say it's because investors are worried about the home mortgage market and all those foreclosures they've been having, and also waxed up about corporate lending markets.

Too much bad paper out there. Badd fuggum, and it is threatening to shut down the one major industry we've got left -- the building of ugly beige suburbs and ugly strip malls to go with them and blacktop roads to go with the McMansions and Burger Kings. Over the past twenty years, as American industrial enterprise has downsized and offshored and otherwise dried up and blown away, the uglification of our landscape has remained the one major viable hands-on activity.

But now if the construction industry slows down to a crawl because there's so much unsold real estate standing vacant and unsellable, we're in very big trouble. Foreclosures will only add to the excess housing stock, besides threatening the survival of the institutions who lent money foolishly to unqualified buyers over the last ten years or so.

Bad paper means bad business. Watch out for a major garbage avalanche in 2008, just like in Mike Judge's futuristic movie "Idiocracy."

End of the Trail

Is this the end of an illustrious semi-career?

I'm quitting both of the bands I'm in after this weekend's gigs. Actually I don't even know why we call them "gigs," because we never get paid. Sometimes we have to drive significant distances to work these counterfeit "jobs," and even to rehearse. That, and the fact that I don't play as well as I used to are sufficient reasons for packing it in.

It's hard to recall that I used to make a living -- a pretty good living at times -- playing drums and singing. Those were the hectic and intoxicated days in Alaska when we worked, drank, sang, and foolishly celebrated our good fortune. How times have changed.

Now life is harder but more sober, lived cautiously as opposed to prodigally, and parsimonious rather than lavish. Discipline and study have replaced the thoughtless good times, and most of us are now ruled more by Apollo than Dionysius.

I'm not sorry about this, and I have no regrets. And anyway, suppose I'm not really done?

Number 21, First Decade

Right. I've lived through the 40's, the 50's, the 60's, the 70's, the 80's, and the 90's. Those decades were easy to name. I mean, you wouldn't call them anything else.

But what are we going to call the first decade of the 21st century? The oh-oh's? The oughts?

It looks like "the zeroes" wins, hands down, for lots of obvious reasons.

Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, on a Nice Day

At about 70 degrees farenheit, with bright sunshine and a cool breeze blowing out of the northwest, there's no place on earth nicer than this.

Leave your car wherever it is and put on your walking shoes. Everything you need is right here in the neighborhood. The Alpha Market is small and expensive, but it has the best bread, salmon, and produce in the known universe.

To be among loved ones in an idyllic environment, full of food, sleeping well, and living with a very cursory and flexible schedule, is to know fulfillment. We roll out about six a.m. and Rachel gets ready to go off to her U.S. history class at State College, where she has an excellent lecturer and an interesting study to occupy her mornings. Her mother and I eat a leisurely breakfast and prepare for her return, which of course calls for lunch.

Dogs, cats, pigeons and coffees in the garden at Reverie round out the day.

If it can get any better than this, I'd like to know how.

Reality Wedges (Updated 8/15/07)

I believe I met Owsley in 1967. At least I think it was him.

I was sitting on the grass in Golden Gate Park, dinking unobtrusively on my little tabla, when a smallish, neatly-dressed young guy came walking down the blacktop footpath. He had sandy hair, a well-trimmed beard, and glasses. He wasn't in a hurry, but he wasn't strolling either. He was on a mission, going somewhere.

"It's a pink wedge," he said, handing me a triangular-shaped tablet. "Careful -- it's two hits."

"Thank you," I said to his departing back, for he had many, many pink wedges of strong, pure LSD to distribute in the park that day.

Between 1963 and 1967, Owsley manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses of LSD and gave most of it away. At a time when supplies of clean, reliable pharmaceutical-grade acid had dried up, he perfected techniques guaranteeing a 99.9 percent pure product, and was single-handedly responsible for the shape, content and direction of the Bay Area "hippie" movement of the mid to late sixties.

A lot of his stuff ended up in the hands of people who sold it, but they sold it very, very cheaply.

In addition, Owsley Stanley was an innovative and ground-breaking sound engineer, responsible for the origins of the "wall of sound" approach to amplification, at a time when music and musical poetry were the most important vehicles of revolutionary culture, politics, and economics. His close association with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead, and his financial backing of their most important decisions, were decisive in launching the sixties movement. It's not too much of a stretch to say that he was a major factor in shaping our current American culture.

Much of the neocon revolt and the wave of Christianized "movement" conservativism of the last 35 years has been at least in part a backlash against the sixties. If you don't believe me, read Pat Buchanan or any random issue of The National Review.

The main problem with what happened in the sixties is we forgot. We forgot that by the time those of us who are now over 55 were in high school, the American government-cum-military leviathan had become a machine, and the machine was out of control. It still is, only now it's worse. We forgot that the way of life we were and are living is an expression of insanity. We forgot that it's a way of life dependent on resources which will soon run out.

There was a time when these realizations and dealing with them were the stuff of daily life, but we forgot all that because we became first distracted, then consumed by jobs and families and insurance and 401K's and the illusion of security. Nixon was followed by Ford, then Carter by Reagan and Bush I, then came the false hope of the Clinton years, and we forgot.

But now I've noticed people are starting to remember, and maybe just in time.

Owsley went to jail in 1967, and was expatriated to Australia in 1996. He resurfaced in San Francisco earlier this year, and agreed to sit for an interview with a Chronicle reporter. You can read it here.

I was foolish with that pink wedge, by the way, and took the whole thing at once. It was a night to not remember, since I can recall only small bits and pieces of it, like snapshots from another world, leading to (as the song lyrics say) a jingle-jangle morning, sitting shivering with a blanket in the San Francisco fog, overlooking the bay from Telegraph Hill.

UPDATE: The raw material available to Owsley for his social experiment in "consciousness raising," his mission when he began manufacturing acid in the early 60's, was the youthful populations of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco and the student ghetto in the area of Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.

As with Telegraph Avenue, many students from San Francisco State and USF flocked to the Haight, which was perfect for multiple roommate setups with its large flats and cheap rents. Marijuana was already commonplace there in 1963 and 1964 when Owsley came on the scene and began distributing his exciting new product. It was at this time that he began his association with Ken Kesey, who had a house in Palo Alto that was becoming famous for its non-stop parties (See Tom Wolfe's 1968 book "The Elecric Kool Aid Acid Test"), with music provided by the embryonic version of the Grateful Dead, who played under the name, "The Warlocks."

It was about this same time that Sam Andrew and Peter Albin came together to form the beginnings of the band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and started playing in the basement of a house at 1090 Page Street in San Francisco, where they were soon joined by James Gurley and Janis Joplin. Not long after, in 1965, Jefferson Airplane had their first gig at the Matrix, near the Marina.

The main elements of the countercultural movement in San Francisco took shape quickly, and coalesced mainly around two elements -- the music, and the drugs. It was helped along by the general social malaise and alienation stemming from the Vietnam War.

Psychedelics were the drugs of choice, alcohol and heroin were on the outs, and Owsley acid was the rocket fuel that caused the movement to launch, culminating in the Summer of Love of 1967. That season-long event was enabled and encouraged by several high-profile events in late 1965 and 1966 that drew extensive national media coverage, publicizing the wild happenings in Haight-Ashbury world wide.

