Rolling in Dough

Atheists line up,
submit to hair dryer
to be de-baptized.

All that money available out there will just go to waste if Democrats don’t wake up and do something sensible, like allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire. They can also end the ridiculous subsidies for oil companies who are making more money than most nations. They certainly do not need subsidies for their all-out attack on our planet. I don’t know exactly how much money would be involved by revoking the tax cuts and the subsidies but I’m pretty certain it would go a very long way to pay off our enormous debts. Of course if you also added in the many billions wasted on the Pentagon we’d be rolling in dough. We might even be able to help our citizens with one thing and another, like eating, housing, health care, stuff like that. Maybe we could save a little more if we stopped the Israelis from stealing from Daddy’s purse. Then if you added in all the money that could be saved from getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq we’d be rich once again, rich beyond our wildest dreams. If the “empire” was shut down we’d probably drown in our own money in a fortnight. We could pave the streets with gold. Here we have this enormous potential to get out of debt, rebuild our country, restore the middle class, and avoid third or even fourth world status, but of course it will never happen. Democrats and Republicans are united in their support of the capitalistic corporate state, the pursuit of profits, and maintaining the pretense of democracy in our increasingly fascist society.

I don’t ordinarily like engaging in postmortems or “what ifs,” but occasionally I can’t help it. Somewhere today I saw something about what things would be like had Al Gore been allowed to win as opposed to Bush. Obviously it is hard to say, but I think you can sure we would not have illegally and criminally attacked Iraq and thus would have avoided many of the problems we now face (you have to use your imagination). I also think it safe to say we would be much further along in saving our increasingly endangered planet as well as our own country. Whatever you might think of Gore he surely would not have been as incompetent as Bush (as if anyone could have been that incompetent). However much you might not have liked either Nixon or Reagan they were at least somewhat “Presidential” compared to Bush, who ruled more like the village idiot, repeating things he obviously did not completely understand in a language that only somewhat resembled English. Oh well, what if?

While on the what ifs, what if Obama and Holder had launched a detailed investigation of the Bush/Cheney war crimes as they should have? I think they are even required by law to do so. As it is Bush/Cheney have admitted to some of their crimes (torture) and others are self-evident as, for example, lying us into a pre-emptive war against a country that was no threat to us (the most fundamental war crime of all). Now this band of criminals is trying to disappear into the woodwork like the disgusting criminal insects they are, and will probably never be held accountable for the millions of deaths and the untold misery they caused. Whatever I might otherwise think of Obama I will never be able to completely forgive him for this act of political cowardice.

I think the case of Al Franken is an interesting one of role reversal. You may remember that when he was running for the Senate he was disparaged as just being a comedian and many people, especially Republicans, did not want to take him seriously. It turns out, ironically enough, that Franken is a serious and gifted Senator while his Republican critics remain the same silly clowns they have always been.

There is an interesting (perhaps not really interesting) argument going on about whether the Teaparty is racist or not. If the racist signs some of them carry are not enough to answer the question, consider that they are really part of the Republican Party, granted the most extreme part, and as such are of course racist. The whole Republican strategy in the period AR (after Reagan) depends upon the south and southern votes and that is clearly predicated on racism however much they may try to deny it. To ask if the Teaparty is racist is like asking if “bears do it in the wood.”

LKBIQ:
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.
George Aiken

TILT: The musky odor of Musk Oxen is used to attract females during the breeding season.

Freezer Feasts - essay

I’m so excited! I think I may have invented the next social craze: Freezer Feasts. Those of you who have freezers, especially larger ones, will grasp this concept immediately. As you no doubt know, one of the problems with freezers is that over time they fill up with stuff to the point where some of the older stuff inevitably gravitates to the bottom and has an excellent chance of being forgotten before it is used. While it is true that food will stay frozen for a long time, it is also true that most food shouldn’t stay in the freezer too long as it risks freezer burn or just becomes too old to be conscientiously served. You may try to use up everything in your freezer but it is not usually possible in a reasonable amount of time and there is always a residue of miscellaneous items that really should be used up before it’s too late.

As a solution to this problem I am recommending Freezer Feasts. On a designated date, long enough to be certain everything remaining will be suitably thawed and can be cooked, you invite all your friends to a feast. First you estimate how many people can be served with what is left over in your freezer after your failed attempt to use it all, and then you invite that many people to come and share in this event. And what a feast it can be! Although we do not keep a careful inventory of what goes in and comes out of our freezer, I am certain that if we were to offer such a feast at the moment it would include: one frozen duck, two frozen rabbits, a small bit of venison, 3 pounds of frozen octopus, half a bag of shrimp, at least one salmon filet, one whole whitefish, one gift of a lake trout, one pork roast, one beef rump roast, a small package of pork chops, two calamari tubes, several jars of chicken stock, at least one jar of veal stock, frozen leeks and peas, a quart of very old ice cream, a one-pound package of frozen huckleberries, two jars of homemade tomato sauce, a couple jars of leftover chili, an old loaf of bread, and some frozen duck fat. Now you may think this is a result of greed and hoarding but I assure you it is not. We buy things when they are available (not often here) and plan on using them, but then summer comes and it is possible to get lots of fresh produce and fish and we just don’t get around to them soon enough. Granted this may be an unusual mélange to be cooked at one time, but just imagine what a gourmet meal you could prepare with it, and how many friends you could feed.

The basic idea is to invite friends who also have freezers because they will understand, be in the same situation, and can eventually reciprocate. There are enormous and important advantages in doing this. For example, it avoids freezer burn and spoilage and thus prevents waste. It also allows you to empty your freezer periodically so you can defrost it more easily. It forces (or allows) you to begin buying again thus helping the struggling economy, and it insures you will have a better supply of food in your freezer. As the items are not held together by a common theme (other than all being food) they challenge your imagination as a culinary artist. There is also an element of nostalgia as you will probably find things you can no longer afford and enjoy them, perhaps, for one last time. If you do it well you will please your friends and gain their admiration, and perhaps even widen their tastes. It also allows you to break the seemingly endless cycle of potlucks, as your friends need bring nothing other than their own bottles and chairs (this last request seems to be becoming more and more common, especially as we tend to meet in larger groups outside during the summer). It also introduces an element of surprise and eliminates monotony as these feasts will not occur at regularly scheduled times. And at the very least it will bring diverse families together and thus promote social solidarity and camaraderie, as people who eat together are always friends.

Eventually, when it’s your friends’ turn to clean out their freezers and put on their feasts think of how you will look forward in eager excitement and anticipation to what magnificent leftovers may emerge and be offered. Obviously not all feasts will be as great as yours, but some will be, and some may well be even better, you may experience new treats and learn to eat foods you have never tried before. You might even learn to like eggplant and okra (ugh).

Once you have such a system in place and functioning, with just a modest amount of tweaking here and there it could come to share all the fine features of the Kula ring of the Trobrianders, the potlatches of the Northwest Coast, The Yam and Pig exchanges of the Melanesians, and the classic reciprocity of all gift giving a la Marcel Mauss. It will also importantly help to break the anomie so characteristic of living in such impersonal and large-scale societies. So don’t just keep piling more and more items into your freezers, pause now and then, prepare a feast for your friends, slow down and enjoy yourself. You can also incorporate this into the Morialekafa diet regimen: eat and drink all you want, no limits, but only do it every ten days.

Hogwash

Man asks friend to shoot him,
blame ex-wife’s boy friend,
get custody of his son. He dies.

As near as I can tell it’s all hogwash, pig pucky, horse manure, or BS. Does anyone really have a handle on what is going on or likely to happen? Mitch McConnell said the Republicans “got their groove back.” Does anyone know what the hell he is talking about? He might as well have said “23 skidoo,” or “Oh you kid,” or even “Wanna buy a duck,” as far as I can tell. These Republican clowns seem to believe they will take back the House during this year’s elections. Perhaps they will, or at least gain some seats, but why this should be so I have no idea. Row vs Wade doesn’t seem to be a big issue this time, nor does the threat of Gay marriage, there is no sex scandal in the White House to exploit, the birthers have lost credibility, both sides are questioning the “war,” so what does that leave? Well, it seems to leave unemployment, immigration, health care, the economy and the debt. Surely they do not intend to run on their well-known and repeated blocking of extending unemployment benefits. They have already infuriated Hispanics, most of whom will probably never vote Republican again, health care has passed and most probably has no chance of being repealed. So…the economy and the debt would seem to be the main issues. As they were largely responsible for the debt I can’t see much traction there for them, and their answer to the economy, believe it or not, is to maintain and even improve tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy and the corporations. Oh, and also doing away with Social Security, 86% of the American public oppose. How can this be a winning strategy? It can’t, unless there are unusually large numbers of voters who have lost their minds. Thus it is the election will come down to that – how many voters are out of their minds? There are always some, otherwise we would never have had a Nixon, Reagan, or George W. Bush, but will there be enough to put the country back in charge of the criminals that brought all this about? As my neighbor says, “Who knows what goes on in the minds of baboons?”

