Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
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Somebody's been at sea a little too long.
Australian sailors had sex on the beach, streaked through military buses and pranced naked with rolled-up burning paper stuck between their buttocks in a wild, drunken romp at a US outpost in the Indian Ocean. An investigation by The Weekend Australian has revealed many other complaints of misconduct during the 24-hour shore leave on Diego Garcia – the US base dubbed "Gilligan's Island with guns." Among the allegations were widespread drunkenness among the crews of HMAS Adelaide and HMAS Kanimbla, urinating in public, overt public male-to-male kissing and abuse of foreign military personnel.
Disciplinary action has been taken against just two sailors – one for the so-called "dance of the flamers," where rolled paper inserted between the buttocks was set alight, and another for exposing himself in public. [...] Another drunken shipmate had run naked through an army shuttle bus transporting other foreign military personnel. His identify could not be established.
They never identify the "foreign military personnel," either the ones that were abused or the ones that got the naked, hammered Aussie come barreling through their bus. Or if they're the same bunch and this guy was verbally abusing them as he ran through their bus. It doesn't really seem out of the realm of possibility.
The Dance of the Flamers was performed at a yacht club.
(link via People's Republic of Seabrook)
What with Iraq sucking up all the headlines these days, it's nice to finally get some good news. Iceland has been liberated!
Los Angeles becomes the world's first city with its own internet domain: http://www.la
doremifaso.la is already taken.
From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire:
New Jersey state senate candidate Jim Morrison's involvement in what he calls a "pretty penis contest" has spurred efforts by Democratic party officials to get him to quit the race, the New Jersey Herald reports. The AP quotes an unapologetic Morrison: "If people want to know about it, they should know I won the contest."
Is this required behavior for people named Jim Morrison?
Update (7:48 pm): I forgot to mention this from the end of the AP article: "Morrison, a partner in his parents' law firm, has gotten national attention in the past. He was a runner-up on ABC-TV's reality show 'The Mole' in early 2001. That same year, Morrison was named one of People magazine's '50 Most Eligible Bachelors.'"
From the Volokh Conspiracy: "Strom Morts," suggests reader Jonathan Falk. ("OK, it's not quite English, but it's damn close.")
I've read this letter to the editor at the Knoxville News Sentinel's website about ten times now and I still cannot, for the life of me, figure out whether he's being tongue in cheek.
You may think you are doing a noble and valuable service by bringing us the intimate details of a purported attack by a University of Tennessee football player on a 16-year-old girl.
Frankly, the people of Knoxville and the surrounding towns are interested in something more important: having a football team with a vastly better record than last year. That 8-5 record included a grand total of two wins against teams with significant ability. You don't think anyone believes that beating Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Kentucky and Mississippi State should actually be counted as wins?
I would like to understand why girls - who should know better and surely should have been taught basic common sense by their parents - go at night to a building occupied by athletic 300-pound men, 6-foot, 4-inch tall, with large muscles? Then, when the oh-so-predictable happens, they cry rape.
We don't need or want to hear the details of these stories dragged out endlessly through the newspaper nor do we want to hear similarly of some half-drunk wise guy who chooses to challenge a large, strong football player in a bar on the Strip and winds up with a broken jaw.
Please, let's concentrate on stories that will give us a winning team. Throwing players off the team because their interest in being a professional football player is greater than their interest in the insipid courses most of them take should not keep them from playing and winning for our university.
Why is pursuing a career as a professional football player not as worthy as becoming a scientist or an engineer or a social worker or a musician? It is certainly more lucrative. If athletes prefer to spend their time honing their skills at what will be their career instead of in study hall, let them be.
Then we will have a football team of which we can be proud.
Sanford Wagner, Knoxville
Tomorrow, the latest spacecraft bound for Mars will launch from the Kennedy Space Center, one of the three ground rovers and four satellites that, barring anything unexpected, will converge on the Red Planet by early next year. In the meantime, the satellites currently orbiting Mars are sending back a wealth of information and pictures. If all goes well, the next few years should yield a flood of data about our planetary neighbor.
The Odyssey, which showed the presence of water at Mars' southern pole, has detected much larger amounts of water at the northern pole, greatly increasing the odds of finding microbial traces of Martian life.
"Once the carbon-dioxide layer disappears, we see even more water ice in northern latitudes than Odyssey found last year in southern latitudes," said Odyssey's Dr. Igor Mitrofanov of the Russian Space Research Institute, Moscow, lead author of a paper in the June 27 issue of the journal Science. "In some places, the water-ice content is more than 90 percent by volume." [...] Another report, to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, combines measurements from Odyssey and Global Surveyor to provide indications of how densely the winter layer of carbon-dioxide frost or snow is packed at northern latitudes greater than 85 degrees. The Odyssey data are used to estimate the mass of the deposit, which can then be compared with the thickness to obtain a density. The dry ice layer appears to have a fluffy texture, like freshly fallen snow, according to the report by Dr. William Feldman of Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., and 11 co-authors. The study also found once the dry ice disappears, the remaining surface near the pole is composed almost entirely of water ice.
Also, the Global Surveyor satellite has sent back a couple of striking photographs. One is of the tiny Martian moon, Phobos, one of the darkest objects in the solar system and only 0.006 times the size of our moon (17x14x11 miles, 27x22x18 km). The other is a stunningly clear picture of a meteor impact crater clearly showing the presence of layers of sedimentary rock, which may indicate the former presence of a giant lake.
Fascinating...
Interesting piece - albeit with a horrific misspelling of "surreptitious" - at the Telegraph about the Interventionists, performance artists who physically intervene in existing works of art and have been very busy recently. Because everything eats itself in the end, there have now been interventions into interventionist works which, as the Telegraph article notes, presents some interesting and ironic twists to the philosophy.
It would appear that the art world has gone intervention crazy. You could blame it on Guy Debord and the Situationist International with their fondness for challenging the gallery environment with dynamic interventions. But that's too obvious. As usual, I blame Brian Eno.
[...]
Hopefully the as-yet unnamed 36-year-old from Notting Hill (note to self: doesn't Eno live in Notting Hill? How old is he?) who intervened into Cornelia Parker's The Distance: A Kiss With Added String will find the artist as broad-minded as Tracey Emin. Parker's piece, according to the artist "a comment on the claustrophobic nature of relationships," is nothing more than Rodin's sculpture The Kiss wrapped in a length of twine. The unnamed man, on bail pending further police inquiries, simply cut the rope.