In 1965 Kesey ran several "Acid Test" parties at numerous locations in the Bay Area. They were publicized by garish, semi-legible posters, with the dates and locations of these bacchanalias hand-lettered in the lower right-hand corner. The mother of all acid tests, however, occurred in January, 1966, as a one-night component of the three-day Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall. Billed as an event that would simulate the drug experience, but without the LSD. Festival organizers of course had no way of knowing whether participants' minds were unaltered or blown to smithereens with Owsley acid, but it's a safe bet that most of the revelers were higher than the Sears Tower.

The Trips Festival was followed six months later by the one-day Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, which drew 20,000, mostly stoned to the bone young people for a free concert featuring The Jefferson Airplane and Alan Ginsburg. This was the largest event of its type until Woodstock, three years later, and the press coverage was no doubt responsible for convincing many a teenage would-be runaway to forsake school, home, parents and siblings, and the boredom of Cedar Rapids, or Billings, or Victorville, and set off for the land of free love, free drugs, and liberation from all life's cares, in the Summer of 1967.

Owsley set out to transform the world by distributing free LSD to anyone who wanted it. He was convinced that if enough people got high, if consciousnesses were raised high enough, that Americans would recognize the futility of their way of life, and abandon it, and the world would change for the better.

The movement he fueled gathered publicity, and the publicity drew new recruits by the thousands. And when the Summer of Love was over, no one could really say whether the world had changed for the better or not. But following closely on that famous season, the Diggers, a Haight-Ashbury-centered social activist group which had opened a free store and a soup kitchen, staged a "Death of Hippie" parade on Haight Street in October, 1967. It was meant to signal the end of the movement which the Diggers and many other old-timers in the Haight felt had been co-opted, sensationalized, and cheapened by the mass media, and turned into television freak show and an irrelevant curiosity.

Owsley was arrested and jailed in 1967, and pure LSD, while still available, was no longer the norm. Harder drugs, especially speed, began to show up more frequently on Haight Street and Telegraph Avenue, and the violence and psychosis that accompany that dangerous substance began to replace the peace and love of '65, '66, and '67.

The Summer of Love was over, and with it, the countercultural movement.

The Boys of War

"We made 500 bucks before she hung herself...I guess she was unhappy."

Here's a video that reveals warboy culture in all its sadism and depravity.

I have no doubt that there are many service people who are sickened and appalled by warboy culture. For instance, I remember the American soldier who shot himself in the foot rather than participate in the atrocity at Mai Lai.

But so what? Warboy sadism is still a fact of life, and an unalterable circumstance of war.

If war is hell, lying to fabricate a war on false premises is the work of the devil.

This video is the reality that counterbalances the patriotic wankfest that passes for debate in the American media and all over the internet.

It clearly shows the reason why any unnecessary war, a war of aggression, a war undertaken to "shock and awe" the rest of the world, to secure resources through acts of piracy, is a crime against humanity.

It should be treated as such.

I picked this video up from Stan Goff, the former career military man and U.S. Army Ranger. It should be given the widest possible circulation.

Signs, Portents, and Omens

I don't consider myself superstitious, but I've learned to pay attention to signs, portents, and omens:

*The divorce card appearing in the middle of the future line in a personal reading of March, 2003;

*Uncontrolled weeping the day I left my job and home (a day I had been working toward for years) and traveled south to my new location; black clouds with violent lightning on the horizon as I approached it, driving the straight line of CA 18 through the desert toward Yucca Valley;

*The patriarch acting like a small child at the dinner table on our first night in our new home.

My advice to people is to avoid looking for omens, but to pay heed to those which are large, distinct, unavoidable, and unambiguous as regards interpretation.

Much Ado About Very Little

I don't enjoy always being the curmudgeon, so it's with some hesitation that I offer my opinion that the Live Earth concert was just a lot of posturing, as are all such musical extravaganzas put on to benefit supposedly worthy causes.

Don't get me wrong. Saving the earth is as worthy a cause as ever came along. But Live Earth, like the assorted paloozas that preceded it over the last 20 years, was vanity-driven exercise in feel-goodism. Such events also give aging celebrity performers a chance to promote themselves gratis, and second- and third-rank hangers-on a chance to do the ohyeahbabyohyeahbabyohyeahohyeah for which they are undeservedly semi-famous.

It takes a real wet blanket to be so cynical about something that everybody agrees is wonderful and significant and the coolest thing since popsicles. Therefore, it was a relief to find, as I opened Jim Kunstler's weekly blog this morning, that there's at least one person who agrees with me.

"There was so much about the Live Earth show that actually expressed what is worst about the current state of American culture," Kunstler groaned. "(T)he obscene posturing of zillionaire celebrities, awarding themselves brownie points for the largeness of their concern -- even while, like Mr. Sting of the band called the Police, they buy-and-sell $20 million Manhattan condos, and burn god-knows-how many tons of Wyoming coal amplifying the bass runs to "Roxanne." And the flip-side of these celebrity pretensions, of course, is the disturbing fealty paid to them by the fans, as members of the public caught up in celebrity-worship are called. Obviously, the whole thing is a kind of self-reinforcing feedback loop spiraling up to ever worse grandiosity on the part of the celebs and ever more pathetic groveling worship of these fake gods by the fans -- until it becomes little more than an object lesson in the tragic limitations of the human condition."

But what about Al Gore? Yes, I still believe Gore is the only serious possibility for leadership we have at this point, even though he disdains to run. Kunstler touched that base too: "Gore..." he said, "could just put aside his pretensions for being a kind of global Wizard of Oz and just cut the shit and run for president of the US, where he might actually make a difference."

The rest of us might want to think about cutting the shit too, and later this year, before fall turns to winter, I'm going to sell my little tin shack in the desert and my automobile that I need for even the most pedestrian daily errands, and move to a city where I won't have a car. Ever again.

Cars are half, or more than half the problem. Carlessness is the wave of the future. And I would hope that vanity fests like Live Earth are not. We can do without any more such hooplas.

The Limits of Authority

Here's something I don't understand. Conyers and the Judiciary Committee subpoened Sara Taylor, who used to work in the White House. Her lawyer wrote Conyers a letter saying she wants to testify, but the White House won't let her.

How can the White House not let her? She wouldn't be breaking any law, she no longer works for the White House, and Bush and Cheney are not her mama. What are they planning to do about it if she does testify?

Her testimony would be in regard to the U.S. attorney firings.

I don't know of any precedent for "not letting" a former employee testify, or under what authority such action can occur. The situation was revealed this morning on ABC's "This Week" in a question the show's host George Stephanopoulis asked Conyers, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Coyers hinted that impeachment of Bush and Cheney is getting to be more of a real possibility because of their stonewalling of various congressional investigations.

Lesbian Gangsters

Anybody who still takes Bill Orally seriously better have a brain scan PDQ.

Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" awards for Friday featured an O'Reilly toofer: he took second place for having his D.C. radio show pulled and replaced by a sports talk show, while at the same time managing to capture first place for reporting the previously unremarked existence of a “national underground network of lesbian gangs carrying pink pistols” who are terrorizing and raping young girls and forcing them into lesbianism.