When it comes to hogwash little can surpass the sad and absurd story of Afghanistan. After years of no clear story of just what we were doing there, one has emerged. We are now being told we are there to build a nation, train its army and police force so they can defeat the Taliban and live happily ever after. This makes a nice story, if you like fairy tales or hogwash, because such an outcome is not going to happen. The very people we are training to maintain their well-known completely corrupt government don’t want us there any more than they want the Taliban, perhaps even less. They don’t train well, desert in large numbers, turn on our troops, and in general do not cooperate. We seem to believe they cannot do well without us, they believe we should leave and mind our own business. We forget the Afghans overcame the Taliban on their own once before, they can do it again if they so choose. When the corrupt and basically useless Karzai government goes there is no telling who will eventually emerge as the central power in Afghanistan, it could be the Taliban for a while, it could be some other group, some other strong man, but whoever it is, it almost certainly will not be intimately linked with the U.S., that predatory nation having already made the situation worse and lost “the hearts and minds” through its routine murder of innocent civilians. The terrible act of 9/11 should have been treated as a routine international crime, but under the guidance of the criminals, Bush/Cheney, became a “war,” costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, a mistake of monumental proportions that could have been brought under control by Obama who elected instead to make it even more nonsensical. That al Qaida or the Taliban are a threat to the U.S. is hogwash, plain and simple. Our “war” in Afghanistan may have something to do with our wanting to control things in the Middle East but it has nothing much to do with a threat to us. Most Afghans would be delighted to see us leave. Most Americans would be delighted to have us leave. We are fighting for a goal that is unobtainable. But hogwash is hogwash and seems to know no particular political party.

LKBIQ:
All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.
Fran Lebowitz

TILT:
There are about 4500 species of cockroaches.

Forty Acres and a Mule

He loses a drinking bet,
friends get to set his
prosthetic leg on fire.

Forty acres and a mule, a policy put in place in 1865 to award land to freed slaves and allow them to get a start in a new life. Apparently this policy didn’t last very long. It does serve as a kind of example for other more important and longer lasting Agrarian Reform movements. Such movements have been fairly common in the last two or three decades in Africa and South America. Usually they consist of taking lands from wealthy landowners who have far too much, breaking it up into smaller parcels, and awarding them to those who were previously peasants or sharecroppers. Obviously the landowners believe this to be completely unfair, whereas the peasants think the ownership of almost all of the land by a few people is completely unfair.

In the land of unreality where I now spend much of my time, having given up even trying to deal with the unpleasantness of our current irreality, I can imagine this happening right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Indeed, I fancy it ought to happen. It is no secret that corporate farms have pretty much taken over agriculture in the U.S., and also no secret this is not good for the land for numerous reasons, not the least of which have to do with the massive use of fertilizers, pesticides, genetic modification, and what-have-you. There is now a movement on the part of some to turn to organic farming and also to turn more toward using crops grown closer to home (the 100 mile diet, transportation costs, fresher, better food, etc.). I suppose the “Slow Food” movement is indirectly related here somehow as well.

Now, as we are also experiencing massive unemployment, along with the reallocation of wealth more and more to the already obscenely wealthy and these huge predatory corporations, why should we not engage in an agrarian reform movement here at home. We could call it “X acres and a tractor,” and calculate the number of acres that can be adequately farmed by one family with a tractor, and have done with it. This would provide many jobs, security for many families, fresher and more organic foods, and a much healthier food supply and life style in general. Perhaps we could even run the tractors on solar or wind power. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous. But what a great idea! Maybe it would even help to get us off junk foods and reduce obesity. We could get rid of the gigantic holding lots, pig and chicken farms that are so terribly polluting and unpleasant, and stop injecting our meat with undesirable chemicals. But wait a minute, we already did this, in the early 20th century, or at least something like this. Why did we give it up? Greed and capitalism I suppose. Some argue that corporate farming is the only way to provide food for large cities, and perhaps it is. But Paris and London, Rome and Berlin, Leningrad and Budapest all made it to a pretty fair size without corporate farming. Cities, like farms, should be regulated in size as well. Most of our huge metropolitan areas now consist mostly of slums providing little or nothing for the masses of unemployed people who used to be working on the farms. They are no more than holding areas where the poor, miserable, sickly, and unemployed go to die. Besides, the need for large urban areas, what with modern technology and communication, is pretty much gone.

Put in simpler, blunter terms, human beings do not have to live as they have chosen to live. A far more sane, healthier, more natural and happier life would be entirely possible. We have chosen to turn our backs on it in favor of fouling our own nest as fast as possible. We have lost our respect for nature, have failed to manage our affairs, have offended all other species, and continue blindly onward to our own eventual extinction. There is a fatal flaw in our species, best summed up as GREED.

I don’t know what to make of Republicans. Either they are incredibly stupid or incredibly dishonest, perhaps both. On the one hand they want to preserve and even improve tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, and on the other hand they want to reduce the deficit. You might think these are incompatible goals, but not for Republican believers in magic. They resolve this obvious contradiction by simply proclaiming that tax cuts don’t affect the economy. They appear to suffer from a collective Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder which makes them repeat tax cuts at every opportunity. If they can win elections at this point in time by insisting on more tax cuts we will know that Goebbels was right all along.

LKBIQ:

“There is no use trying; one can't believe impossible things." (Alice)

"I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” -Queen
TILT:
All male mules and most female mules are infertile.

Extra Virgin?

Argument over ownership of frying pan
leaves man with third degree burns,
stepbrother with 11 stitches.

I’m having a bit of trouble with language these days. I think this is because I was confronted today with the phrase, “extra virgin.”Now I know that extra virgin when applied to olive oil means the first pressing of the olives, but how did such a description emerge? What could possibly be “extra” virgin? Obviously you can relate the “first pressing” to the first intercourse, but what could make either experience extra? Somehow to me this sounds much like saying someone “is a little bit pregnant.” It simply makes no sense, yet it is a commonly used phrase. Perhaps it means one extra virgin at a party for virgins and their prospective suitors, if not, what? Anyway, this seems a special case, because usually our language problems have to do with archaic usages, phrases from the past that have somehow retained their meaning even though their origins may be obscure to most users, usages that I suppose could be labeled “survivals.”

For example, a few years back, when my son was still small, I was taking him fishing. We were driving up an unpaved and very rough mountain road when I observed, “it’s really washboardee (ignore for the moment there is no such word) and my son asked, “what’s a washboard?” Obviously there was no way he could have known what a washboard is/was as they disappeared in our culture long before he was born. In this case he genuinely did not know what I meant although I suppose he might have figured it out as having something to do with the rough road.
But we routinely use phrases completely out of date that still carry well understood meanings, or at least I think they do. “Hold your horses,” for example, pretty clearly relates to controlling your impatience. “Waiting until the cows come home” would appear to have much the same connotation. Perhaps it is the words “hold” and “waiting” that convey the basic meaning. Such sayings I find of great interest because they somehow seem to convey meanings for most people even though they have never been near either horses or cows. There are some cases, however, where it is difficult to see how something could have a meaning without actually knowing the history or circumstances surrounding it. A little boy asking his father, for example, “what is clockwise?” Being born in a digital age, the concept of clockwise would have no meaning or connotation at all unless it was explained.

Then there are phrases like “burning the midnight oil.” As using oil for lighting was mostly discontinued quite a long ago, long before most people had any experience of it at all, it is hard to see how meaning emerges from this, but somehow it does (at least I think it does, maybe in this case because it does still occur if only rarely). If you say to someone, “I see you’ve been burning the midnight oil,” don’t they seem to grasp the concept? Similarly, if you say “I think I bought a pig in a poke,” don’t they somehow seem to understand the meaning, even though in this case the meaning comes from a relatively obscure fairground practice of deception that disappeared a long time ago. And how about, “he was hoisted on his own petard?” How many people have any idea what a petard was? And yet, somehow, it seems to me, people grasp the basic meaning of this phrase (I think). Then there is something like, “taking her down a peg or two.” I suspect most everyone understands the basic meaning here, but do they associate it with the tuning of musical instruments where the phrase originated in the 16th century?

Some of our commonly used phrases do have intrinsic meanings that have nothing to do with history. “He’s a hard nut to crack,” for example, or “nod off,” or “nip something in the bud.” Even something like “grist for the mill,” can have a contemporary association even though it obviously arose in the past. I guess even something like “put him out to grass,” contains meaning for most people, even though it refers to what is done with horses and raising horses is not something everyone has experienced. “The die is cast” would also probably be meaningful to most people even with no personal experience of that kind of work. “Fresh as a daisy” has an obvious meaning, as, I think, does “putting the cart before the horse,” even if you know nothing of either carts or horses.

There are, of course, many sayings and phrases that have meaning only to those individuals completely conversant with the particular culture they reside in. “He hit a home run,” for example, does not have meaning to those who know nothing of American baseball. Some phrases would not be heard any longer because of obvious culture changes in language. The phrase, “the fag-end,” is not likely to be heard in our culture any longer because the meaning of the word “fag” has changed. The fag-end would not necessarily have been meaningful previously either if one was not acquainted with the weaving industry. Some phrases elude me completely although they must have had some historical anchor, “don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” is an example.

Slang has to be the subject of a a much more detailed study and I hesitate to mention it here. But let me offer just one example of how difficult and culturally astute you have to be to always “get it.” When I was a young boy, hanging out in the pool hall where I was not supposed to be, I often heard someone say things to the effect that “it was like shit through a tin horn.” This never made any sense to me whatsoever and I wondered about it for a long time (as I am not very bright). Suddenly one day it came to me, the phrase actually was “shit through a Tinhorn,” a Tinhorn being slang for an Easterner (sometimes a gambler) in the West who was unfamiliar with the food, customs, and etc. Slang changes so fast nowadays that one generation can barely communicate with the next one and the meanings are so culturally embedded as to be virtually incomprehensible to outsiders. But that is another story.