To this humble observer, this intervention is the most eloquent of all those considered here and seems to advance the original piece, bringing to it a sense of completion. Parker's "comment" is at its best obvious and at its worst reductive. It surely invites intervention. If indeed the artist finds relationships claustrophobic, shouldn't she find the cutting of her string, metaphorically at least, a liberation? By freeing The Kiss from its bindings the unnamed Notting Hillian has offered a ray of hope to the artist. There seems little doubt that they should get together for dinner. I'd suggest a bowl of spaghetti.
The most famous/infamous Interventionist work is probably Jake and Dinos Chapman's "rectification" of a set of original prints of Goya's Disasters of War. The brothers purchased the set and then went "very systematically through the entire 80 etchings and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads." This, unsurprisingly, prompted an angry Spaniard to stage his own intervention.
Nicola Hunter, an art history teacher from Oxford who was in the audience, said: "Chapman is a provocative speaker and he was engaging in dialogue with various members of the audience. Suddenly this oddly-dressed man in a red beret and long dark hair sprang up in front of Jake Chapman. He gave a short speech, saying he was Spanish and that Spanish people loved Goya. He then produced a large pot of red gloss paint and threw it over Jake Chapman. Everybody froze. It was a direct hit. It hit him in the face and splattered across the wall and, I think, two of their etchings. You could see Jake was furious."
Some commentary by folks smarter than yours truly:
Jack Balkin examines the implications of grounding the decision on privacy rights rather than equal protection.
Phil Carter discusses the decision's impact on the military's don't-ask-don't-tell policy.
Ana Marie at The Antic Muse swings a satirical wrecking ball at Scalia.
Second of all, could Anthony Scalia be any gayer? Why isn't he posting in the Corner -- he's that gay.
Check out the hissy-fit he throws in his dissent, basically predicting that overturning Bowers will lead to utter chaos, real wrath of God type stuff! Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, and volcanos! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifices, dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!:
State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.
That's right, folks, he just argued that the getting the police out of gay people's bedrooms will lead to pig-fucking. (Or, worse: touching yourself.)
Walter Dellinger and Dahlia Lithwick have a back and forth about several issues implicit in the decision, but mostly about the role of Sandra Day O'Connor in this Court, including this odd figure:
Number of 5-4 opinions: 13. Number of 5-4 opinions in which Justice O'Connor is in the majority: 13. Number of dissenting opinions by Justice O'Connor: 0.
And Kevin Drum reminds us of a post from the beginning of April wherein he posed a question that has gotten overlooked a bit:
But why did a panicky neighbor call? And why did the cops arrest them instead of just slipping away? Like I said, this might be old news to some, but this article is the first one I've read that had a picture of the two men involved. Do you notice anything, um, distinctive about them that might have caught the eye of a nosy neighbor and a couple of Houston cops?
By a 6-3 margin, the Supreme Court struck a mighty blow (that pun was unintentional but upon re-reading, well, it's staying) for freedom and equal rights in overturning the Texas sodomy law. The Axis Powers - Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas - were predictably in the minority, and Scalia teetered on the edge of apoplexy at the decision, taking the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench. Witness Judge Tony trying to unwad his judicial panties:
Bowers’ conclusion that homosexual sodomy is not a fundamental right “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” is utterly unassailable.
Well, gee, Your Honor, if our nation's history and tradition is the yardstick, then I'll bet you're still pissed that broads can vote and those uppity colored folks count as more than 3/5 of a person.
Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda [...] It is clear from this that the Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring, as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed. Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home.
Many Americans don't want Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, Muslims, Catholics, and/or Jews doing those things either. Not quite a winning point there. Hell, I'd prefer my son not have to encounter evangelical Christians or crypto-fascist justices, but I still recognize the rights of each to indulge their filthy, disgusting habits. Hell, I even support letting them do it in public! And I can't believe that anybody would even need to point this out, but it was a foregone conclusion that the Court was going to take a side in the "culture war" one way or the other as soon as they agreed to hear the case. Neutral observer of the democratic rules of engagement, my ass. Tell it to Al Gore, you pompous hack.
Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals
In fact, some of my best friends are abominations in the eyes of God!
If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is “no legitimate state interest” for purposes of proscribing that conduct, ante, at 18; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense of neutrality), “[w]hen sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,” ante, at 6; what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising “[t]he liberty protected by the Constitution,” ibid.? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case “does not involve” the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court.
Again, that (not in the least entertaining) belief was resoundingly affirmed during the last election, Mr. Justice. So, putting aside the usual rationale for right-wing huffing and puffing over homosexuality, why exactly is Justice Scalia so unduly alarmed at this decision? Because despite the voluminous legal sophistry that permeates his dissent, he's completely right about one thing - this decision does knock down the last legal barriers to same-sex marriage, as Daily Kos explains:
The majority ruled that the Texas sodomy law "furthered no legitimate state interest." That is a "rational interest" standard -- much more lax than "compelling state interest," or "strict scrutiny." [...] Any use of consistency and logic would force the court sanction same-sex marriages, and invalidate any attempt to limit the definition of "marriage" to unions between man and woman.
I suspect this just moved up several notches in the rankings of significant issues for the 2004 campaign. Conventional wisdom would say that this is a loser for the Democrats, but that is last century's logic. This is an issue of basic fairness and young people, at least, know it. The economic/libertarian wing of the GOP just wants this issue to go away, because nothing exercises Jesus' shock troops quite like homosexuality, and let's face it: those people put forth an ugly, hateful face for the Republican Party, one far more knuckle-dragging and mouth-breathing than Trent Lott.
Aside from the militant Christers (and Dems have no real shot at their vote anyhow), anti-homosexual hysteria is largely a generational issue. Everybody below the age of 45 has openly gay relatives, friends, co-workers, et cetera, and once you replace the abstracts of the issue with real human beings, it gets much more difficult to keep spitting venom. Scalia is on the wrong side of history, and the histrionics in his dissent show that he knows it.