One of Fox News's paid shils, sitting in with O'Reilly as a guest expert, asserted that there are over 150 such crews in the D.C. area alone.

All I can say is I hope there's film at 11:00. This should be fun to watch. I wanna see those pink pistols.

I think Orally is just resentful of females who disdain a heterosexual persuasion because he hates thinking about all those women out there who will never feel the touch of his fabled falafel. Or is it his loofah? But why bother about insignificant details?

Seattle's Dave Neiwert has all the gruesome details of this heinous threat at his blog Orcinus.

July 4 Holiday, 2007

Consider this quote from George Bernard Shaw: "Patriotism is the belief that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it." Then read this short essay by Stan Goff.

It's the best thing you'll read today.

Goff was 26 years in the military, and served part of that time in the Rangers.

Pew

The Pew Organization has published a poll that shows how low the reputation of the United States has fallen in the rest of the world's eyes, with most of the damage done in the last seven years.

Right. Well, if people elsewhere feel bad about the U.S., there are plenty of current polls showing that Americans feel bad about the U.S. too.

The last polls I saw had like 77% of Americans saying they thought the country was "on the wrong track," or something to that effect.

Everybody feels bad about us and we feel bad too. We all feel very bad. Boo hoo.

As President Merkin Muffley (played by Peter Sellers) in the movie "Dr. Strangelove" said to the Soviet Premier after the U.S. had launched a nuclear strike against Russia, "I'm sorry too, Dmitri. I'm very sorry. All right! You're sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are Dmitri. Don't say that you are more sorry than I am, because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, all right? All right."

When we get tired of feeling bad, maybe we'll do something about it. We could start by impeaching Bush and Cheney and getting a little self-respect back. Maybe if we respected ourselves a little more, other people might start to respect us a little more too.

Incidentally, the scenario in "Strangelove" hinged on the nutty breakdown of a supposedly foolproof system. The nuclear strike against Russia occurred because of the efforts of a certifiable lunatic, Air Force General Jack D. Ripper, to monkey wrench and override the system of safeguards, and launch the air wing under his command against the Soviets on his own initiative. That was back in the early 60's, the days when the theoretically sane people were in charge.

Is Dick Cheney sane? Even theoretically?

Ends and Means

In late March, two members of the Congressional Peak Oil Caucus, Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Tom Udall (D-UT) called a press conference to announce the release of a previously embargoed General Accounting Office report which reveals that the U.S. is "particularly vulnerable" to disruptions in its 22-million-barrel-per-day oil habit due to the imminent peak and anticipated decline in world oil production, and that the U.S. government is "unprepared" to deal with the consequences of these supply breakdowns, brought on either by production shortfalls or political conflict.

Their press conference announcement (two pages, pdf) provides a thumbnail of the GAO document and a link to the full report.

"This GAO peak oil report is a clarion call for leadership at the highest level of our country to avert an energy crisis unlike any the world has ever before experienced," Bartlett said, adding that this supply crisis "could happen at any time."

Udall listed the steps Washington needs to take to deal with the inevitable supply crunch, including "a concerted focus on conservation, higher fuel efficiency standards, energy saving buildings and appliances, (and) revival of passenger and freight rail..."

With the price of crude oil once again topping $70 a barrel, the age of cheap gasoline is already history, and the coming supply crisis a certainty rather than a possibility. The GAO report points out:

*OPEC countries hold most of the world's oil reserves, but the extent of those reserves has not been verified by independent auditors, and is therefore an unknown and unknowable quantity.

*Four countries -- Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela, hold an estimated one-third of world oil reserves. All four are either politically unstable, strongly anti-American, or both.

I'm surprised that Al Gore, who now has to be considered an undeclared presidential candidate, has not picked up this issue and married it to his global warming crusade, since the solutions to the coming petroleum supply disaster are also the solutions to the climate crisis.

I have no doubt that Americans will sooner or later do the right thing in dealing with global warming, just as an obese person in a time of famine is bound to do. Our way of life and our economic regime for the past six decades, dominated by the perpetual horizontal expansion of cities with replicated suburbs spreading farther and farther from the core, and the proliferation of automobiles to negotiate these freeway-linked megalopolises, is rapidly passing away. Whether our transition to a new, high-density urban way of life is relatively easy or catastrophically hard depends on the quality of the leadership we choose to take us there.

It will take more than just electing a president who doesn't have his head in an inappropriate place. Strong, determined, and in some ways implacable and puritanical state and local leadership will be required as well.

Because in the days to come, as the prophet said, Americans will burn gasoline and natural gas "by measure, and with astonishment."

Giuliani Spurns CA Bagels

Former NY Mayor and current presidential candidate Rudy Guiuliani visited a California bagel shop Friday and had a cup of coffee, but didn't want a bagel.

So. Our California bagels are not good enough for the Mayor of New York. Such snobbery.

"He ate earlier," a spokesminion said. Yeah, I'll bet. Let's just see how many votes this payaso gets from California.

Dion Hearts Paris

In this depressing and dangerous age of political dysfunction and global terror, theirs and ours, it's nice to know that love never dies.

And in celebration of that fact, Dion Di Mucci, yes, he of "Runaround Sue" fame and front man for Dion and the Belmonts, has penned a tender and sincere love song to the delinquent heiress, Ms. Hilton.

Maybe she's been an object of ridicule and derision, but doesn't everybody deserve to be loved? And what normal American girl doesn't want to be loved by a bonafide rock star?

She's crazy if she doesn't take advantage of this.

Dion performs "Hey, Paris" in what I presume is his living room.

Check it out!

The Tower Struck by Lightning

In the first year, in the ninth month, on the eleventh day of the month, the tower was struck by lightning.

Here in our present-day Babylon, unlike the ancient nation whose fate is recounted in the first and last books of the Bible, the tower we've built is mostly horizontal, not vertical, and spread over the ground like an amoeba. That part has been struck by disaster also, although of a different sort than that which demolished the vertical portion.

When the tower is destroyed, the pride and arrogance that built it are also demolished and lie buried beneath the rubble. If the builders attempt to hang on to the delusions of omnipotence which caused them to erect such monuments to their own vanity in the first place, they will only cause themselves more grief, and their legacy to their own people as well as others will be more widespread destruction.


When God sees the tower, he regards "this thing they begin to doe: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they haue imagined to doe." Thus the mighty are brought down, and the proud humbled.

Therefore, the time when the tower is struck by lightning is a momentous and sobering time. It signals the arrival of the day of reckoning, when the illustrious rulers of the mighty Kingdom of Babylon must realize that in their hubris they have violated the limitations and laws of proportion which nature and nature's God have put into place. And this is why they are shown from time to time that their gifts do not confer dominion, which still belongs to a power they are unable comprehend or measure.

As one prophet expressed it, they shall burn gasoline "by measure, and with astonishment.

Hitler and Whole Foods?

Jonah Goldberg, sometimes known as the Pillsbury Pantload, is an overweight, dull-witted wannabe pundit who capitalized on his family connections to get a job writing thrice weekly for the National Review Online, where he also wears the elevated title of "Editor-at-Large."