LKBIQ:
If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
Doug Larson

TILT:
The cave with the longest surveyed passages is Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, 367 miles.

Republican Idiocy

Teenager refuses to give his
seat to 66 year-old Japanese woman,
she breaks his nose with umbrella.

Perhaps I am just unusually out-of-sorts today but I swear that everything than emanates from the mouths of Republicans these days is absolutely idiotic. My computer was acting up today, and it was far too windy to work outside, so out of frustration I turned on the TV. There was a youngish-looking Republican on the Chris Matthews show who said in all seriousness that unemployment insurance was bad because it kept people living where they were instead of going where there might be jobs. That is, I guess, if you are married and out of work, have a home you are desperately trying to keep, have little or no money, you just move your family to Nebraska or someplace where you might find a job. This is idiotic. And when you consider that Republicans continue to hold up extending unemployment benefits for millions, when they are themselves multi-millionaires, you have to believe that is pretty idiotic as well. Of course in this case it might not be completely idiotic when you realize they are merely throwing millions of unemployed Americans “under the bus” in order to make Obama fail and thus have a chance to regain power. This might not be idiotic, but it is certainly heartless and evil.

Of course everything that comes out of the mouth of Michelle Bachmann is idiotic. Now she claims that Donald Berwick, Obama’s appointee as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, believes in the U.K. “death system.” She also claims Obama has turned us into a “nation of slaves,” which apparently also in her mind (if she has one) has something to do with health care. Even better, she is starring in a documentary that links Darwin to the Holocaust. What do you expect, it’s vintage Bachmann idiocy?

Then there are the Republicans for reducing taxes on the wealthy at a time when such an idea is totally idiotic. Linda McMahon, running somewhere-or-other as a Republican, is on this perennial bandwagon, admitting she got the idea from Reagan, and Jon Kyl is for extending tax cuts for the wealthy even if it increases the deficit (but not for unemployment benefits because they will increase the deficit), hypocrisy and idiocy elevated to a level far above the average.

Republican Representative Steve King has proclaimed that Gay Marriage is a purely Socialist concept, while Rand Paul has stated that the Tea Party has broad bipartisan support (I suppose this is why they can’t even get enough people to attend their rallies). And don’t forget his famous claim that critizing BP is un-American. Idiocy reigns supreme in Republican circles.

The MSM have been having a field day with Harry Reid’s “throwing Obama under the bus,” because he suggested Obama was not always aggressive enough in backing his agenda. This after Obama has been doing fund raisers for Reid and the two of them are obviously close. The Republican media has apparently never heard of friendly or constructive criticism, certainly not when they have a chance to cause trouble as they must have done on the playgrounds, “so-and-so doesn’t like you as well as me,” childish, as well as idiotic and stupid.

Eric Cantor has announced that Republicans could take back the House. This is sort of like saying the sun could rise in the west. Of course they COULD take back the House, but the chances are not great, just more Republican idiocy. And even if this were to happen it would only prove, once again, the idiocy of the American voting public.

My vote for the biggest Republican idiot of the moment is the grandest old pontificating, hypocritical windbag of all time, Newt Gingrich, who has announced to whoever will listen, if anyone, that he has never been more serious about running for President. I sympathize, I have never been more serious about wanting to move to the French Riviera and live on a luxury yacht, feeding on truffles and unborn lamb, and surrounded with worshipful , gorgeous, and nubile young ladies from all over the world. I wish both of us the best of luck.

Do not forget Representative Barton’s apology to BP, or “What’s-her-Face” Angles claim that the unemployed are spoiled, or McCain’s claim he never said he was a maverick, or “Diapers” Ritter’s claim that his aide, accused of attacking a woman with a knife, was not working on women’s issues, only abortion, or the recent claim by some other Republican that Obama deliberately wanted the oil spill in order to pass a carbon tax, or Inhof’s claim that global warming is a fraud, or, or, or, or… It would be easy enough to continue this tirade with example after example after example, but the idiocy I have come to expect from Republicans has reached such a predictable and epidemic level I no longer even listen or watch, nor do I understand why the media keep reporting this utter nonsense. I have no idea what idiocy is actually coming from Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, and the other destructive hate-mongers as I have never listened to any of them in the first place and do not ever listen to them now. But whatever it is, you can be sure it is idiocy personified, the ultimate idiocy, the grandfather of idiocy, idiocy so profound you might believe it is a result of weird extra-terrestrially communications coming through the diseased minds of reincarnated extinct hyenas drunk on fermented bananas.

LKBIQ:
The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

TILT:
In some cultures having a singing cricket in the house is said to bring good fortune.

The Man Who Loved China - book

The Man Who Loved China, by Simon Winchester (Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)

I have always thought that on a per capita basis Britain produces more genuine eccentrics than any other country. I still think so. In any case, the subject of this book, Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, certainly qualifies. A distinguished Cambridge Professor of Biology at an unusually young age, Joseph Needham was also (like several British scholars of his time) a socialist/communist free-thinker, who was also engaged in a “modern marriage” to a somewhat older woman who was also a distinguished scientist, while at the same time openly maintaining a lovely Chinese mistress, also a scientist, in a comfortable ménage a trois, and at the same time remained an unabashed promiscuous lover of women wherever found (in spite of his apparent heightened heterosexuality he was an early defender of Gays). He was also a gymnosophist (I didn’t know what it was either, look it up). But Joseph Needham was also a brilliant scientist who by age 31 published his three-volume book, Chemical Embryology, that established his reputation as an unusually serious and gifted scholar. He also was fluent in seven languages, including Polish, and was working on Mandarin Chinese, being tutored at first by his Lover who was also responsible for creating his abiding interest in China.

This is an absolutely fascinating book, partly because of the eccentric Needham and some of the other characters he encountered in China, but also because of what he was to discover there. Needham was flown into China (with some difficulty) in 1943 as an official representative of the British government. This was, of course, at the height of the Chinese/Japanese war. His instructions were to aid Chinese scientists in any way he could, learn as much as he could about the situation and the Chinese, and also try to promote British/Chinese relations. He obviously had been picked for this task because he was capable in the Chinese language as well as being a distinguished scientist. During his four years in China he traveled widely, even into the most remote areas of the country, and collected massive amounts of data on Chinese history and science, including many ancient texts on a virtually infinite number of subjects. Many if not most of the important Chinese scientists were forced to take refuge in the hinterlands and suffered from a lack of scientific equipment and other supplies. Needham had the authority to order their much-needed supplies and have them flown in which was, of course, a boon for their scattered war industries.

Needham did fall in love with China, but it was what he learned about Chinese history and science that was to astound both him and the West. It had long been assumed, by the ethnocentric and paternalistic West that China was a more-or-less backward nation that had little in the way of science or technology and was far inferior to Europe on that score. It was true that at that time China did appear to be far behind the West, but Needham discovered that China had pioneered in science and technology far ahead of the West, having invented not only gunpowder, but hundreds of other important inventions sometimes a thousand years before they were known to Europe. These were not minor innovations and included the first printed book (AD 868, before Gutenberg), paddle-wheel ships and boats (AD 418), calipers (AD 9), cast iron (5th century BC), chess (4th century BC), coinage (9th century BC), magnetic needle compass (AD 1088), paper (300 BC), the stirrup (AD 300, a much more important innovation than you might think), and literally hundreds of other important things. The author presents a list of these various inventions and discoveries that runs to 11 pages.

When Needham returned to England he began work on his magnum opus, Science and Civilization in China, which eventually ran to more than 24 detailed volumes. This achievement has been compared to the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary and resulted in fame and awards galore. Needham fell into disgrace for a time because of his sympathy with the Chinese Communists. He was lured there and duped into agreeing that the U.S. had used biological warfare when they had not. Eventually it was revealed that he had been tricked by the Russians into believing something that was not so and thus regained his reputation. Needham was one of those unusual individuals with an interest in virtually everything. It was this scientific curiosity above and beyond his expertise in biology that allowed him to achieve this comprehensive history of all forms of science in China. There were a few critics who argued that he was not a trained historian nor was he truly an expert in all fields. His achievement was so massive these perhaps jealous claims eventually just fell by the wayside. There are some who will argue that he became such an enthusiastic sinologist that he may have exaggerated Chinese achievements. The data to prove his claims now occupies at least two rooms at Cambridge and as a resource has still not been exhausted.

There arose an obvious question: Why did China, who pioneered so much science and technology so early, seem to stop at about the 16th century, just about the same time it began to flourish in Europe? This became known as “Needham’s question,” and to this day there has been no completely satisfactory answer. It does appear, however, that after this long hiatus China is back once again in the forefront of scientific and technological discovery. It is well to consider carefully a giant sign at the entrance to the city of Jiuquan: “Without Haste. Without Fear. We Conquer the World.”

Simon Winchester has a genuine talent for writing fascinating books, such as The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and many others. This one is, I think, one of the best. I heartily recommend it.

The Mouth that Roars

Boyfriends pays more attention
to his Shiba Inu than her, she tapes it
upside down on refrigerator.

I don’t know why I should bother even mentioning this but as it has upset me somewhat I cannot resist. If you look on the internet you can actually find people who believe that Sarah Palin could become the Republican nominee for President in 2012. You can also find others who regard this as an impossibility, but still others who insist that no one knows and it could possibly happen. This possibility I find both frightening and depressing, but given that George W. Bush made it to the Presidency I fear anything might happen. Personally, I believe this would be proof of a Republican death wish, but there are obviously others who think it might be fine.