A short article at New Scientist about the odd reproductive habits of spiders makes them seem more alien than ever. The gruesome habit of female spiders making a post-coital meal of their male suitors is well-known, but in certain species, the mommy-and-daddy dance is stranger still. While the males of some species try to avoid having their petit morte segue into plain old morte, other species, like the red back spider, actually somersault onto the female's fangs, thereby guaranteeing that, in stark contrast to humans, their first time remains the best panky of their lives. And then there is Argiope aurantia.
Male spiders possess two sexual organs called pedipalps, each of which inflates after inserting into one of a pair of genital openings in the female. In the 55 cases in which a male finished mating by inserting his second pedipalp, the researchers saw that the male immediately became unresponsive and assumed a death posture with legs folded under his body. The male spiders' hearts stopped beating after a few minutes. [apostropher: aside from double genitalia and the cardiac arrest, that still sounds uncomfortably familiar...]
There was no obvious sign that the female was responsible for this lethal effect. And any stealthy way of dealing out death was ruled out by the actions of one confused male that stuck his second pedipalp into a mealworm carcass trapped in the web. This cross-species necrophilia also instantly triggered the male's death, showing female Argiopes are not to blame.
The females do sometimes remove and devour their dead mates. But the researchers do not think the death program evolved to give her a post-sex snack, as the males are too tiny to provide much nutrition. Instead the researchers think the corpses act as a weird chastity belt that blocks the female genitals and discourages other suitors. If so, it appears to be effective. In 11 cases where competing males attempted to dislodge the dead mate, they only succeeded three times. And it was not for lack of trying, Foellmer told New Scientist: "The other males go berserk, bite into the legs and try to pull him off."
Which reminds me:
Why do female spiders bite the heads off their mates after sex?
To stop the snoring before it starts.
One must take DEBKA's reports with a grain of salt, but I'd be surprised if this weren't true. Meet the new Mukhabarat, same as the old Mukhabarat. Well, no, not as psychotically violent, but with vastly superior technology and a lot more money.
The Americans are secretly building two giant intelligence facilities in Iraq at a cost of some half a billion dollars, according to an exclusive report received from DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s intelligence sources. US engineering and construction units are setting up what amounts to an "intelligence city" on a site north of the oil city of Mosul in Kurdistan and a second facility in Baghdad’s Saadun district on the east bank of the Tigris. Our military experts infer from the vast dimensions of the two projects and their colossal expense that it is Washington’s intention to retain a large US military presence in Iraq in the long term, for a decade at least.
The new installations will greatly enhance America’s military, intelligence and electronic command and control over Iraq and its neighbors, notably Iran and Syria. The Mosul facility will guard northern Iraq’s oilfields and the pipelines carrying Iraqi gas and oil to Mediterranean terminals. Its instruments will reach into every corner of Iran and Syria, replacing America’s electronic eyes and ears in southern Turkey. This facility will be activated a section at a time according to need. Upon completion at the end of 2005, it will employ an operating staff of around 4,000 American intelligence personnel and electronic engineers.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s Middle East sources report that the intelligence center going up near Mosul is causing much nervousness in Damascus and Tehran. Both governments understand that when the first sections are activated in three months time, not a single military or intelligence move of theirs will go unseen by America’s electronic spies – and that goes for terrorist activity as well.
The functions assigned the Baghdad station are different. While the Mosul center will provide early warning against external threats to the US military presence in Iraq, the Baghdad station will stand guard over America’s political and military control of the capital and its satellite towns, including the Sunni enclave cities of Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit.
An "intelligence city?" Sounds like they're settling in for the long haul.
If you live in Arizona and you can't find your penis, call the water company. They've got one in lost and found.
Via uggabugga, I stumbled across The Presidential Prayer Team. And you can join for free! I wonder if I'm still eligible to join if the thing I would pray for a god to give George W. Bush is kidney stones...
Nuke component unearthed in Baghdad back yard
Of course the news channels are breathless about this, but let's take a minute and look at what was actually found. A few parts of a gas centrifuge that dated back to 1991 and had been buried for twelve years. Not a centrifuge, some parts of a centrifuge. It takes hundreds, perhaps thousands, of actual working centrifuges, large-scale facilities in which to operate them, and fissile material to start producing the material that goes into a bomb, then you need the delivery system. You could make this same discovery in almost every country on Earth.
From Yahoo News: "A U.S. Army digger destroys one of several houses in the Iraqi town of Ramadi, some 90 km (55 miles) west of the capital Baghdad June 3, 2003. Soldiers said that U.S. forces stationed nearby came under attack from these houses and it was decided to remove them." (Posting it here rather than just linking because Yahoo links tend to be ephemeral.)
Pictures like this will go a long way toward convincing the Iraqis that we aren't creating New Palestine. I came across this picture at Shock and Awe, where Kynn notes:
Once upon a time, a non-Muslim country won a short war in the Middle East, and set themselves up as military occupiers of the mostly Muslim people. The United Nations was powerless to do much besides pick up the pieces and provide the care for the native population (which the occupier showed little concern for), because the occupying country paid little heed to the U.N.'s opposition. The people of the subjugated country soon became angry at their occupiers, demanding self-rule. Urged on by extremist Muslim clerics, those people began to resort to terrorist suicide bombs, striking at the oppressors. In response to these attacks, the occupying power began demolishing Arab homes, stating military necessity and claiming the homes were being used to stage attacks.
Yes, that does sound terribly familiar. And that photograph will have a resonance across every nation in the region.
Peter Sutcliffe [the Yorkshire Ripper] told police that in 1967, at the age of twenty, he had heard the voice of God speak to him as he worked at Bingley cemetery. He would claim that he had first heard that voice while digging a grave. He stated that the voice had led him to a cross-shaped headstone upon which were written the Polish words JEGO, WEHBY and ECHO. It was this same voice that had ordered him to kill prostitutes.
-crimelibrary.com
Harvey Carignan assured the policemen who arrested him in 1974 for multiple rape, mutilation and murder that they had made a mistake because the person they had arrested - himself - was: "An instrument of God, one who was acting under His personal instructions. Murder, rape and mutilation are all part of a Grand Plan. God is a figure with a large hood and you can’t see his face."