He's the son of Lucianne Goldberg, a D.C. literary agent and rumormonger who gained some degree of fame back in the day as a professional Clinton hater. His column inevitably exemplifies the sort of nonsensical and evidence-free rumination that passes for thought in the right blogosphere.

A year or more ago, rumors began to circulate that the Pantload had produced a book, and a cover and publisher's description duly appeared on Amazon. The red cover was embellished with a yellow happyface cartoon portrait of Hitler accompanied by the title, "Liberal Fascism: from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton."

Now, a year on, this purportedly completed volume still hasn't been released, and apparently we're going to have to suppress our eager anticipation until December. However, in the meantime the title has changed, and while the new title has been posted at the book's blurb site at Amazon, the accompanying graphic still bears the old title, which you can clearly see if you supersize it.

The old title made little enough sense, but the new one: "Liberal Fascism: from Hegel to Whole Foods," makes absolutely none. The mind can only flailingly conjecture what a purveyor of yuppie foodstuffs has to do with fascism, or the philosophy Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or for that matter, Mussolini or Hillary Clinton.

So which is it, Jonah? Mussolini or Hegel? Hillary Clinton or Whole Foods? This is what you'd expect from a Dick Cheney fan, and while I'm waiting with bated breath for these questions to be answered, I must admit I'm not planning to read Jonah's analytical opus, whatever it may be called by the time it finally comes out. I'll let someone else suffer through that ordeal, and read his or her review for answers to my questions.

Goldberg is a monumental piece of work. His writing is not only devoid of cogency, but is frequently so senseless as to fulfill every possible meaning of the word.

Morning in America

When Richard Lugar bailed out on the Iraq War a couple days ago, followed by Voinovich with John Warner waiting in the wings, it was obvious that something real big was up.

An AP story out this morning confirms that heavy changes are afoot.

"A majority of senators believe troops should start coming home within the next few months," the story confirms. "A new House investigation concluded this week that the Iraqis have little control over an ailing security force. And House Republicans are calling to revive the independent Iraq Study Group to give the nation options.

"While the White House thought they had until September to deal with political fallout on the unpopular war, officials may have forgotten another critical date: the upcoming 2008 elections."

This will play out when the next cycle of war funding requests comes around. I doubt that it will feature the noisy and contentious debate we saw the the last time. Republicans in Congress are looking at that ticking clock, and there are now fewer than 18 months until November, 2008.

If the administration tries to hold on to the same old stay the course policy until September, Lugar said "It'll be further advanced in the election cycle. It makes it more difficult for people to cooperate. ... If you ask if I have some anxiety about 2008, I do."

Everybody knows where the war is going -- nowhere. Everybody knows how most Americans feel about the war. However, nobody has asked the obvious question: if the U.S. pulls out of Iraq without having accomplished any of its objectives, what will be the impact on the oil supply?

We can't survive without mideast oil. As Jim Kunstler put it bluntly a couple weeks ago, "We're involved in Iraq because we don't want to begin thinking about modifying our behavior at home. We are desperate to preserve our access to Middle East oil because that is the only way we can keep running our society the way we're used to running it. Mostly, we don't want to face the tragic misinvestments we've made in the infrastructure of happy motoring, and we don't want to face the inconvenient truth that there really isn't any combination of alt.fuels that will permit us to keep running all the cars the way we like to run them. Either we keep getting the oil or say goodbye to the American Dream Version 2.K."

It looks like we're going to finally confront our dependency on oil, i.e., foreign oil. We'll have no choice. And we can't do that without confronting the tremendous weaknesses and vulnerability built into our fundamental way of life.

This was the problem the Iraq War was supposed to solve; we'd establish a firm base in the middle of the region, set up a client government, and guarantee ourselves a steady, cheap supply of the black gold, if not forever, then for a long time. After all, according to Dick Cheney, the present-day American way of life is "non-negotiable."

And when I think back on this moronic misadventure, I keep seeing the confident, imbecile faces of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Rumsfeld -- the real architects of the war and educated fools every one.

Our prospects for ending the war before 2009 are better now than they've been since it started. But our prospects for determining how we're going to live with the fallout -- nobody's bothered to think about that.

Their Space

I opened a "myspace.com" account about a year ago, mainly to keep up with my daughter's comings and goings, and to be able to access the pages of the two bands I'm in.

A guy in his sixties with 19 friends (a minimal number), one of whom is the ubiquitous Tom, doesn't get much traffic. And what traffic I do get in recent months is exclusively from ladies of questionable virtue whose profiles disappear from the site, usually within a few days of their asking me to be their new "friend."

"I've moved my profile here because Myspace won't allow me to post some of my nude modeling photos," says the latest of these twenty-something would-be friends, Raelene from Alabama. However, I did what I usually do in such cases, and ignored the request.

I'll tell you, life gets to be tedious when you reach that unmistakable point where you're old and in the way.

The Joy of Cooking

Here's a very interesting story that I missed when it came out on MSNBC almost a year ago. Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary (Michael Wynne) said last September.

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

The "it" Wynne is talking about specifically is a riot-control device the Air Force calls "Active Denial Technology," or ADT. According to a 2001 article at the website NewScientist.com, ADT is "is designed to heat people's skin with a microwave beam" and "uses a 2-metre dish to create a narrow beam of microwaves (delivered at the crowd from an aircraft) that can be scanned across a crowd or even aimed at individuals."

Apparently Secretary Wynne is not worried about what the domestic press would think if the Air Force microwaved a bunch of scruffy demonstrators. I guess nobody's scared of "60 Minutes" any more.

The Air Force Research Laboratory reassures us "that the 3-millimetre wavelength radiation penetrates only 0.3 millimetres into the skin, rapidly heating the surface above the 45 °C pain threshold." At 50 degrees C., a person would feel like he or she is on fire. "Someone would have to stay in the beam for 250 seconds before it burnt the skin," the AFRL adds, which would give demonstrators "ample margin between intolerable pain and causing a burn."

All those old jokes about the lady who gave her poodle a bath and then tried to dry it in the microwave aside, this is pretty scary stuff.

I believe this is another bit of anecdotal evidence which shows that the patients are now in charge of the asylum.

Vive La Tarot de Marseille

For those who might be interested, there is a French cardmaker, Jean-Claude Flornoy, who still knows how to make tarot and playing cards the old-fashioned way, printing the blackline sheets off woodblocks and coloring the cards by hand using stencils.

An entire deck made this way would be prohibitively expensive, but he has made a couple of trumps-only decks (22 trump cards plus the two signature spot cards) that are hand colored and affordable.

This page on his website shows the coloring process. The woodblocks for these two old Marseille decks -- the Noblet and the Dodal -- are long gone, but he has copied the blackline designs faithfully with the aid of a computer. So these decks are produced with an impressive combination of cutting-edge and primitive technologies.

First two large sheets, each containing twelve cards, is printed. Then each is colored with a series of six stencils, one for each color. The lighter colors go on first -- light blue, then pink, then yellow, then green, red, and dark blue last. After that the sheets are cut into cards.

The result is an absolutely gorgeous set of hand-colored trumps plus the maker's signature cards, the deuce of cups and the deuce of coins. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see them.