How can this be? Here is a woman plucked out of relative obscurity by John McCain, who hungered for the Presidency so greatly he was willing to sell his country under the bus with this strange selection of a running mate. It’s true she was Governor of a small (in population) state, with a citizenry probably more interested in their next moose kill than who was governor, but this was not a serious prerequisite for the potential Presidency of the U.S. Having thus obtained some notoriety she quickly gave up being Governor for the far more important and lucrative book and lecture circuit. Now she has become the mouth that roars, and it roars almost non-stop these days. Remember, this was a woman who thought Africa was a country, who suggested that because she could see Russia from Alaska that constituted foreign policy experience, could not answer even the most basic questions put to her by interviewers, and quickly proved to be completely unqualified for the position of Vice President, let alone President. I do not believe she is unusually stupid, but there is no doubt she is seriously ignorant of basic things one would need to know to become President. She seems to know virtually nothing of Foreign Policy, not much more about how our government actually works, and is basically a kind of religious wacko (the MSM tend not to dwell on this). Some say she is just in it for the money, which she is certainly raking in at a steady pace and no doubt laughing all the way to the bank. Others say she is serious about the Presidency, and of course the truth is no one seems to know for certain what she’s about (I’m not certain even she knows what she’s about at the moment, except that it really pays very well). She has apparently surrounded herself with advisors who tell her what to say and now has the temerity to actually challenge the President at every opportunity, not only on foreign policy but on economics, health care, immigration, and other topics as well. She has, it seems, become an instant authority on things she really knows little or nothing about. This is, to me at least, utterly ridiculous, and anyone who believes she is Presidential material is even more ridiculous. But such people actually do exist. There are, it seems, a few Republicans who think she is completely unqualified also, but the lunatic fringe has been culling them and their voices have virtually disappeared. In other words, the lunatics, egged on incessantly by the big talk-show lunatics, are attempting to take over the asylum. I guess these people are not content with the almost irreparable damage done to the country by Bush/Cheney, they want to repeat it in spades. Do not forget the words of our great sage, H. L. Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

President Obama has apparently given in to Israel again. He seems to not realize that Bibi speaks always with a forked tongue and has no serious desire for peace or a Palestinian state. So Obama says we will never do anything to harm Israel and at the same time promises the Palestinians a state. Can the Palestinians be given a state without in some way harming Israel (at least by reclaiming some of their stolen land and water)? Obama, too, has a forked tongue, and as long as the U.S. uncritically supports Israel there can never be peace in the Middle East. Israel wants the question of Jerusalem to be left until the very last during negotiations. Of course this means that no matter what is agreed upon previously it can all be undone at the last minute by Israel. The difficult decisions should be made first, they will not get any easier at the end. Their position is disingenuous at best and potentially outright sabotage.

LKBIQ:
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell

TILT:
The Chinese invented the stirrup in 300 A.D.

"Defense Budget"

Man holds mother hostage
at gunpoint for refusing
to iron his clothes.

There are rumblings at last about our bloated “Defense Budget.” Barney Frank and Ron Paul have together put together a bill that would presumably cut this shameful waste substantially. Don’t bet too much that anything much will happen. The defense budget is not really all about defense. First of all we don’t have really very much to defend against, mainly a few terrorists out of the billions of people that inhabit the earth. There is nothing on the horizon that I can see that could possibly defend or justify our spending more than all the rest of the world combined on the military. As near as I can see our military/industrial/political complex is basically a scheme for converting taxpayer money into profits for our largest corporations. It is a circular kind of potentially never-ending process guaranteed to insure that money will be systematically and regularly transferred from one very large group of people to a smaller but more powerful group. Every year we pour more money into the defense budget through our annual Congressional budget process. The companies and corporations that receive this money make enormous profits, part of which they return to the Congresspersons who made these profits possible, thus guaranteeing that the same thing will happen over again. It’s really potentially better than a Ponzi scheme because Ponzi schemes eventually have to end when new suckers can no longer be found. The military/industrial/political complex has managed to create a never-ending supply of suckers called taxpayers, most of whom apparently believe we are in constant danger from someone or other and although they grumble about paying taxes have been taught to believe the problem has to do with social security or medicare or other entitlements, rather than the obscene and unnecessary military waste, clever, no? However, it may be the case that, like Ponzi, this clever scheme is also about to run its course for the simple reason that we cannot realistically sustain it much longer short of bankruptcy or worse. You don’t have to think too carefully to understand there is little or no rationale for our 15,000 troops in Okinawa, our bases in Germany and other European nations, and so forth. It’s all part of the same scam. You also don’t have to think very hard to understand that all that wasted money would go a long way towards fixing our decaying infrastructure, educational system, medical care, and so forth, including rebuilding our economy and producing more jobs. The Frank/Paul bill probably won’t get very far but it will at least focus some attention where it belongs. Getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan would certainly go a long way towards solving our budgetary crisis, perhaps that, too, will come to pass.

From the ridiculously absurd to the absurdly ridiculous, I cannot believe there is anything to this rumor that Sarah Palin is going to replace Richard Steele as RNC Chairman, clowns are not often replaced with mindless bimbos. But if it has to be, bring it on, nothing would please me more. Republicans seem to believe they are going to make huge gains in the elections later this year. I find this mysterious to say the least. Just what is it that Republicans have done that would justify their return to power. Remember, they are the ones that go us into this terrible mess in the first place, they have no program for our country other than their usual lower taxes and smaller government credo. Their current leaders are a collection of pretty extreme “crazies” like Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Backmann, Hannity, O’Reilly, and so on. Even their senior Senators are little better: McConnell, McCain, Hatch, and the mental midgets from some of the Southern states who seem to believe it is still 1860. Even their Governors are a strange lot, like Bobby Jindal who just signed a bill allowing people to carry their guns into church. Now there’s an idea whose time has come! It’s a party that wants to keep on drilling no matter what, that wants to keep the unemployed, unemployed, to privatize social security, reverse the health care bill, and keep us permanently at war. If American voters go for this stuff you will know that our country is hopeless. All will surely be lost. And if by some strange aberration they should win in 2012 you won’t have to be nostalgic for a moron in the White House because there will surely be another one.

LKBIQ:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
Ernest Benn

TILT:
Przewalski’s Horse is the only true wild horse still alive today.

Wall Street Donations

Negotiations for sex
break down when she
flashes smile of rotten teeth.

It appears that Wall Street has now begun giving by far the most money to the Republican Party. I find this most interesting in several ways. First, it just confirms what we have always known, Wall Street has no interest whatsoever in the American public or what might be good for the country. They support Republicans only because they believe (know) that Republicans will do anything they can for the fat cats on the market. There can’t possibly be any other reason for supporting Republicans. They apparently gave quite a lot of money to Obama and some Democrats because Democrats won control of the White House, Senate, and House. The fact that they have now shifted back to supporting Republicans I find a positive sign in that it indicates to me that Obama must be doing something right. It does, however, serve to point out a disturbing paradox in our society. That is, when Wall Street (and the corporations) do well it must mean that the working class is not doing so well. This is so because in order to make money and do well businesses have to have cheap labor. So when they do well it follows that the working class does not do well. For many Americans this poses a rather strange dilemma because their retirement money is invested in Wall Street and when Wall Street thrives labor does not. Thus if you have money in the market you would like to see it do well, but if you believe in fair and just wages for workers, you are caught in this peculiar bind, or so it seems to me.

Mitch McConnell has now announced he will not support the Elena Kagan nomination for the Supreme Court. Orin Hatch has done the same and so has John McCain. What a crock of BS! They know she is almost certainly going to be confirmed so why not get a little publicity and reinforce your Republican credentials by opposing something you know is going to happen anyway. Hatch has said something to the effect that “she doesn’t come up to my standards.” I should think this would be more properly rendered as “she doesn’t come down to my standards.” In any case it seems obvious to me they will vote no because Obama nominated her, and they have to live up to their standard of voting no for anything Obama wants.

And speaking of playing politics, how about the Republicans on unemployment benefits and jobs? They are obviously willing to sacrifice American families and their well-being in their single-minded quest to regain power. There simply is no other explanation for all of their “no” votes. It’s really quite simple, the worse unemployment is, leading up to the elections, the more likely Democrats can be blamed and the greater chance people will vote Republican. Cynical, yes, purely political, yes, disgusting, yes, unethical and immoral, I think so, but those concepts don’t seem to apply to Republicans anymore. Who cares if a few more families go hungry and lose their homes, it’s all so Republicans and Wall Street can continue to do God’s work.

I truly admire Rachel Maddow and I think she has the best show on TV. I am not convinced, however, that her trip to Afghanistan was really necessary. I guess maybe something will be gained by it, but I have yet to hear anything that she probably could not have said without visiting there. Most everyone knows the official story by now, we have to train the Afghan army and police so they can take over when we leave because otherwise the Taliban will take over. And yes, we are wasting billions, much of which is being shipped out of the country by various warlords and politicians. And yes, the whole enterprise is stupid even beyond belief, but we have to do it (because, implicitly at least, the Afghans are unable to manage their own affairs). The real reason I believe we are pursuing this is that we are determined to have a government that is obedient to us and no one else. This seems to be our goal all over the Middle East, we have to maintain our control and influence at all costs. I’m pretty certain this is what Iran is all about, it has nothing much to do with whether the Iranians develop a (mostly useless) bomb or not, but, rather, with keeping them from becoming too much of a power in the Middle East (hence the constant talk of regime change). It is very similar to the situation in Britain after WWII when Churchill said he would not preside over the demise of the British Empire. We cannot have a President who will preside over the loss of our “empire,” even though it will almost surely bankrupt us if we continue, which seems to me to be pretty much inevitable unless we come to our senses very soon.