-casebook.org
A devout and obsessive religious upbringing as a child probably influenced the killer Herbert Mullin to start murdering people in the USA in 1972. Voices told him what to do as he shot four young boys to death in a park at Santa Cruz. When his murder count reached thirteen the police caught him and were no doubt highly impressed by his claim that he had received telepathic messages from God, and he was in fact the "saviour of the world" who had just saved the world by shooting people.
-casebook.org
On January 23, 1972 [Joseph Kallinger] branded his oldest daughter for running away. He was arrested for child abuse and found incompetent to stand trial. By mid-1974 he was constantly hearing voices from a floating head that followed him around. God also spoke to him and told him to kill young boys and sever their penises. Eager to comply, Joe enlisted his 13-year-old son, Michael, and proceeded to torture and murder a nine-year-old Puerto Rican youth. Their next victim was one of his own children, Joe Jr., who had previously accused him of abuse.
--Slaughtered in the name of God
During a jailhouse interview last month, [Christopher] Turgeon said he has no regret or remorse and truly believes what he did was right and ordered by God. "I can't question God's methods," he said. "I just obey."
-A Killing in God's Name
"God told me to do it."
-Deanna Laney, on bludgeoning her children to death
"Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers, and especially the Arabian Peninsula where the Ke'ba is."
-Osama bin Laden
"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
-George W. Bush, speaking to Palestinian PM Abu Abbas
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today. The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure. By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
[...]
Mr. Westermann, who is in his mid-40's, has worked as a State Department expert on unconventional weapons for the last several years and is viewed within the department as a careful and respected analyst of intelligence. An administration official said he had served previously as a Navy officer and had not worked for the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies.
Due to low polling numbers, lots of folks have written off John Edwards as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. I think that is mighty premature almost a year before the first primary, and when Edwards starts his multi-state ad blitz you'll see a surge in his numbers. Right now, it's in his best interest to let the other candidates (read: Kerry and Dean) keep landing body shots on one another, and I suspect that is his current M.O.
In the meantime, he delivered a speech last week at Georgetown University that was the most cogent and powerful salvo on the economy and budget that any of the candidates have unleashed so far. If this is the tack he's planning on taking - and it does seem to be - then Democrats serious about retaking the White House ought to be paying attention, no matter which candidate they support. There is really too much in there to summarize it effectively, so read the whole thing. I'll excerpt some highlights.
Our great free enterprise system has been rocked by some at the top who put their own fortunes ahead of their company’s future and their employees’ hard work. Our democracy has been wounded by some at the top who put favors for the few ahead of what’s right for the whole nation. Worst of all, the character of our country has been betrayed by some at the top who want the measure of an American to be how much she is worth, not how hard or how well she works.
Here in Washington, some of our most powerful leaders stand accused of letting big campaign contributors write special favors into law. And tonight, a President and Vice President who have doled out special privilege more quickly than any administration ever will begin a two-week sprint to collect, in return, more special-interest money more quickly than any administration ever.
[...]
The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with – opportunity, responsibility, hard work. There’s a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.
For a man who made responsibility the theme of his campaign, this president sure doesn’t seem to value it much in office. We’ve lost 3.1 million private sector jobs. Over $3 trillion in stock market value lost. A $5.6 trillion budget surplus gone, and nearly $5 trillion of red ink in its place. Bill Clinton spent 8 years turning around 12 years of his predecessors’ deficits. George Bush erased it in two years, and this year will break the all-time record.
Yet even with all those zeroes, the true cost of the administration’s approach isn’t what they’ve done with our money, it’s what they want to do to our way of life. Their economic vision has one goal: to get rid of taxes on unearned income and shift the tax burden onto people who work. This crowd wants a world where the only people who have to pay taxes are the ones who do the work.
Make no mistake: this is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy and shrink the winners’ circle.
[...]
This crowd is making a radically different argument. They don’t believe work matters most. They don’t believe in helping working people build wealth. They genuinely believe that the wealth of the wealthy matters most. They are determined to cut taxes on that wealth, year after year, and heap more and more of the burden on people who work.
How do we know this? Because they don’t even try to hide it. The Bush budget proposed tax-free tax shelters for millionaires that are bigger than most Americans’ paychecks for an entire year. And just last week, Bush’s tax guru, Grover Norquist, said their goal is to abolish the capital gains tax, abolish the dividend tax, and let the wealthiest shelter as much as they want tax-free.
Look at the choices they make: They have driven up the share of the tax burden for most working people, and driven down the burden on the richest few. They got rid of even the smallest tax on even the largest inheritances on earth. This past month, in a $350 billion bonanza of tax cuts on wealth, they couldn’t find $3.5 billion to give the child tax credit to poor people who work. Listen to this: They refused to cut taxes for the children of 250,000 American soldiers who are risking their lives for us in Iraq, so they could cut dividend and capital gains taxes for millionaires who were selling stocks short until the war was over.
[...]
First, I will ask Congress to cancel the 2001 and 2003 income, dividend, and estate tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in the upper two brackets. In these times of national sacrifice, we should not be asking less of the most fortunate. I agree with Bill Gates, Sr., the father of the richest man in America, that in a world where taxes must be paid, the people who inherit massive estates ought to pay taxes too. I agree with Warren Buffett, the shrewd investor and another of America’s richest men, who said that something is deeply wrong when a billionaire has a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Second, I will give America a tax code that rewards work, not wealth. Today, middle-class families pay income tax on their earnings at a rate of up to 25%, plus another 7.65% in payroll tax. Yet under the law President Bush just signed, a CEO who pays himself whatever he wants can sell millions of dollars in stock and pay tax at a total rate of 15%.
Let me say that again: Somebody who has worked long hours his whole life to save for his son’s college has to pay taxes at more than twice the rate as his boss. Where I come from, that man’s hard work means at least as much to the future of this country – not half as much – as what his boss does. After the biggest lapse in corporate responsibility in our lifetimes, we shouldn’t be letting a CEO who pays himself hundreds of times more than his workers pay lower taxes than the workers themselves.
Mr. President, I challenge you. Explain why you think a multimillionaire should pay 15% on his next million, while a fireman has to pay over 30% for each extra dollar of overtime. Mr. President, explain how you square that with America’s values.