The slightly smaller (and historically very early, hence more interesting) Noblet trumps deck sells for a very reasonable 38 Euros, or about $50, as near as I can work out the exchange, and I plan to buy them come payday, since I heard Flornoy is going to discontinue them this year.

I don't know of anything like this available anywhere else.

Mobile Park Thrashers

When late spring arrives here in the desert, the people in the trailer park where I live move out, and the birds move in. There are trees and bushes here as well as water, and the local predator, the coyote, stays outside the fence. There are no dogs running loose and few cats. Wagner Park is now an open aviary.

I think it was mid-April when I first encountered the occasionally noisy and rather aggressive couple who now dominate my lot and the bushes on the other side of the driveway. I awoke one morning to hear them calling monotonously to one another. Apparently, both are named "Chuck."

"Chuck!" they said, in a raspy alto. "Chuck, Chuck!"

Foot-long brown birds with long, curved, wicked-looking black beaks, they're so identical in size, coloration, and temperament you can't tell the male from the female. They began industriously building a nest across the way and ran off all the other birds freqenting the lot except the mourning doves, who are extremely docile and apparently not a threat.

I soon began to grow attached to these dull, anti-social creatures, mainly because of their singular appearance, for I had never seen a bird that looks anything like them. I asked my neighbor, "What kind of bird is that?" but the usually knowledgeable Harold mis-identified my new lot mates as cactus wrens. I later found out cactus wrens are smaller and spotted, and not similar at all to these chocolate-colored wallflowers with the suture-needle beaks.

Thanks to the U.S. Geological Survey's comprehensive picture list of common birds of the U.S. and Canada, I finally determined that my new friends are the largest of the Mockingbird family (sometimes called the Mimidae), California thrashers.

One source I consulted said these birds are "common, but seldom seen" because they spend most of their time under bushes, turning over leaf litter and looking for food. So mine must be atypical, because I see 'em all the time, especially in the cool of the morning, and the waning hours of early evening, when invariably one of them is looking and calling for the other. Another source said they're "highly territorial," which is, I think, putting it mildly.

I wonder if they'll fly away to somewhere else in the fall, or will be here all the time now. I'd miss them if they left.

Ugh!

I read somewhere or other that Mrs. Clinton has now opened up a double-digit lead over Barack "The Kid" Obama. So now, 17 months before the actual event, it looks like our 2008 presidential election will be the Ice Queen versus the Oven Mitt.

Has the electorate ever been offered a such a moth-eaten choice as this before?

No wonder al-Qaida spokesmen Ayman al-Zawahari and the American Adam Gadahn (from Hemet, right down the road here -- local kid hits the big time!) sound so confident these days. Leadership like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney (pick 'em!) would be as big a gift to al-Qaida as the Iraq War has been.

I guess there's not much we humble voters can do about this situation, since the rulers make the rules for the smart people and the fools. But there might be a number of creative ways to protest this upcoming disaster dressed up as an exercise in democracy.

1. Boycott -- just don't vote, because it only encourages them. However, not voting wouldn't really have much impact because all a candidate needs is a majority among those who actually voted, even if that number is very small. So instead, I'd suggest...

2. A third candidate -- if any candidate gets enough votes to prevent either of the other two candidates from getting a clear majority, the election will be thrown into the House of Representatives. It wouldn't change things all that much, but at least then those g.d. Republicans and Democrats would have to do their dirty work out in the open, for the whole world to see.

Possible third candidates I would suggest include:
Paris Hilton
Engelbert Humperdinck
Lyndon LaRouche
Dennis Rodman
Jessica and Ashley Simpson (dual presidency/sister act).

But wait -- there's a news flash! I just heard on NPR that Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New Fork City, has announced he's going to drop out of the Republican Party. Newsies say he's doing so in preparation for standing for president as an independent.

Hell yeah, I'd vote for him, probably even sooner than I'd vote for Paris Hilton. He's got a lot going for him, such as:

1. He's not (or won't be) a Republican;
2. He's not a Democrat;
3. He's from New Fork City, a place feared and detested by the denizens of the U.S.'s vast, primitive, and barbaric regions of cornbread and Biblical literalism, who think New Fork and San Francisco are bottomless pits of depravity whence all evil emanates -- stuff like socialist gay yoga in Unitarian Churches.

Inna Gadda da Vida, BABY

Once I heard somebody say, "Thank God for a garden."

I don't know about that. I've been sweating away in mine, and gardening is not what I thought it was. So far I've facilitated zero life, because there's nothing to do there except kill things -- dig 'em up and cut 'em down, before they come around the corner at you. Then you barrow a ton of silage uphill to the dumpster.

Actually it's not a garden at all. It's a jungle. This isn't gardening, it's jungling. Whack your way through with a machete and a shovel.

Hardest job so far: digging up even medium-sized Mojave yuccas -- appropriately nicknamed "Spanish dagger" -- by the roots, in the meantime avoiding its dense phalanx of stabbing points.

I suppose it's good for me. I've never done any of this home improvement happy horseshit in my life, and this is a daily discipline that, if I keep at it a couple of years, will show some real results. The Buddha would approve. This is an appropriately humble undertaking to learn and practice i one's old age.

Plus, I don't think anybody's really cleaned this thing out in about 10 years. And I can tell you, a cactus garden in a hot desert is a dangerous thing. Put a little water on it, and it explodes in an excess of proliferation. Put a lot of water on it and stand back.

You're going need a willingness to sweat, a patient attitude, and a sharp machete.

Sweet and Fitting

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori...
--Horace

(Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country...)

Watching Lewis Milestone's towering film masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front a couple days ago, I was immediately struck by how little the methods of manipulating young and naive adolescent males into pouring out their blood and sacrificing their lives on the altars of false gods have changed over the last 100 years.

As a newly-formed regiment of fresh cannon fodder marches past their classroom window to the blare of martial music, a fresh crop of 17- and 18-year-old high school seniors is regaled on the virtues of war by their professor, who ritually washes and anoints them for the god Mars's chopping block:

It is not for me to suggest that any of you should stand up and offer to defend his country. But I wonder if such a thing is going through your heads. I know that in one of the schools, the boys have risen up in the classroom and enlisted in a mass. If such a thing should happen here, you would not blame me for a feeling of pride. Perhaps some will say that you should not be allowed to go yet - that you have homes, mothers, fathers, that you should not be torn away by your fathers so forgetful of their fatherland...by your mothers so weak that they cannot send a son to defend the land which gave them birth. And after all, is a little experience such a bad thing for a boy? Is the honor of wearing a uniform something from which we should run? And if our young ladies glory in those who wear it, is that anything to be ashamed of?...To be foremost in battle is a virtue not to be despised. I believe it will be a quick war. There will be few losses. But if losses there must be, then let us remember the Latin phrase which must have come to the lips of many a Roman when he stood in battle in a foreign land:...Sweet and fitting it is to die for the Fatherland...

Look at present-day television commercials for our all-volunteer Army and Marine Corps and you'll see the same appeals to our current crop of young and defenseless American babies that German academics used in 1914 and 1915. Indeed, the pro-war propaganda manufactured by the current American regime is, if anything, cruder and more childish than what its predecessor war machines in 20th-century Germany used, and it's certainly not working as well. Recruitment numbers are down, and maybe the truth about modern warfare is finally starting to sink in.