LKBIQ:
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Sir Winston Churchill

TILT:
There are nearly 100 species of lemurs.

BS

Ninety-one year old widow
lives with the corpses of her
husband and twin sister.

I like to think there is a point where BS doesn’t work anymore. And I also like to think we may be rapidly approaching that point. General Petraeus has returned to Afghanistan vowing that we are going to “win.” This has to be BS of the very highest order. It has been widely conceded by many in the “know” that we are not going to win in Afghanistan. At least we are not going to win militarily. Of course it depends upon what one means by win, and so far no one, including Petraeus, has ever specified what winning would mean in Afghanistan. As near as I can tell winning in Afghanistan means something like not losing. That is, if we get some kind of stalemate we can declare we won and maybe actually withdraw from that unfortunate country that is not really a country anyway. The world’s greatest and only superpower cannot ever admit it lost a “war” to a bunch of ragtag Afghans armed with small arms even if it did. There has never been the slightest doubt we would “lose” in Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires” for hundreds of years. It is understandable, I think, why Bush/Cheney started this “war” as they wished to engage in permanent hostilities everywhere for as long as possible (have to feed t he military/industrial/political machine after all), but I will never understand why Obama insisted on accelerating it rather than giving it up (can’t admit defeat, I guess). Anyway, you can rest assured that anything you hear about Afghanistan is BS, pure and simple.

The BS we hear about Afghanistan is relatively benign compared to what came out of the White House today. President Obama met with Benjamin Netanayu and at the end of their meeting said there was no rift between Washington and Israel, that Netanyahu was interested in peace, and that progress was being made. I don’t know what actually transpired at this meeting but I certainly recognize BS when I see it. Netanyahu has made it quite clear for years that he is not interested in peace, does not want to see a Palestinian state, and prefers the status quo where the Palestinians are broken up into small groups with no chance of ever having a viable state. He has also made it clear that from his point of view the question of Jerusalem is non-negotiable, it belongs in its entirety to Israel, which makes the possibility of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians is impossible to begin with. And even as talks continue the Israelis continue to build more and more illegal houses and settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank. You might as well try negotiating with a Gaboon Viper as with Netanyahu. This story is BS at such an exalted level as to leave one gasping for breath.

Of course everything we hear about the Oil disaster in the Gulf is BS, and has been from the very beginning. It is quite clear that BP has lied repeatedly and continues to lie, and there is little doubt that the Obama administration has done the same. First it was a mere 1000 barrels a day, then 5000, then 15,000, and then, and then, and then, we don’t even know now how much is leaking or if it will ever stop. Don’t even bet that the drilling of new lines is going to work, it may leak until there is no more oil left to leak and the Gulf will be so contaminated it will never recover. But not to worry, as soon as we figure out what went wrong we’ll start drilling again. This is BS as an art form.

Once again there is a claim that Obama was not born in the U.S. This is said to be true because of
who said it (I know not who) and because he/she has absolute proof there is no real birth certificate for Obama. I don’t have any idea what this is all about, who is behind it, or what it is they are hoping to gain by it, but I can tell you for certain it is going to turn out to be, once again, BS of the highest order. These morons pursue Obama like he is a runaway slave, too stupid to admit they are simply baying at the moon. This too will pass.

I love the Rachel Maddow show. I think she is the best thing on television and the only one with the nerve to confront lies head on. But I’m not terribly pleased with her showboating in Afghanistan. I see little reason for her to be there, squired around here and there for little reason other than to show she is there. There is, after all, only one thing to say about the “war” in Afghanistan, it is absolutely stupid, pointless, unnecessary, and ridiculous, and we should get out as soon as possible, or even sooner. Anything else you hear about it is BS. If there is any reason for continuing this farce it is being kept a closely guarded secret. It’s probably very simple, President Obama does not want to be, indeed, cannot be, the only President to admit to losing a “war” (the U.S. simply does not lose). What are a few more lives when it comes to Presidential and national pride. But “Pride goes before a fall,” as we have been told since childhood. Too bad we were all hiding in caves when wisdom was passed out.

LKBIQ:
There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
Robertson Davies

TILT:
Badger dens are called setts, badger colonies are called clans.

Nostalgia

Woman arrested for assault
after attacking her drunk
boyfriend with a weed-whacker.

A bit of nostalgia struck this evening as I was watching some cooking show (actually my wife was watching it, I was innocent) that featured someplace, I think in Virginia, where there still exists one of those old-fashioned drive in restaurants where you are served on a tray in your car. It made me wonder why those places virtually disappeared. You would think that with even more cars than ever before, and fast food joints everywhere, there would continue to be a demand for such places. I guess they have just been replaced by the drive-through phenomenon. Too bad, I used to love those girls on the roller skates rolling up to your car and taking your order and all that. No doubt drive-through is cheaper and cuts down on the number of employees and stuff. But we could still use the jobs. Ah, efficiency, profit, and all that. I guess it makes sense, but it’s just not the same.

Similarly, I miss those old drive-in movies. Remember, you could load up your kids in their pajamas and take them to the drive-in. If they fell asleep in the car it was no big deal. And you could get popcorn and candy and drinks (could even bring your own bottle if it suited you) and sit quietly in the privacy of your automobile enjoying what was happening on the really big screen. Or, if you weren’t married and didn’t have kids, you could take your girlfriend and just cuddle all you wanted in the privacy of your own comfortable box. You didn’t have to be in the least intimidated by the rest of the audience. Obviously such an institution could not survive against television and things like Netflix that allows you to do the same thing in the privacy of your own home, be it apartment or house. But it’s just not the same.

What I truly miss, however, is billiards. I mean real billiards, played on a table with no pockets and only three balls made of ivory. It was a gentleman’s game. In our town the city fathers came every day during their noon hour to play billiards. We all sat around and watched. It was a game of angles, of geometry, of real talent. They all had fancy cue sticks decorated with real ivory and mother-of-pearl and there was a huge wooden case where these valuable sticks were placed while not in use. If you could find one of these cases nowadays it would probably cost as much as a house, no plywood, plastic, and staples in those days when craftsmanship still prevailed. The houses of the wealthy often had billiard rooms where the men would join to play, smoke their cigars, and make conversation. I believe that Thomas Jefferson had a secret billiard room in his famous home (billiards was regarded as not entirely respectable by some). Billiards, real billiards, has all but disappeared, even though people still play pool (often called billiards) but it is such a washed out version of what used to be it is barely recognizable. Most bars have some kind of pool table that you have to stick a quarter or two into in order to play, there are no pockets from which to retrieve balls so what you can play, and how, is very limited. It is such a poor imitation of what was once a really great game it reminds you of the death of civilization. Unlike drive-ins and drive-in restaurants, the demise of which is understandable, I do not understand why or how billiards came to disappear. Even now you may find a pool table in a private home but it is highly unlikely you will find a billiard table, and you certainly won’t find ivory billiard balls, now poorly replaced by plastic. It’s just not the same.

One area that I think has improved is automobile travel, but only in the sense that automobiles nowadays are so much superior to the older models. But in the “old days” when you went on an auto trip you usually had to bring your own food in a picnic basket or something as there were few restaurants along the way, the trips were longer because the roads were not as good, and it was much more of an adventure than it is today. And you could and did stop by streams and rivers where you could drink the water without fear of contamination. Indeed, I have to this day a special silver cup in a leather case that was used for the purpose of enjoying fresh mountain water. There were few if any roadside stands and travelers were pretty much on their own. It’s just not the same. But I must say it’s a relief not to be changing tires so often.

Most of all, I guess, I am nostalgic for the time when we were not engaged in permanent wars. We fought the so-called “Good War,” but even then we had to be pretty much forced into it. There was a clear cut reason for it and for our involvement and when it was over it was over, there was a winner and a loser, and there was no doubt which was which. We at least pretended to tend to our own business and not meddle so much in the affairs of others. Now, of course, we meddle constantly, everywhere, and depend upon permanent (even illegal and unconstitutional) wars to fuel our militaristic economy and sustain our corporations in the manner to which they have become accustomed. There were even two distinct political parties, both interested in promoting the welfare of the citizens and our country in general. Alas, it’s just not the same.

LKBIQ:
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
Samuel Goldwyn

TILT:
Opossums have more teeth than any other land mammal.

My Life with the Taliban - book

My Life With the Taliban, by Abdul Salam Zaeef (Columbia University Press, 2010).

This autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef was edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, writers and researchers permanently stationed in Kandahar. They were helped over the almost four years it took to prepare this account by a number of translators who translated the work from the original Pashtu.

This is an autobiographical account of the life of Abdul Salam Zaeef. As representative of that genre it leaves much to be desired. There is far too little detail about all of Zaeef’s interesting life and you are left with wanting to know much more than you are told. I suspect this is so because the motive for writing this book was not really to tell about Zaeef’s life, but, rather, to put his life in the context of the ongoing Afghan struggles with both Russia and the U.S., to explain the origins and behavior of the Taliban, and to express his outrage at the treatment he received at the hands of American forces.