There is significant hay to be made here. The economy stinks and that stink is starting to permeate every corner of the country. We are spending three billion dollars a month just to pay for the soldiers in Iraq, a figure that doesn't even include any reconstruction costs (like, say, the salaries we will now be paying to Iraqi soldiers and police). Those billions are borrowed from our future, from our children's future. Republican congressmen are openly soliciting bribes for favorable legislation. Everything the national Republican Party does reeks of contempt for average working Americans.
How do they continue to get away with it? Well, luckily for them, the arcana of fiscal and monetary policy are so far over the heads of most people, even well-informed and well-educated ones, that administration flacks don't even bother to try and justify anything in those terms. Not that they could. I meant to link to this Whiskey Bar post a couple of weeks ago, but got sidetracked by my non-online life. The post is one of the clearest, most succinct summations of the reasons why the economy is far, far worse than it seems, and likely to get worse still. It's a must-read. Must.
I used to get frustrated with folks who would argue that the deficit didn't matter, since we just owed that money to ourselves anyhow. That position belies a complete ignorance of monetary policy, but holds a certain seductive illogic all the same. But the truth is that increasingly we don't owe it to ourselves, we owe most of it to investors from other countries, as the article illustrates.
Bush can't run on the economy - it's shot. He can't run on success in Afghanistan - we cut and ran and it's back to a shambles. It's becoming clear that he won't be able to run on success in Iraq either, though he certainly intends to try. All that leaves him is fear, lies, and ginning up another war in time for the election. Make no mistake, that is a powerful combination, and one that could successfully get him another four years to funnel your money to wealthy investors and campaign contributors. But if the Democrats get on message and stay on message, they will take him down, because nothing has changed since 2000. The country is still split right down the middle.
If you are a swing voter, unsure whether you should vote Republican or Democrat, then you have been paying so little attention that you don't deserve to vote. The two parties are further apart than they have been in a century. The options are clear and stark. Bush has run our economy in exactly the same manner as he ran all of his business ventures - to wit, into the ground. He has alienated our allies, stuck our troops indefinitely in one of the most dangerous spots on Earth, and made the world a much more dangerous place for Americans. He has rolled back civil liberties and enshrined secrecy as the prime directive in all government dealings. He has turned the reins of government over to megacorporations while emptying the Treasury. Everything he touches turns to shit, folks.
Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is anybody?
Now this is just fascinating.
Harvard anthropology professor Gary Urton is a leading expert on ancient South American civilizations. One of the biggest, the Inca, stood apart from other major civilizations of the era in having no written language. That is, unless Dr. Urton is correct and the khipu, complicated knotted strings that have long been assumed to be either simply decorative or a sort of "textile abacus" for performing calculations, turn out to actually be a 3-D written language built on 7-bit binary code.
Khipu can be immensely elaborate, composed of a main or primary cord to which are attached several pendant strings. Each pendant can have secondary or subsidiary strings which may in turn carry further subsidiary or tertiary strings, arranged like the branches of a tree. Khipu can be made of cotton or wool, cross-weaved or spun into strings. Different knots tied at various points along the strings give the khipu their distinctive appearance.
Professor Urton's study found there are, theoretically, seven points in the making of a khipu where the maker could make a simple choice between two possibilities, a seven-bit binary code. For instance, he or she could choose between weaving a string made of cotton or of wool, or they could weave in a "spin" or "ply" direction, or hang the pendant from the front of the primary string or from the back. In a strict seven-bit code this would give 128 permutations (two to the power of seven) but Professor Urton said because there were 24 possible colours that could be used in khipu construction, the actual permutations are 1,536 (or two to the power of six, multiplied by 24).
This could mean the code used by the makers allowed them to convey some 1,536 separate units of information, comparable to the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 Sumerian cuneiform signs, and double the number of signs in the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians and the Maya of Central America.
If Professor Urton is right, it means the Inca not only invented a form of binary code more than 500 years before the invention of the computer, but they used it as part of the only three-dimensional written language. "They could have used it to represent a lot of information," he says. "Each element could have been a name, an identity or an activity as part of telling a story or a myth. It had considerable flexibility. I think a skilled khipu-keeper would have recognised the language. They would have looked and felt and used their store of knowledge in much the way we do when reading words."
There is also some anecdotal evidence that khipu were more than mere knots on a string used for storing calculations. The Spanish recorded capturing one Inca native trying to conceal a khipu which, he said, recorded everything done in his homeland "both the good and the evil". Unfortunately, in this as in many other encounters, the Spanish burnt the khipu and punished the native for having it, a typical response that did not engender an understanding of how the Inca used their khipu. [apostropher: that is one world-class understatement]
But Professor Urton said he had discovered a collection of 32 khipu in a burial site in northern Peru with Incan mummies dating from the time of the Spanish conquest. He hopes to find a khipu that can be matched in some way with a document written in Spanish, a khipu translation. He is working with documents from the same period, indicating that the Spanish worked closely with at least one khipu-keeper. "We have for the first time a set of khipu from a well-preserved and dated archaeological site, and documents that were being drawn up at the same time."
Makes you wonder just how much else our Spanish, French, and British forebears wiped out as they swept across the New (to them) World, doesn't it?
Wearing a bowtie makes you "dapper"?
CNN'S dapper Tucker Carlson is gearing up for the worst meal of his life. Carlson has repeatedly asserted on CNN's "Crossfire" that he'll eat his shoes and tie on-air if Hillary Clinton sells a million copies of her memoir and Simon & Schuster recoups its $8 million advance. Clinton has now sold upwards of 600,000 copies and Carlson is reluctantly getting ready to chow down. "I feel a little sick to my stomach just thinking about it," he told the Washington Post. "I'm going to contest the results and demand recounts, but ultimately I'm going to give in and do the right thing." Carlson says he plans to consult fetish Web sites in search of edible footwear, but draws the line at munching his tie: "There's only so much humiliation one man can take."
Even the US Postal Service delivers more quickly than this.
Indonesian doctors have removed the skeleton of a fetus that had been stuck in its mother's womb for more than seven years. The mother says she knew she was pregnant in late 1995. But when she failed to deliver a child, she didn't go back to the hospital because she was worried about expensive medical bills. A naval spokesman says the woman went to doctors complaining of stomach pains. Naval surgeons initially thought she had a tumor, but when they operated on her, they discovered the skeleton of a fetus in her womb.