When the protagonist veteran of "All Quiet," Paul Baumer (played by Lew Ayres) returns to his old classroom after a year of mud, blood, and terror in the Flemish trenches, the same professor who primed him for the killing fields asks him to deliver a few encouraging words to the new class of would-be victims, and is appalled by the truth he tells:

I heard you in here reciting that same old stuff, making more iron men, more young heroes. You still think it's beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don't you? We used to think you knew. The first bombardment taught us better. It's dirty and painful to die for your country. When it comes to dying for your country, it's better not to die at all. There are millions out there dying for their country, and what good is it?

Baumer might have added that it's also, by the same token, better not to kill at all. But in any modern society which finds itself in the grip of the spiritual and mental disease of war fever, such as Germany in 1914 and 1939, or the United States in 1964 and 2003, such talk inspires a degree of fear and hatred of which only the most profoundly blind, ignorant, and intensely overheated fanaticism is capable. Gunter Grass, the Nobel-winning German author who was drafted into the Waffen SS at 16 in 1944, describes how his unit dealt with a pacifist recruit in his recent memoir, "How I Spent the War:"

Every possible sort of punitive labor was imposed upon him, but nothing helped. He would work conscientiously for hours without a peep, emptying the latrine with a worm-infested bucket on a long stick—a punishment known as “honey-slinging” in soldiers’ slang—only to appear, freshly showered, at rifle drill shortly thereafter and refuse to wield the weapon once again. I can see it falling to the ground as if in slow motion...

Morning after morning, when we gathered for roll call and the drill instructor started passing out the weapons, the incorrigible insubordinate would let the one meant for him fall to the ground like the proverbial hot potato and immediately return to his ramrod position, hands pressed to trouser seams, eyes fixed on a distant point.

I cannot count the number of times he repeated his mantra, a catchphrase that has never left me: “We don’t do that.”

One day his locker was cleared out: private things, including religious pamphlets. Then he was gone—“transferred,” it was called. We did not ask where to. I did not ask. But we all knew. He had not been discharged as unfit for service; no, we whispered, “he has long been ripe for the concentration camp.”

And since we knew of the camp, Stutthof, only by hearsay, we thought Wedontdothat—which was what we called him in secret—was in good hands. “They’ll bring old Wedontdothat down a peg or two.”

Was it all as simple as that?

Did no one shed a tear?

Did everything go on as it had before?

I must say that I was, if not glad, then at least relieved when the boy disappeared. The storm of doubts about everything in which I’d had rock-solid faith died down, and the resulting calm in my head prevented any further thought from taking wing: mindlessness had filled the space.

Mindlessness certainly characterized American propaganda during the run up to the Iraq conflict, which trotted out the same sorts of lies and paranoid bluster Hitler used to justify going to war in 1939 to neutralize the Polish threat against Germany. But there are hopeful signs that the old war fever sales pitch isn't working like it used to. The majority of Americans has now turned against the war, which is encouraging, even though public opposition is apparently of no effect in altering the trajectory of our self-destruction. The supposed romance of dying gloriously and heroically for one's country may have finally worn thin, and the lesson of Wilfred Owen's poem -- the most famous of World War I -- may finally have taken root in our depraved and warsick modern world:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori

We need to note also that the rate of American deaths and total casualties in this war has been relatively low in comparison to earlier conflicts, but that the price paid by Iraqis for our insanity has been extremely high. And I shudder to think what the fate will be of a nation which murders innocent children in the most cowardly fashion, by dropping cluster bombs from 20,000 feet. If there is any justice in this universe, or anything approaching even a minimum balance, the price Americans will eventually pay for these crimes will be inconceivably high.

Judith and the General

The Book Judith isn't in the Bible. It's one of the apocrypha -- those almost biblical books of dubious authenticity or uncertain authorship. It's a sort of re-make of David and Goliath, that story in which somebody humble, but talented and fearless brings down somebody huge.

Nebudchadnezzar was the king of Assyria, a war machine masquerading as a country. He sent out this bigass army to conquer the world, and he said he would "couer the whole face of the earth with the feete of mine armie, and I will giue them for a spoil vnto them." By that he meant he would give the wealth of the conquered territories -- their gold, jewels, and sweet, light Arabian crude, to the men in his big army with a percentage for his financial backers. Also, Nebuchadnezzar could never spell worth a shit.

He also said that the people he conquered, from Patagonia all the way up to the North Pole, had to toss out their gods and worship him instead, or in lieu of that, adopt sincere beliefs in freedom, democracy, and the free market system, by which he meant markets controlled by him.

And he called his head general, Holofernes, the guy with the hard name to pronounce, and says, "For as I liue, and by the power of my kingdome, whatsoeuer I have spoken, that I will doe by my hand." By which he meant Holofernes's hand.

So off goes Holofernes leading Nebuchadnezzar's humungous, ferocious, and very high-tech army, and lays seige to the town of Bethulia, which is on a hilltop and kind of the gateway to Judea. And rather than charge up that big hill, Holofernes wisely just cuts off the water supply, and the elders of Bethulia knew they were in deep kim-chee, and talked about giving up in five days.

Then comes Judith, a widow of the town and local major babe, and says "Cool it, fools, and grow some spines, hearts, and brains. If you had any faith you'd know that the supreme being -- what'shisname -- is gonna give us what we need to do what we gotta do."

So Judith, who's been walking around in a muu-muu and ashes on her head for four years takes a long bath, and rubs down with lavender and olive oil, lays on the henna, gets out her earrings -- the big brassy-looking hoops, and about a hundred bracelets, and puts on her homewrecker dress. Then when she's all fragrant and a banquet for the eyes, she takes her maid and goes down the hill to where the Assyrians are and says, "Which one of you guys is Holofernes?"

Up comes Holofernes, rising to the bait, as it were. "How ya doin', big boy?" says the irresistable babe, "I think I've got something you need -- uh, some information I mean."

Judith wasn't just hot looking, but was also smart as Henry Kissinger and just as devious too. She could spin a line of bullshit yards wide and miles long. And after a few hours with her, in the inimitable words of King James's translators and editors, "Olofernes tooke great delight in her, & dranke much more wine, then he had drunke at any time in one day, since he was borne."

Then, when Holofernes had passed out, Judith took his sword and cut his head off. She had her maid put it in their meat sack, and they departed inconspicuously in the wee, wee hours.

When she got home to her hilltop and showed the head to the boys in the city, they all grabbed their blunt instruments and went running down the hill and began to lay into the demoralized and leaderless other-people's-countries invaders. And they sent out messengers to all the other cities in Judea, so that when their guys joined in the fun, the Jews kicked those tough Assyrians all the way "past Damascus."

What's the lesson this fable is teaching us? I have no idea, other than make sure the sword is sharp for easier cutting. But I do know this: we tend to think of ourselves as the guys who have defeated various Assyrians over the years, since we're the good guys and the Assyrians are the bad guys. But the fact is, we've never defeated the Assyrians. We became the Assyrians.

Here's another: in the long run, the Assyrians always lose.