Zaeef remembers little of his childhood. Although his father was educated, he was born into a relatively poor family living in a small village with no running water, electricity, or conveniences. The family moved while he was too young to fully understand why. His mother died when he was still a child and he was raised by relatives. It was the case that during his childhood Afghanistan was at peace, both males and females attended college, conditions were relatively progressive. Even miniskirts and Hippies could be found in Kandahar. Abdul Zaeef’s life was mostly uneventful until at the age of fifteen he ran away from home to fight against the Russians who were occupying his country. Here again there is little detail, but it is clear that he was a success in the military and eventually rose a bit in the ranks. After the Russians were defeated he returned home to resume his (mostly) religious studies. However, with the Russians gone, chaos quickly broke out across Afghanistan as different warlords and others attempted to claim land and control of various places. There was incessant fighting and killing on all sides. The situation was so bad it led to the formation of the Taliban, who vowed to take back control of the country. Many veterans of the Russian conflict joined together with still others and, after a time succeeded in restoring order to the country. As one of the first organizers of the Taliban group Zaeef was given various important positions which increased in importance as time passed. He was, at the time of 9/11, the Afghan Ambassador to Pakistan, a vitally important and sensitive post at that time as there was considerable animosity between the two countries. This became exacerbated as Pakistan elected to join with and support the Americans to the detriment of Afghanistan when the U.S. attacked their country in revenge for 9/11. It is quite clear from Zaeef’s account the Taliban did not initially arise and come to power to fight the United States. It is also clear by now they (understandably) do not want to be occupied and would like the U.S. to leave.

Zaeef says virtually nothing about the religious extremism of some of the Taliban, scarcely mentioning the strict behavior mandated for both males and females, and his own position on such matters is not expressed. He does indicate the position of women is decreed under Shari’a law and lets it go at that. He also does not discuss Shari’a law as such. But it is obvious from his account he is a dedicated Muslim, observes his prayers religiously, and is absolutely dedicated to its country and its independence.

As the “war” continued Zaeef became more and more critical of the Pakistan position and lost his Ambassadorship. Eventually the Pakistani authorities turned him over to the Americans where he was held for a time at Bagram and then for four years at Guantanamo. His account of his treatment at the hands of the U.S., however unpleasant, seems honest and straightforward. Perhaps I would not have believed it had I not seen the pictures from Abu Graib, and read the accounts of other released prisoners and their lawyers. I can truthfully say it makes me ashamed of my country. No, I should say it makes me ashamed of the Bush/Cheney administration in particular, war criminals that still go unpunished for their crimes against humanity. I am ashamed that such evil people were allowed to attain positions of such power in our country and institute and continue their criminal “pre-emptive” policies for so long.

If the book disappoints as an autobiography I believe it clearly succeeds at the job it seems to have been intended to do. The general account of this talented man’s life does give the reader a much better understanding of life in Afghanistan, the Taliban, Muslim dedication to their religion and country, and the shameful treatment they received at the hands of the U.S. It is also makes clear the Afghans are never going to be defeated in their own country. They are tired of the incessant fighting and killing and want the whole (by now) ridiculous charade to be over so they can once again be independent and manage their own affairs. For anyone with an interest in Afghanistan and the “war” that has now raged there longer than any other war in American history, this is definitely a book not to be overlooked.

This “freedom” put a proud people in chains
And turned free men into slaves
“Independence” made us weak
And slaughtered us
In the name of kindness
This is democracy by the whip
And the fear of chains
With a whirlwind at its core

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef
(written in Guantanamo)

Sharing

Vietnamese woman tests
for virginity by looking for
red spot behind the ears.

I have been thinking of the concept of “sharing.” Most children in most (if not all) societies are taught from a very early age to share things with others, and for the most part they do. In most small scale societies where community, tribal, or clan organizations prevail, sharing is the most important value. If one person eats, all eat, if one person goes hungry, all go hungry. Typically there are well-known provisions for sharing, the successful hunter or farmer gets a certain share and others receive shares as well. Those who do not share with others are ostracized and can even be driven out of their communities. In some societies, when times are so difficult there is simply not enough food to share, someone, usually an elderly person, will be sacrificed, or even volunteer to die so the remainder can live. This is itself a form of sharing.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, as societies grow larger and more complex, the concept of sharing virtually disappears entirely from human behavior. Larger polities for the most part do not share with one another. There are a few exceptions as when two or more states agree to share water, or large cities agree to share expensive equipment, and so on, but sharing is not characteristic of cultures once they reach a certain level. This is often expressed by saying that morality tends to be limited to the “in-group” and does not extend beyond certain boundaries. In some small-scale societies, clan-based ones, for example, it is said that morality does not extend to anyone outside the clan, and this seems to be pretty much true. Even within large polities, where relationships tend to be contractual rather than personal, as in the U.S., the concept of sharing can even be denigrated and referred to in an extremely derogatory manner as “socialism.” But socialism does not have to imply that everyone shares exactly in the same amount of whatever there is to share. Social democracies have rules for sharing, mostly of wealth, that permit some to have more than others, but also insist that no one should go entirely without. The U.S. does not have very clear-cut rules for sharing and whatever rules there are can be circumvented or ignored, the result being no limits on how much some can have and no limits on how little someone can have. This is not the subject of this discussion, however. I have in mind an even more pie-in-the sky theme.

Let us agree that with the demise of the Soviet Union the United States was/is the only remaining superpower. As such, the U.S. has more power and influence than any other nation on earth. What could have, or might have happened had the U.S. decided to use this power and influence to improve the lives of all people on earth? If instead of wasting trillions of dollars on fighting “wars” to control the Middle East and the rest of the world, we had used our power and influence to share the earth’s limited resources and help others to develop their full potential. How much oil could we have purchased for the money we have wasted killing people for it? How much better would our international relations be had we helped these nations develop instead of ravishing them for their resources? How much more peaceful would life on earth be had we not taken this road of death and destruction? How much better off would our own country be had we spent our money on education, superstructure, medical care, and looking after each other? With 5% of the earth’s population, but using 25% of its resources, would we have been seriously harmed to rein in our consumption and helped others to increase their consumption a bit?

I believe these things could have been done had we not assumed our moral, racial, and religious superiority, had we treated the rest of the world with dignity and respect and genuinely tried to help them, rather than pretending to bring them democracy at the point of a gun and insisting they had to live precisely as we do. Of course it is true that other cultures have customs we do not like or approve of, but such changes cannot be forced on people overnight (if at all). And it is not as if we are morally and ethically pure and they are not. There are societies in which there are no orphans, no child abuse, no beggars, little or no crime, and no homeless. Of course these societies are generally not always regarded as “civilized.” You don’t like the way women are treated in some Muslim countries, read back in American and European history a few years. Laws for women were much more restrictive than for men, women were widely regarded as less intelligent, less competent, and even to this day are paid less than men for the same amount of work. Similarly, they are not fairly represented in either business or government. Even female suffrage is a relatively recent phenomenon. You don’t like the way boys are treated in Afghanistan, think of the epidemic of pedophilia in the U.S. and countries in Europe. And among Western-European societies the U.S. is virtually alone in maintaining the death penalty. And we probably should not even consider such things as torture and other war crimes. Besides, our hypocrisy on such matters is shameless, we don’t express any outrage over the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. We treat Cuba as a rogue country but cozy up to China. We deal with dictators all over the world but regard some dictators as worse than others (those who don’t cooperate with us).

In short, we could have, with all our power and influence, taken a quite different path. How different it would have been had we selected the High Road. Bush/Cheney deliberately chose the low road, the “dark side.” They did not elect to share, but, as all greedy capitalists, to exploit the rest of the world, in this case to maintain the fiction of “American exceptionalism,.” and "our way of life." Anything else would have meant sharing the earth and its resources with ("undeserving and inferior") others. How unthinkable! BothBush and Obama could have seized the moment, but failed.

LKBIQ:
Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
Cicero

TILT:
There are more than 250 known species of bumble bees.

No Joy

“Duke of Germany” arrested
for breaking into a house
and taking a shower.

“And here we have Idaho, winning her way to” -- shame. It has recently been announced that Idaho now ranks 50th among the states in the amount of money spent on education. No doubt this is a source of pride in Boise where our ignorant Republican legislators are making sure they can stay that way. Hey, what was good enough for Pappy is good enough for me. Too bad there is such little demand these days for harness and cannon ball makers.

Boehner, you remember him, the minority leader who looks like he must have been dipped in henna, has just accused President Obama of being childish and whining a lot. I’m not completely certain Boehner knows who Obama is, he doesn’t seem to know much about anything else. Boehner criticizing Obama is truly like an ant taking on a nuclear bomb. Oh well, Boehner comes across as relatively sane when compared to many of the other Republicans these days. You know, the ones showing off their prowess with machine guns, others wanting to pay their doctors with chickens, still others apologizing to BP for asking them to be responsible for their total irresponsibility, and don’t forget those who are threatening to bring down our government with their 2nd amendment rights, doing away with Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of civil rights, abortion, the EPA, the Department of Education, the United Nations, Federal Reserve, unemployment benefits, rescinding health care, and also demand we keep on drilling no matter what. It’s going to be an interesting few months until the elections. This motley collection of raving lunatics actually believes they might even recapture control of the House and Senate. And you know what, they might, the rest of us seem to show signs of becoming just as bonkers as they are.