Can somebody please tell me how to make this shudder go away?
This press release from a group of family planning and reproductive health researchers at Berkeley looks at current HIV epidemiology and changing demographics in India and says it may be soon.
According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, 20 percent of people over 15 in some sub-Saharan African countries are HIV-positive, and 70 percent of them will eventually die from AIDS. Recent estimates indicate the HIV prevalence rate in India, which has a population of 1 billion people, is less than 1 percent, but the low rate belies the looming pandemic on the horizon, according to the paper's authors.
[...]
A report from the CIA's National Intelligence Council projects that the number of people infected with HIV in India will jump to 20-25 million by 2010. There is already evidence that, in some parts of India, HIV infection is moving from the core high-risk groups of prostitutes and intravenous drug users into the general population, the researchers say.
Scary, especially when you consider that India has more people than all of Africa, crammed into about 1/10 of the space. The report makes the expected recommendations: condom distribution, better education, reduced numbers of partners or abstinence, fighting other STDs that increase transmission risk for HIV, and this:
Another avenue of prevention advocated by the researchers is for HIV prevention programs to offer circumcision to Hindu men, who are generally not circumcised. This is based upon increasingly strong evidence that uncircumcised men are at significantly higher risk of becoming infected from an HIV-positive partner compared with circumcised men.
Good advice, but I doubt many adults in the target audience will be lining up for the last one.
Another test, another failure. But wait, says the Pentagon, just because it failed to hit the only missile fired, the one that couldn't be mistaken for anything else, on a pre-determined flight path, with a tracking sensor on it, that doesn't mean it's a failure.
However, the Missile Defense Agency's spokesman, Chris Taylor, saw the test differently. "I wouldn't call it a failure," he told CNN, "because the intercept was not the primary objective. It's still considered a success, in that we gained great engineering data. We just don't know why it didn't hit."
Oh, it's hard to be a satirist these days.
Yes, but then it's also hard to laugh at this once you consider just how many dollars have been spent already to get us to the point where we can fire missiles at missiles and miss them, except in the very most controlled, unrealistic scenarios. Nine billion dollars this year, ten billion next year, and we had already spent over $120 billion when Bush came into office. All this money for a system that every expert not on the payroll agrees doesn't work and probably won't ever.
But damn the torpedos, says Bush and the ventriloquist making his mouth move (some call him Cheney). Come hell or high water, they are going to have these babies installed in Alaska next September. Why would anybody be in a giant rush to install a system by then that nobody thinks will be ready for deployment? Oh right, a presidential election. Is there any depth of shamelessness which the Republican Party would consider beneath them? No, as it turns out, there is not.
[Rumsfeld's] staffers have been phoning city officials, including some in Orange County, and strongly urging them to structure Fourth of July celebrations around the war in Iraq. "I got the impression that they had a list of every city in the nation that had applied for a pyrotechnics permit, and were calling them to persuade them to be part of the program," said one OC city official.
...or don't bother - we'll come to you.
Remember the restaurant we bombed because intelligence said Saddam might be there? There still exists no estimate of how many innocent diners died from that bit of indiscrimate fire. Well, now we have a new, much more dangerous situation. The strike on the Iraqi convoy near the Syrian border has been widely covered, with DoD and intelligence officials crossing their fingers and hoping that Saddam and his sons may have been in some of the vehicles. But now there's a new twist on it.
Turns out that American troops were pursuing the convoy toward the Syrian border. With our whooping, war-painted president and his posse having delivered more than a few unsubtle threats toward Syria, nobody would be surprised if Syrian border guards were a little jumpy when American armor starts rolling at them.
It was unclear who shot first, but American forces engaged in a firefight with Syrian border guards and several guards were hit, one senior Pentagon official said on condition of anonymity. The guards were given medical treatment by U.S. forces on the Iraqi side of the border, and it was unclear how many were wounded and whether any had died, he said.
Two officials said they had no reason yet to believe that Saddam or his sons were among the fugitives. They didn't comment on whether Saddam was the intended target in the strike.
So it's "unclear" who shot first, how many Syrians we injured, or whether we killed any. No matter what the answers turn out to be once this "clears up," this is not good. I can hear the war-apologist bloggers now: well, what did they expect, defending their borders against an advancing army as if they were border guards or something? A bull in a china shop is no longer an apt metaphor for the United States. We're now up to fire-breathing dragon in an ammo dump.
I started to get all depressed over the fact that 22% of Americans in a recent poll believe that Iraq used weapons of mass destruction during this last conflict. But then I found this post by Bob Harris at thismodernworld.com which helps to put that number in perspective by running through some other recent poll results. Turns out that 22% is roughly the same percentage of Americans who approve of the way the Catholic Church has handled the pedophilia scandals or believe that civilian deaths in Vietnam were relatively rare. And it is only twice as many as those who wish Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was their personal physician. Bob's other trenchant observation about the numbers: "About the same number of people who think it's an advantage to be a woman in America would eat a rat on live TV."
So remember: you can get a quarter of the country to agree with just about anydamnthing.
I don't much kinder to the Jeremy Rifkins or Pope John Pauls of the world. I see no real problem with human cloning, support voluntary euthanasia, and am pretty sanguine about genetically modified foods. Wait, scratch the last one there, because this is deeply, horribly wrong.
Coffee plants that produce much reduced levels of caffeine have been created by genetic engineers. Hiroshi Sano and colleagues at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan used a technique called RNA interference to silence a key gene for making caffeine in coffee plants. This technique cut caffeine in young coffee plants by up to 70 per cent. They now hope to develop this technology in the world's most popular Arabica coffee.
Aiyeee! Look, people, play God with sheep, cows, and humans all you like. But keep your stinking paws off my coffee, you damn dirty apes! When these strains start cross-pollinating and the caffeine levels in coffee plants drop world wide, I promise I will go all Ted Kaczynski on the lot of you. That is, just as soon as the pounding headaches fade and I muster the energy to drag myself out of my mountain shack.
The horror, the horror...