Paper Magic

It came as no surprise Friday when Fair Isaac Corp., the company responsible for determining how much "wealth" modern Americans possess in the form of their credit ratings, announced that starting in September its method of computing credit scores will include measures to neutralize the borrowers' practice called "piggybacking," according to a story by Brigitte Yuille at the website Bankrate.com.

Piggybacking is done by would-be borrowers with low credit scores, who "rent" space as authorized users on credit cards owned by people with excellent credit histories.

"Fair Isaac uses 22 pieces of data collected from the three major credit bureaus (Equifax [EFX], Experian [GUS], and TransUnion) to calculate a credit score -- 300 is the lowest, 850 the highest," is the succinct explanation of how the company does its crucial work in a November 28 Business Week magazine article. In recent years, shaky borrowers have been gaming the system in increasing numbers by piggybacking their names onto other people's credit cards, thus scamming the three major bureaus' data-collection systems by combining other people's payback histories with their own.

For example, when Alipio Estruch wanted to take on a $449,000 mortgage to buy a house near Fort Lauderdale earlier this year, he found his credit rating of 550 left disqualified him as a borrower. But after paying $1,800 cash to an internet-based company, Instantcreditbuilders.com (ICB), Estruch's name was added as an authorized borrower to the cards of several people with excellent credit histories. They were paid for the space on their cards, and for the $1,800 fee, Estruch boosted his credit rating to 715 overnight, qualifying him for the loan he wanted.

Piggybacking is a great deal for the cardholder renting the space as well. Some are making over $2,000 a month, getting paid between $100 and $150 a pop for each space they rent, usually on seldom-used cards. The rest of the (typical) $900 fee goes to the agency such as ICB who serves as the go-between for the would-be borrower and the reputable cardholder. Those borrowing on someone else's good credit history don't get any personal information, the full credit card numbers they're being added to, or the card expiration dates. Any sensitive information is protected by the agency, and the renters add the users' names themselves, with a phone call to credit card company.

It wasn't very long ago that people with borderline credit histories didn't have all that much trouble securing big real estate loans due to the expansion of the so-called "subprime" lending market. But now that production homebuilders are sitting on growing stocks of unsold houses, and the default rate among sub-prime borrowers whose homes are falling in value continues to rise, lenders have suddenly discovered that their "industry," as James Kunstler puts it, is "rife with irregularities in lending standards!" So the bogus lending practices of the recent past, such as the infamous "interest-only" loans for example, have now been replaced by bogus borrowing practices, such as piggybacking.

All this paper magic and manipulation of numbers only serves to underscore what a scam and a series of self-serving illusions the late capitalist American economy has become. The problem is that if the survival of even a remnant of the housing bubble, the one economic factor that has held up the economy for the last ten years, depends on the continued practices of paper magic of one sort or another.

Kunstler also points out that the housing bubble is collapsing at the same moment as the oil crisis of rising prices is setting in permanently. "These events will be happening simultaneously," he writes. "The housing industry, so-called, will never recover because the oil crisis spells the end of the suburban build out. The cycle is over. The big production homebuilders will go down and never come back."

This is why the end of "piggybacking," combined with the collapse of the "sub-prime" loan market and the rising price of oil, spells big trouble ahead for the U.S., at home as well as abroad.

Disasters of War

I just finished reading Gunter Grass's World War II memoir, "How I Spent the War" in the June 4 New Yorker. It's now online, so people seeing this can read it for themselves.

I don't know how I managed to never read anything by Grass over the last 40-plus years. When I was at San Francisco State in the mid-60's I saw lots of students carrying copies of "The Tin Drum" around for some class or other, and isolated phrases about Grass like "the conscience of postwar Germany" bounce around in odd corners of my memory. That's a possibly true but incomplete description of Grass, who over the years, has carefully cultivated a prodigious mastery of the writer's craft. He's a better writer than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and like Solzhenitsyn has something very, very important to tell us.

Grass's melancholy tale of his induction into the Waffen SS at age 16, very late in the war (September, 1944), of his lucky and completely accidental survival of the collapse of the Reich, of the corpses hanging from trees, the irrelevance of bravery in the face of superior firepower, the sudden deflation of adolescent bravado and naivete under the avalanche of war's overpowering reality, conveys a tremendous sadness which I would imagine has increased rather than diminished with time. Every word of this extremely intimate and wholly subjective memoir is chosen to serve as an indictment of the futility and pointlessness of modern war.

Has there been a war in modern times that could not have been avoided? Has there been one that should not have been?

Grass's war was the same one my father, ten years older than the German author, got caught up in. Pop also entered the conflict late, arriving in France in February of 1945, and mostly dealt with thousands of confused, desperate, hungry refugees and families on the road, and axis soldiers, mostly German but also from various other countries, looking for someone to surrender to. His trip across France and Germany by boxcar and foot ended with his witnessing the opening of the Dachau death camp.

He returned home traumatized and demoralized, intimitaely acquainted, like Gunter Grass, with the depths of depravity to which the race is capable of sinking under the iron reality of war. He was angry, sometimes sullen, and somewhat unpredictable for a couple of years, but after a while he recovered. I guess he decided what he had gone through was worth it, that he, his country, and his comrades in arms had accomplished something.

But for survivors on the other side, the postwar held nothing but the lingering, bitter taste of disaster. Grass's accomplishment in describing Germany's collapse, and the pathetic final attempts of the Wehrmacht to defend itself, lies in his ability to deliver an emotionally overpowering work using bland and objective language. He simply lays out his experiences of the war's last days in the coolest deadpan, and the measured calm of his tone amplifies the devastating effect of the narrative.

The Crusades (continued)

Okay, so Senator McCain is on Bill O'Reilly's "No Spin Zone" on Fox News talking about the new immigration bill that's wending its way through Congress (or maybe not), and O'Reilly says, "But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you're a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have."

The white, Christian, male power structure?

The context of this remark was O'Reilly's contention that Congress needs to put a cap on the eventual number of immigrant workers we allow into the country, lest the white, Christian, male power structure find itself swamped by sheer numbers. And at the end, McCain (who supports the bill) says "I agree with you."

The "No Spin" Zone? What fantasy universe of the nonexistent past are these guys living in?

I'd like to find out what they're smoking, so I can be sure to avoid it.

Pirates of the Persian Gulf

Noting that a majority in Congress calls the new war funding bill "supporting the troops" while she calls it "stealing Iraq's oil," Truthout.org columnist Ann Wright* on Saturday made a couple of very serious accusations:

"If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the (oil) privatization legislation (i.e., the new Iraqi oil law which would give control of most of the country's petroleum resource to foreign companies for the next 30 years), Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there," Wright said, and adds the further charge that "The privatization law (was) written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration."

Unfortunately, Colonel Wright did not support her accusations with documentary evidence such as hyperlinks or citations. If these very serious charges were true, I wanted to find the evidence. Wright accused congressional Democrats and Republicans alike of shamelessly blackmailing the Iraqi people by shaking them down for their oil, their only source of wealth, and also of open and blatant premeditated acts of brazen piracy, larceny, and brigandage.

She's accusing the Democratic Party especially of betraying not only the American people who voted them into power, but of betraying the Iraqi people as well, by turning them over to Cheney the Pirate.