This must be at least importantly the result of one of our strongest and most admirable values, free speech, turning out to be one of our most important vulnerabilities. After years of virtually unchallenged hate speech and non-stop lies from right-wing radio, television, and newspapers, what would one expect? When hate merchants like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Malkin, and others go basically unopposed day after day it was probably inevitable that (1) whatever intelligence there was in the public has probably significantly eroded, and (2) our country has become divided to the point of relative helplessness. Nothing can be accomplished because the goals have changed. Where once our government attempted to look after public affairs in the best interest of the citizens, it now looks after the best interests of the huge corporations that control the purse strings and buy whatever outcomes they wish. This is not a battle between Republicans and Democrats, or between the Left and the Right, or right and wrong, it is primarily a battle between the Haves and the Have-nots. The Haves are winning by a large margin. It is doubtful the Have-nots can make a comeback. As someone (I have no idea who) once said, “Marx didn’t anticipate the poor could be bought off with a six-pack of beer and a long-legged whore on Saturday night.”

And so it is at mid-year of the 10th year of the 21st century. We seem to have abandoned progress and are, in fact, backsliding, devolving instead of evolving, regressing instead of moving forward. We still have those, even some with the audacity to run for President, who do not believe in evolution. Some are arguing about things that were supposedly settled long ago. The relative age of the earth, for example, was pretty much settled by the 1860’s, but some are still arguing about it. They are not arguing about the earth being 3 or 4 billion years old instead of perhaps 8 or 9 billion years, or even longer, they are arguing the difference between 6000 years and several billion years! This is absolutely shameful. And these same people believe people existed contemporaneously with dinosaurs. They apparently truly believe this utterly absurd nonsense. And the media actually treats them seriously. This has been brought about by the very people who have prided themselves on not funding education, who are not interested in academics, learning, or even books, and who pride themselves on not being “pointy-headed intellectuals.” They acquire their abysmal ignorance through the likes of Beck and Limbaugh and are proud of it. Having brought our fine country to its knees, they will apparently not rest until it’s finally destroyed.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.
Ernest Thayer

Paternalistic Naivete

Princess Abby, Chihuahua with
abnormal back and legs, one eye closed,
wins ugliest dog contest in California.

Beyond the fact that I believe the “war” in Afghanistan has no justification whatsoever, and the continuation of it makes no sense, there is a strange aura of the surreal that seems to hang over it, I guess you might describe it as a kind of paternalistic naïvete. That is, we are said to be training an Afghan army that will be able to defend itself and the country. It is also sometimes said that the Afghans just don’t seem to learn, they are illiterate, desert, and are unable to do what is required. They sometimes refuse to fight. Given that Afghanistan is known as “the graveyard of empires,” and the Afghans have defeated everyone who attempted to conquer them, it seems odd to me they can’t be trained to be soldiers and policemen. This goes along with the apparent belief that the Afghans cannot govern themselves and they need to be taught how to do so. Personally, I believe all this is nonsense. First, Afghanistan has managed to exist for thousands of years and have successfully repulsed every enemy. They are well-known to be fierce and successful fighters. Second, whatever you may think of the Taliban and Shari’a, do not forget the Taliban successfully organized themselves and restored order to the country after the chaos that ensued when the Russians were driven out. They did not come to power as an anti-American organization and were not, at least at first, our enemies. This was quite a remarkable feat and it implies, to me at least, they are perfectly capable of managing their own affairs. Why we are now fighting them I do not know, they merely want us out of their country. If Afghanistan does not want to be ruled by the Taliban I doubt they will be.

I strongly suspect the so-called “failure” of the Afghan army has to do with the fact they do not wish to fight against their brother Afghans, and they would prefer us to leave and leave them alone. As a tribal and clan-based society they have their own political organization, do not understand democracy and do not want it imposed upon them. Actually, in a sense they do understand democracy, as when the Taliban formed they managed to agree on who the leaders would be and swore allegiance to them. I don’t know that they actually voted as such, but they apparently had little trouble organizing themselves and choosing leaders. I think it is unlikely they are willing to fight very hard to impose a system of government they are not interested in and do not seem to want (or even need).

To acknowledge the political and military success of the Taliban does not mean you have to accept the tenets of Shari’a law, especially when it comes to the treatment of women and the rather extreme rules that are imposed on everyone. But no amount of military force by the U.S. or U.N. is going to change these customs very quickly if at all. I certainly do not approve of their extremely fundamental views, their treatment of women and sometimes boys, the stonings, and whatever. But then, I don’t approve of the treatment of women by some Christian groups either, and full equality between the sexes still does not exist here in the U.S. There are, of course, many problems in Afghanistan, but they are Afghan problems, not ours. We should withdraw as soon as possible, promise aid if and when they ask for it, and help them in any way we can. We have come very close to fulfilling bin Laden’s dream of bankrupting ourselves, enough is more than enough. The military/industrial/political dream of an endless “war,” and our attempt at empire, are about to run their course. We can’t afford it any longer, even if we sacrifice Social Security, Medicare, Public Schools, infrastructure, and everything else that helps make life worth living.

I don’t know what all the fuss about the Gulf is about. Geez, it’s not as if the whole planet is being ruined. Obviously drilling for oil is more important than life itself, and think of all those suffering Oil executives and Congresspersons whose livelihood depends on it. Of course there are all those fisherman, shrimpers, hotelkeepers, bartenders, maids, small businesses, and what-have-you, but who really cares about them. There are always unemployment benefits – or at least there were for a while.

LKBIQ:
“To work in government positions means a life surrounded by corruption and injustice, and therein is found the misery of mankind.”
Abdul Salam Zaeef

TILT:
There are more than 300 distinct breeds of goats.

Who, What, Where, When, Why - story

The Supreme Court confirmation hearings are indeed vapid (thank goodness Kagan has a sense of humor). The Oil spill is growing worse by the minute and is going to continue getting worse for a very long time. The "war" in Afghanistan is unspeakably absurd. Republicans continue to block any attempts to better the lot of average citizens. Israel continues to colonize the West Bank and mistreat the Palestinians. I am so sick of the whole business I decided to just fool around. So here is another contribution to my collection of unfinished, unwanted, uncollected, unknown and unpublished short stories to be entitled simply, Encounters.

Who, What, When, Where, Why
A Short Story
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

Who would have been involved in what is still remembered and often recalled as the greatest fight ever witnessed in our little mining town was probably not only inevitable but in retrospect, entirely predictable. Although a relatively small community, the population was unusually diverse, with Italians, Germans, Finns, Frenchmen, Swedes, Irish, Norwegians, Slavs, and a few American Indians, all of whom arrived there by the lure of good paying jobs in the mines, mills, and forests that made up the economy of the aptly named,” Silver Valley.” In spite of this unusual diversity, mostly confined within one narrow, small valley, there was remarkably little conflict between these groups as such, but there were often fights between individual representatives of them, especially those who had acquired reputations.
One such individual was Victor Semenza. Some referred to him as “The Wop,” but with one exception no one ever addressed him as such to his face, for Victor Semenza was more than a Wop, he was a Super Wop, and was both gifted and without fear. Victor’s gift, or curse if you prefer, was that he knew how to hit people. Now you may think this ability is relatively common but it is not. Victor was apparently born to instinctively know that if you wanted to hit someone on the nose you did not aim for that feature but, rather, six inches behind the person’s head. Such a blow was devastating. It was a skill that most professional boxers have to learn and practice, with Victor it was perfectly natural. Victor acquired his reputation as a fighter in High School when, after a football game with our hated nearby rivals, it was believed that Victor had killed an opponent in a fight after the game. Such fights were common in those days. It was never proven that the teenager died because of Victor’s blows, but everyone believed he had. This followed and haunted Victor, and became even more complicated over time because of his physical appearance. He was small, never more than a welterweight at best. And he was a handsome Sicilian, with curly dark hair, an unmarked face, dark piercing brown eyes, beautiful olive skin, and the hands of an artist. His appearance unfortunately misled many into believing they could bully him, but at 27 years of age, and after many contests, Victor was still undefeated.
Victor’s challenger was Paddy O’Conner, as Irish as it was possible to be. He was what was often referred to as “Shanty Irish,” and could have been referred to as “Shant,” except that Paddy was even more pejorative, although I’m not certain people there realized it was a derogatory term. For all we knew, Paddy could have been his given name. Paddy was as homely as Victor was handsome, with pale white skin, sandy, slightly reddish hair, blue eyes that often twinkled with mischief, hard, heavily calloused hands that revealed a lifetime of work in the woods and mines, a muscular body as hard as a body could be, and an odd, wrinkled countenance, that made him appear older than he was. Two years older than Victor, he was blessed with a wonderful, engaging personality, a fine sense of humor, and was an extraordinary raconteur. Paddy’s reputation had been established while he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, building Forest Service camps and roads in the mountains surrounding our little town. The same size as Victor, he had dominated his peers, taking on all comers, including many much larger men. As lithe and strong as a panther he was also a champion arm-wrestler.