To the bewilderment of most of my friends, I am just this side of obsessed with professional football (the American flavor, that is). One of the highlights of the NFL season is Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on espn.com (tagline: "Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is believed to be the first Brookings scholar ever to write a pro football column."). With a month and a half to go before the NFL starts its preseason, there is precious little football news to dissect and mock, so his latest column shoots arrows all over the topical map. Two non-football-related highlights include one bit on monkeypox and the notes to one about media consolidation.
Imagine the Gambians, As They Carry the Giant Pouched Rats Down to the Dock, Thinking to Themselves, "America Is the Greatest Country in the World, and Yet They Pay Us to Ship Them Rats": Researchers think the monkeypox outbreak was triggered by prairie dogs that came into contact with an infected Gambian giant pouched rat. Forget how this chain of events could be figured out in such a short time, while science is still unable to determine why women are wide awake after sex, and men want to sleep. The real question is: What caused innocent, trusting little prairie dogs to come into contact with Gambian giant pouched rats?
According to this story in the New York Times ("All the News That Might Be True"), the rats "are imported as pets." People are importing rats? Don't they realize that a large supply of locally produced rats is already available free of charge? But these days no one wants a domestic rat. Oh no. It's got to be an imported rat!
[...]
Random House, Which is Owned by Bertelsmann, Will Publish TMQ's Next Book and the Excerpts Will Run in Time Magazine, Which Is Owned by AOL Time Warner. Watch for Details on ABC Primetime, Which Is Owned by Disney
* NOTE 1: NBC, which is owned by General Electric, is a competitor of ABC, which is owned by Disney, which owns ESPN; NBC is a partner with Microsoft in MSNBC, which has a sports news division, and Microsoft is a partner with ESPN.com; Microsoft recently signed an agreement to cooperate with AOL, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, which owns cable companies that show NBC, ABC and ESPN, and owns Sports Illustrated, which competes with ESPN The Magazine, which is published on Earth The Planet; AOL Time Warner cable channels carry CBS, MTV and Nickelodeon, all of which are owned by Viacom, which also owns Paramount Pictures, which competes with Disney's Miramax and Touchstone movie studios, and also owns Simon & Schuster, which published the Hillary Clinton book that was excerpted in AOL Time Warner's Time magazine and featured in a Barbara Walters special on Disney-owned ABC. So don't worry about media consolidation, and please support Michael Powell!
** NOTE 2: FX, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, also owns Fox, which competes with Disney's ABC, General Electric's NBC and Viacom's CBS, and owns Fox News, which competes with CNN, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, and owns Fox Sports Net, which competes with ESPN, and owns HarperCollins books, which competes with Simon & Schuster and with Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann, which owns BMG Music, which is negotiating to combine operations with the Warner music label owned by AOL Time Warner. Really, don't worry about media consolidation!
*** NOTE 3. "Lethal Weapon" movies are produced by Warner Brothers, which is owned by AOL Time Warner, which competes with the 20th Century Fox studio owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation,**** which competes with Paramount Pictures, which is owned by ... oh, forget it.
With this year's NBA Finals vying for the title of least aesthetically pleasing championship ever, the coming six weeks seem all the duller. Maybe I'll actually get all these damn boxes unpacked...
Now that the WMD defense is rapidly unravelling, war supporters seem to have settled on a new mantra to chant. Post a comment anywhere questioning the wisdom of the war and hear the chorus rise: "massgravesmassgravesmassgravesmassgraves." This again avoids the basic point which is, of course, the issue of an imminent threat to the United States that would justify a pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign country. Mass graves are unsettling, but don't really threaten you or I.
Jude Wanniski is an archconservative supply-side republican with something of a reputation as a crank even in those circles, but he makes an interesting point about the mass graves being discovered across Iraq.
The very first report, as I recall, was of mass graves that turned out to be cemeteries. But because the news accounts on CNN repeated incessantly that they were "mass graves," it simply confirmed the public's predisposition to believe that Saddam Hussein was a genocidal maniac. Ever since, the Times has been reporting on bodies being turned up by the hundreds or thousands in one place or another, and in each instance the dispatch suggests that these were the result of Saddam's brutality.
My caution is the result of having consulted experts in the history of Iraq, who tell me there are most certainly mass graves all over the country, because it has been at war since 1958 [...] when the monarchy fell. I'm advised that most of the slaughter that occurred over this period was in these early years of civil war, when there really were men and families lined up along ditches, machine-gunned or in other ways executed. There are also stories of "mass graves" that followed the 1991 Gulf War, when the USA urged the Shi'ites in the South and Kurds in the North of Iraq to take up arms against the Baghdad regime. I think even Human Rights Watch would have to say that "rebels" who are trying to kill "loyalists" should expect to either succeed or pay the consequences, as they did when the USA was nowhere around to back them up.
And let's not forget that in the south of Iraq, some of those mass graves were created by Americans during the first Gulf War.
Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi troops.
"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."
A thinner line of trenches on Moreno's left flank was attacked by the 1st Brigade commanded by Col. Lon Maggart. He estimated his troops buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers. Darkness halted the attack on the Iraqi trench line. By the next day, the 3rd Brigade joined in the grisly innovation. "A lot of people were killed,"' said Col. David Weisman, the unit commander.
One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.
I agree that was Saddam was a bad man with a thirst for blood, but the presence of mass graves puts us no closer to justifying this invasion. Hell, liberal groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were the only ones shouting about them back when Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand and Reagan was funnelling him support and weapons. I guess they just weren't as awful back then.
Two unrelated headless corpse stories within three minutes of one another. What are the odds?
Reuters: Headless Naked Corpse Found by Castle Frankenstein Wed June 18, 2003 08:22 AM
Reuters: Head Cut Off Corpse in Chapel Desecration Wed June 18, 2003 08:19 AM
In acknowledgement of the time of this entry, I'll mention this story. Japanese researchers at Akita University School of Medicine published a study indicating that viewing computer monitors at night, particularly bright ones, produces physiological changes that could disrupt the sleep cycle. Interesting enough, if not particularly surprising. But what caught my eye was only mentioned in passing. They had the subjects doing exciting (a shooting game) and boring (addition) tasks on bright and dim displays and collected a range of measurements during the tasks.
Rectal temperature was recorded at two-minute intervals during each task. [...] The rectal temperature decreased during the night in all conditions. The rectal temperature was higher during the exciting task than during the boring one and significantly higher during the tasks with a BD than during the tasks with a DD in the latter half of each task.