Her accusations, as it turns out, are 100 percent accurate. A CBS News story from last Friday, published in the wake of the the congressional vote on the war funding bill, notes that "Continued U.S. reconstruction aid would be conditioned on progress toward the so-called benchmarks." And we also know that the passage of the Iraqi oil giveaway law by the Iraqi parliament is one of the bill's "benchmarks," because, as Robert Naiman noted at the Huffington Post on March 14, "Representative Dennis Kucinich is asking for something to be removed from the supplemental - the 'benchmark' that requires the Iraqi government to pass a new oil law."

Proving the second of Wright's accusations -- that the proposed Iraqi oil law was "written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration" -- is also a slam dunk. Having studied the Arabic version of the proposed law for purposes of making and publishing an English translation of it, the Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar notes that the Arabic of what was purported to be the original draft of the law looked "weak and translated. I have no doubt that the English version of the law is the original one, and that the Arabic one is nothing more than an edited translation of the English origin. The few changes in the content, between the Arabic and English versions show clearly that the Iraqi lawmakers who worked on the law did not change any of the parts that relates to foreign investments," Jarrar concludes.

He also identified the original source of the proposed new oil law by noting that the English version of the law which leaked in 2006 "shocked a number of specialists, like Erik Leaver from the institute for Policy Studies, because it had some exact text from a previously leaked seminar papers produced by a private contracting company called 'Bearing Point.'" In fact, the Virgina-based consulting firm BearingPoint, one of the world's largest, richest, and most powerful energy consultants, was hired by the Bush administration for no other purpose than to write the Iraqi oil law the American (especially Exxon) and European (B.P. and Shell) oil giants demanded of them.

The website Oil Change International reported the details of BearingPoint's Iraq contract: "BearingPoint, a Virginia based contractor is being paid $240m for its work in Iraq, winning an initial contract from the US Agency for International Development (USAid) within weeks of the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A BearingPoint employee, based in the US embassy in Baghdad, was hired to advise the Iraqi Ministry of Oil on drawing up a new hydrocarbon law."

Apparently their advice consisted of writing the law, then handing it to the Iraqi parliament and the Oil Ministry, and threatening them with the withdrawal of reconstruction funds if they are unable to see the virtues of the new law.

Oil Change International adds that "BearingPoint employees gave $117,000 to the 2000 and 2004 Bush election campaigns, more than any other Iraq contractor."

This Iraq war is now demonstrably the most openly criminal and larcenous act of international pillage since the King of Belgium grabbed the Congo in 1876, with the sole intention of robbing those hapless Africans of their ivory and rubber. Oh yes, and he mentioned something about spreading Christianity and Democracy as well. Big deal. History doesn't repeat itself, but as Mark Twain said, "It rhymes."

Furthermore, the war and especially the latest war funding bill have laid bare the utter bankruptcy and moral depravity of the American political system, and of both major parties. Forget elections, folks, and forget about improving the American political system. The so-called system has degenerated into a simple dictatorship, and the only way it can be improved is out of existence.

When you have rats, you get a cat. When you're troubled by too many cats, you get a dog. If you've got dogs, find yourself a tyrannosaurus.

And if you've got Republicans and Democrats, and they're working together to promote international crime and mayhem on a cosmic scale, get yourself a Samuel Adams. Or a Tom Paine. Or a Robespierre. Or a Lenin. Or a Ho Chi Minh.

Hell, get all of 'em.

Democrites

No, Virginia, there is NOT an opposition party in this country. Yesterday's vote on war funding proves it.

Since a Democratic Congress was elected in November of '06, why is the war still going on?

Why is impeachment "off the table?"

If you really want to know the answer to that question, read this. But fair warning: don't read it unless you REALLY want to know.

If you're like the rest of us -- I mean the 70 percent or so of American adults who don't like things the way they are -- do yourself a favor and abandon all hope.

Hope is for saps and wimps. It's the friend of the tyrant and the sly, fat fascist. The rich capitalists in their mahogany boardrooms who have hijacked our political system (including the party of Democrites), and the perps running the machine which wages perpetual war for perpetual profit, will not relinquish power because we hope they will, or because the Democrites ask them nicely to give it up.

They have to be overthrown.

Dust Hides a Mirror -- Or Not, as the Case May Be

"We are what we think," the Buddha said, or something very similar, as those monosyllables are not only attributed to him, but are the opening words of the most basic text of Theravada Buddhism, The Dhammapada.

"All that we are arises with our thoughts," he continues, and then, "With our thoughts we make the world."

The Buddha was capable of great subtlety, but he never hid anything, and the Dhammapada's most important words come first, at the very beginning. How like him.

Is the Buddha saying that there is no such thing as objective reality, and that reality, to the extent that it exists at all, is purely subjective, and only found in our minds? Not at all. Any child knows there is an objective reality outside his own head, even if he or she doesn't realize that it can only be experienced "from the inside," as it were.

"Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you..." Siddhartha said next. There is a subtle implication here, (overtly stated in the second stanza*): look at the world with a purified mind and your senses will apprehend the world as it actually is, just as a spotless and true mirror reflects what is held in front of it.

Which brings us to why the U.S. is in so very much serious, serious trouble these days.

"Last week," Truthout.org columnist Dean Baker wrote yesterday, "I was struck to see a well-respected centrist foreign policy analyst discuss President Bush's 'surge' as a serious policy for bringing stability to Iraq. This sight was striking, because at this point it is very difficult to imagine the surge as a serious policy. It seems evident that the surge is a desperate gambit by a president who does not want to acknowledge the failure of his invasion, and instead is willing to see the deaths of thousands more US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians."

Baker is of course, pointing out the obvious, and at the same time laying bare one of the more frustrating and maddening tenets of mainstream American punditry: the tendency of "serious" political commentators to give solemn consideration to shit that every idiot knows is patently untrue. They do this only because the idiots in charge, who are more often than not so pathetic that they believe their own bullshit, are putting this utter nonsense forward as serious policy which has a chance of success.

We've learned nothing from the Iraq War. But nothing.

Dean Baker's whole essay is worth reading, and as you read keep in mind: "Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart."

*We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.
Speak or act with a pure mind
And happiness will follow you
As your shadow, unshakable.

Annals of Addiction

If I have any regular readers here (and I hope I have a few), I apologize for not having been around for a week. I've been dealing with the effects of quitting smoking, and while I've had plenty of time, I've had neither the energy nor the inclination for blogging.

It seems the unlovely combination of bronchitis and emphysema finally did what the simple desire not to smoke (and thus be cool, yogic, serene, organic, and wise) was unable to do -- make not smoking a pleasure. And even though I'm still alternately on edge and listless, it really feels good not to be sucking those toxins into my lungs and coughing them back out. Ugh.

In addition, I can't quite get over the feeling that on a mainly political blog there's not much to write about these days. We're stuck having to bear the current unbearable situation another 19 months, and there ain't a whole lot anybody can do about it, except maybe Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and they ain't doin' it.

But that's OK; we're not dead yet. The earth is still producing crops, and some of the bees are still alive. We haven't attacked Iran yet, and maybe we won't. And I'm still here and still breathing, although I'm not quite sure why or how.