What happened between Victor and Paddy was not unusual given the ethos of the mining community. Our town was the county seat and the center of a rich mining and lumbering district. Most of the miners and lumberjacks were unmarried and spent most of their time in the mines and forests, coming in on week-ends for the recreation provided by the many bars, brothels, and gambling halls. Fights were commonplace and usually for no good reason, other than proving one’s merit and superiority over others, most often after a few drinks. Paddy and Victor did not know each other except by reputation. Neither of them were excessive drinkers, perhaps not willing to risk their reputations under adverse circumstances. But with two such champions in the same place at the same time the tension and the peer pressure became overwhelming. Paddy’s entourage began provoking him to challenge Victor, knowing that Victor was undefeated. “Come on, Paddy, you can beat that Wop, he ain’t as tough as they say.” As the evening progressed the urging became more intense, some began to subtly accuse Paddy of being afraid. “Look at that Dago bastard sittin’ there like a pretty boy,” they said, “You can take him easy Paddy,” and they could not stop making other even more provocative comments.
Victor, sitting at a table on the opposite side of the room, was unaware of what was happening with Paddy, simply enjoying the companionship of his friends and nursing a beer. When he rose to go to the bar to order another round of drinks, Paddy, goaded beyond his patience, and now having to prove himself, crowded in front of Victor and said, “Hey Wop, wait your turn, I was here first,” a challenge as unmistakable as it was false. Victor, experienced in such confrontations, ignored him and ordered beers for his friends. But as he turned to return to his table Paddy made the mistake of blocking his way and put his hand on Victor’s chest. When Victor tried to push it aside, Paddy grabbed his shirtfront, pulled him towards himself and attempted to land a punch. Victor had no choice but to return a punch. “Tiny,” the 300 pound Swiss, who owned and operated the bar and was bartending at the time, was almost instantaneously around the bar to separate the two and usher them outside. Fighting was never allowed inside the bar.

What ensued, while not entirely predictable, was not without precedent. As the two fighters started to exit through the front door, with Paddy in the lead, he suddenly turned and sucker-punched Victor who was somewhat constrained by the doorway. This was not regarded as unfair as it was a tactic often employed in barroom brawls. There were, of course, no Marquis of Queensbury rules in our town, but there were some widely recognized and accepted rules. You could not, for example, bang your opponents head on the floor or the sidewalk, kicking someone while down was forbidden, chairs, knives, clubs and brass knuckles were not allowed, and guns made the contest entirely outside the definition of an ordinary fight. What made this particular fight into something unusual is the fact that Victor fell backwards into the bar and Paddy fell on him, punching so viciously as to make it impossible to separate the two. Thus the fight continued inside the bar itself. Victor managed to throw the Irishman off and rose to his feet throwing his own punches. It appeared that Paddy was the stronger of the two. He grabbed Victor by the shirtfront and pulled him around with ease, attempting to punch him at the same time. But each time it appeared Paddy would control him, Victor would squirm away and wait for an opportunity. A crowd quickly gathered, even the card players in the back room stopped their games to watch, people were standing on chairs and on the sidelines urging their favorites on as the battle continued. Paddy was playing with him like a cat with a mouse, as he whirled him about, crashing him into chairs, the pool table and the walls. Finally, it looked like Victor might be doomed as he was seemingly unable to regain his balance and stood awkwardly, his nose and face bloodied, a cut over his left eye, his hands at his sides. But Paddy, exhausted by his efforts, made a careless mistake and relaxed his grip for an instant. Victor’s famous straight right hand shot out smashing bone and cartilage, blood gushed from Paddy’s broken nose, he fell heavily backwards to the ground, unconscious. It was over just like that. No one cheered, the entire bar was engulfed in a momentary silence, the room quickly cleared, the sport was over.

When Paddy regained his senses and rose to his feet, the two gladiators shook hands, and each held up the other’s arm as if they were both triumphant. It was not an unusual event. Such fights were common on Saturday nights, the opponents often didn’t even know each other, or have any particular grudges to bear. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other, nor was it really the Irish against the Italians, or the French against the Germans, or the Finns against the Russians. More often than not these Saturday night events featured fights between Missourians and non-Missourians. Missourians were disliked far more than either the Irish or Italians. Indeed, Missourians were regarded with utter contempt because once a battalion of soldiers from Missouri had been brought in as strikebreakers. The town never forgot or forgave.

Where the fight occurred was unusual in that ordinarily fighters were ordered outside into the alley or onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. Usually there was no damage to property or a mess to clean up. But in this case the barroom was spattered with blood, chairs had been broken, card games interrupted, and the pool table left far from level. Tiny was outraged at this violation of protocol but knew his chances of reimbursement were non-existent. It was just another cost of doing business and as he had plenty of that he simply stood with his arms crossed and stared glumly around the room. He knew that “Idaho,” the janitor, whose speech was badly garbled as a result of a similar fight, would clean it up before opening time the next morning.

Why the fight occurred was the topic of conversation for weeks, months, even years. And of course the accounts became increasingly confusing over time. Some thought Victor had it coming, for reasons they never made clear. Some admitted that Paddy had been provoked by his friends into insulting Victor. Still others claimed there had been bad blood between the two for years but offered no evidence for such a claim. Paddy was described as a hothead who was always looking for a fight, some said Victor was to blame for having tried to stare the Irishman down. It was even suggested that Paddy was jealous of Victor’s good looks and wanted to change them. There was for a time even a rumor the two had fought over a woman, but everyone soon recognized the absurdity of such a notion as no one had ever seen Paddy with a woman. In fact, they fought simply because they were men, and men at that time and in that context, fought, especially if they had reputations to defend. Victor was undefeated, that was challenge enough. It was the argument over who was really the best man that continued most often over the ensuing years. Many thought Paddy was clearly the best and that Victor had merely landed a lucky punch. “Paddy mopped the floor with him,” was the phrase most often repeated, and there was some truth to the claim. But others defended Victor, pointing out that Paddy had sucker-punched him and not given him a fair chance in the beginning. One of Victor’s two younger brothers usually brought the argument at least temporarily to a close when he said, “It don’t matter what the ‘Mick’ did, when Victor saw his chance he dropped him like a used rubber,” a point as indisputable as it was colorful.

Pathetic

Woman falls out of third story
window, lands on hood of car,
goes to sleep in neighbor’s house.

I hate to have to say it but I think what is happening now with respect to American Foreign Policy is, in a word, PATHETIC. After nine years of “war,” against Afghanistan (the longest war in U.S. history), one of the poorest nations on earth, against fighters armed mostly with small arms, no air force, little or no artillery or tank support, and etc., we are obviously “losing” (or at the very least not “winning”). With supposedly the greatest military in history, with the most sophisticated arms and equipment, the best technology, a military budget that is greater than all the rest of the world combined, supposedly the greatest intelligence and spy satellites possible, drones, and who knows what all else, we have not only failed to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE HE IS! It seems to me there are only two possibilities, either we are unbelievably, even pathetically incompetent, or there are unknown reasons we have not really wanted to capture or kill him (I truly do try to resist any form of conspiracy theories but this situation is demanding too much of my feeble intellect).

What is even more pathetic, we don’t even know who we are fighting or why. According to Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA, there are only 50 to 100 al Quaida in Afghanistan. We have something like 150,000 troops there plus untold numbers of civilian personnel and spend billions fighting them. Is that not pathetic? What is worse, we show no signs of giving up. President Obama is now concerned over our apparent “obsession” with the deadline for getting out, even though he established the deadline himself and up until now has insisted we will meet it (and it is obvious we cannot afford to continue). We are now fighting the Taliban where previously we were fighting al Quaida. The Taliban were not, and are not our enemies. They merely want us out of their country. They are NO threat to the U.S. (or anyone else for that matter). This is even worse than pathetic, it’s insane.

Because we have managed to impale ourselves on a massive national debt there are those who are now suggesting we should give up social security because we cannot afford it. It is no secret these are the same people who have always opposed social security and long wanted to repeal it, but their argument that we cannot afford it, while fighting two phony and unnecessary “wars”, and maintaining a pseudo-empire that we clearly cannot afford, is transparently pathetic.

Elena Kagan is in the midst of demonstrating that her description of Supreme Court confirmation hearings as a “charade” is right on. It appears she will be confirmed. But some Republicans are determined to stop any Obama appointee, no matter how qualified. So of course they are bringing up every tiny nitpicking detail they can think of to attempt to derail her. As even that is proving difficult they have decided to trash Thurgood Marshall, one of the greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, who also had Kagan as an aide. I guess that although they would never admit it, they are still upset that any civil rights legislation was passed. Their opposition to Kagan is not only disingenuous, it is pathetic. These hearings are a complete waste of time and money, the major point being that every blowhard self-important Senator gets his/her few minutes of national attention to make a fool of him/herself.

Perhaps most pathetic of all (ignoring the Oil spill for the moment) is the Republican opposition to extending unemployment benefits to over a million people. One of these unprincipled nitwits has even argued that denying them further benefits will force them to get jobs, a kind of Panglossian argument that even the good Dr. himself would probably choke on.

How the mighty have and are falling. There was a time when the U.S. was more or less solvent, when the rest of the world admired, envied, and copied us, when we at least gave the appearance of knowing what we were doing, when we adhered to our principles of fighting only when attacked, no torturing, and observing international law and our Constitution. Thanks to Reagan/Bush/Cheney and the Republican criminal conspiracy, those days are gone, probably forever. Get used to living in the Third World.

LKBIQ:
People are fond of spouting out the old clich%uFFFD about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is somehow merit in utter failure.Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide.
Hugh Macleod,

TILT:
Herring was once known as “two-eyed steak.”