Now, I'm not really a gamer; you get much past left, right, fire, and hyperspace and I start to panic. I can add numbers in my head pretty easily. But I have to think my ability at either would be greatly diminished by the distraction of 11 rectal temperature readings in a twenty minute span.
Way back at the beginning of April, I linked to a couple of posts by Steve Gilliard at Daily Kos about the misplaced confidence of Americans regarding the Iraq War. He basically argued that toppling Saddam was not the end of the problem, but only the catalyst for an entirely new set of even worse problems with which America was unprepared to deal. A month and a half has passed since then, and with that span's observations in mind, both posts are well worth a re-read.
We are stuck with Iraq now. No country is lining up to offer money or soldiers to help and one could hardly blame them. The dismissive arrogance shown to the United Nations and most of its member states is predictably being returned in kind. The most important leg of the Powell Doctrine, a clear exit strategy, was ignored, I suspect over Colin Powell's private objections. There never was an exit strategy and the point at which we'd no longer have 100,000+ troops stationed there seems ever more remote. But then, as Fred Kaplan notes in this excellent Slate article, while we spend a great deal of time, money, and mental energy on how to start and wage wars, we don't spend anywhere near that amount on how to end them. Kaplan cites a memo circulated by influential retired Brigadier General Wass de Czege after he observed US military war games last year.
These sorts of war games "tend to devote more attention to successful campaign-beginnings than to successful conclusions," he wrote. "War games usually conclude when victory seems inevitable to us (not necessarily to the enemy), at about the point operational superiority has been achieved and tactical control of strategically significant forces and places appears to be a matter of time."
Winning a war, he noted, doesn't mean simply defeating the enemy on the battlefield. It means achieving the strategic goals for which we've gone to war in the first place. In both war games, he wrote, the question of how to achieve those strategic goals couldn't be answered because the war game ended too soon.
This is unfortunate, he went on, because, important though it is to understand the early stages of a military campaign, "it is just as important to know how to follow through to the resolution of such conflicts." He added that, if the game managers did follow through the next time they play, they would learn that they - and, by extension, U.S. military commanders generally - have underestimated "the difficulties of 'regime change' and the magnitude of the effort required to achieve strategic objectives."
Well, General Shinseki at least was closer to reality regarding the number of troops such an endeavor might require, but wouldn't you just know it, he retired. And in what could only have been an intentional middle finger to Donald Rumsfeld, thanked almost the entire military structure and Congress by name without mentioning the Secretary of Defense. Then again, at this point I doubt there is any number of troops we could put in Iraq that would pacify the place. Baghdad blogger/journalist Salam Pax illustrates the level of anger and desperation we are facing in recounting a recent experience with a taxi driver.
I was trying to get a taxi at 10:30pm last night (which is a stupid and dumb thing to do in the first place - curfew is still at 11:00pm) so this car stops and we agree on a 2000 dinar fare. The moment I sit in the car he starts cursing and swearing at "them". Suddenly he stops in mid sentence turns to me and asks angrily
- are you a muslim? *he has a muslim looking beard, is angry and I defiantly don't want to start a theological discussion with him* - yes, alhamdulillah I am a muslim. - are you working with "them"? *oh dear this is not going anywhere good* - No! of course not. Why should I? Pause. - so do you think if I hide a hand grenade under the dash board they would be able to find it? *shitshitshit* - listen I really think you should be careful they have equipment which is able to detect these things, you really shouldn't carry a hand grnade around. - aha! So you know what equipment they use *fuck* - no,no, I said they might have this sort of equipment.
just then we pass a US patrol; one humvee and a couple of soldiers on foot. He slows down and looks intensely at them. They are on my side and he leans on me to look out of the window. This is the point when I start wondering whether I will die from the explosion after the this crazyfuck throws the grenade or from the retaliation fire. He decides to shout stuff and whizzes off.
I think I was in a car with a loony-suicide-fucker last night. I wanted to ask why he wanted to hide a hand grenade in his car but I was really really scared. He just might decide to stick the hand grenade down my throat, because it is Halal to kill those who are agents of the infidel occupier. What do you do when you are in a car with someone who asks you about the best place to hide a hand grenade?
Now you might say that he is part of that movement which calls itself al-Auda [the return] and is planning attacks here and there (I wish people would stop calling them sporadic but I will get to that in a moment). What makes this guy even more dangerous is that he is not part of the Ba'athi underground plot to re-emerge. He is one of the loonies who have taken the call to Jihad issued by the Imam of the abu-Hanifa mosque seriously. And these people just play so easily into the hands of the Auda.
Our raids to "root out resistance" are only making the situation more volatile and dangerous. Sooner rather than later, many Americans who supported the war are going to start wondering why we still have soldiers getting killed and maimed on a daily basis long after Bush strutted down the aircarft carrier and declared "Mission Accomplished." Welcome to guerrilla warfare, Mr. Bush, where the mission is never fully accomplished. We can't bring order to Afghanistan, we can't bring order to Iraq, and now they're considering putting troops in Gaza and the West Bank to take on Hamas? This is surreal. Unless you're in the armed services, in which case I imagine it's quite horribly real.
I marvelled during the run-up to the Iraq invasion that Bush was the only leader who could possibly have driven France, Germany, and Russia into an alliance. That was no mean feat, given the little matter of twentieth century history. Well now he's managed to one-up even that accomplishment.
The administration's fevered alarums about links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda were incredibly ridiculous to anybody with even a passing understanding of Middle Eastern politics. Despite adopting some of the trappings of Islam over the past decade in order to stay in power, few non-Israeli leaders in the Middle East have been more consistently and vehemently hostile towards Islamicists than Hussein. I have no hard figures to back this up (because nobody does), but it's no secret that folks of that mindset make up a good number of the skeletons being exhumed from the mass graves.
Saddam didn't much put up with anybody who could pose a threat to his rule, and the Al-Qaeda would-be theocrats had nothing but revulsion for the heathen Ba'athist socialists. Just for evidence of their wildly divergent worldviews, remember that the Islamic fundies do not allow representations of the human form, like say, statues. And if we know anything about Saddam, we know that he was more fond of pictures and statues of himself than just abo
