This ham smells April shower fresh...

...but I don't think I trust the Active Sport peach cobbler.

The food may still taste like road kill. But if a new program from the U.S. Army works out, GIs' rations won't smell quite so bad. The Natick Soldier Center is working on a project to make rations more palatable to grunts by embedding savory aromas into the food's packaging. If the food smells better, the thinking goes, the soldiers will be more likely to eat their MREs, or Meals, Ready to Eat, and will be better able to carry out their grueling tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The effort -- tongue-pleasingly titled Active Package Olfaction to Increase Soldier Acceptance of Field Rations* -- could ultimately affect more than soldiers' appetites, however. Smells have been known to influence people's perception, energy and ability to learn. This project might be the beginning of a military foray into aromatherapy.

*APOISAFR - It's like they named it after me.

Quick Reads

Ftrain: The Alley Watchers

McSweeneys: The Bombay Palace All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: A Postcolonial Perspective

languagehat: The Dada Manifesto

Open Brackets: Cours Primaire

Texts & Pretexts: Blackberries

Absolutely Nothing

Absolutely nothing at all, huh, Dick?

From the 2000 Vice Presidential debate:

SEN LIBERMAN: [...] And I'm pleased to say - see Dick, from the newspapers, that you're better off than you were eight years ago, too. (Laughter.)

MR. CHENEY: And most of it -

SEN. LIEBERMAN: (Chuckles.)

MR. CHENEY: And I -- I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: (Laughing.) (Inaudible.)

(Laughter, applause.)

Laughter, Laughter, all right. Har-de-f***ing-har-har.

Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion under Operation Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under a no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to newly available documents.

The size and scope of the government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than was previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military's increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run its logistical operations. Independent experts estimate that as much as one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to independent contractors.

The lying started well before these jackasses (weren't) elected.

Soylent green is people.

"We have essentially humanised the yeast," says Tillman Gerngross, GlycoFi's chief scientist. "It is the first time a fungal organism has been able to secrete a human glycoprotein with complex human glycosylation."

I think I have something in my eye...

...and it's coming out the back of my head.

Then, he fell off the ladder face-first and onto the drill, which went through his right eye and out his skull, just above his right ear. According to Ben, doctors told him the drill pushed his brain aside, rather than impaling it, which could have caused further - and most likely vastly more extensive - damage.

[...]

Corrin Keck, a friend of Ron's, said other than loss of sight in his right eye, she has not seen any major effects. "At this point, we haven't noticed any problems with his motor skills and speech."

Holy crap.

A Dream

Just go read.

snif snif.

I grew up a white kid in a black world in Durham, NC. Ma & Pa G. were colonists of sorts from out West and the Deep South, respectively, and the African American community accepted us and I rarely felt out-of-place growing up. I know I've heard Dr. King's 'I Have a Dream' a thousand times. Hell, in grade school we spent more time learning about George Washington Carver than we spent learning about the Father of our Country and February was always fun because we had assemblies with special speakers, musicians, and yes...preachers every day.

But each time I reread I Have a Dream I'm awestruck. Awestruck by the immensity of the distance come and by the immensity of the distance yet to go.

And Al Gore Was the Liar?

Apparently, the new standard is that the lies don't even have to be remotely feasible, just pronounceable.

President Bush's campaign -- expected to dwarf Democratic hopefuls by raising $200 million or more for the primaries, with no GOP rival -- is appealing for donations by portraying Bush as a fund-raising underdog who won't have enough cash to defend himself against Democratic attacks.

"Democrats and their allies will have more money to spend attacking the president during the nomination battle than we will have to defend him," campaign chairman Marc Racicot wrote in the fund-raising e-mail sent Wednesday night. "If you need more convincing the president needs your help, consider what the Democrats are saying. The race is just starting, but their rhetoric is already red-hot." (emphasis added)

Okay, the notion that the man who has broken every single fundraising record there is, who belongs to the party with a massive fundraising advantage to begin with, could possibly have less money than the Democrats is crazy enough. Between the middle of May and the end of June, Bush raised $35 million; the nearest democrat, John Kerry, raised $16 million from January to June.

But hey, we all know the GOP is fabulously bad with numbers, so that's no surprise. This however, is something new: if your opponent won't lie about you, then just make up the craziest shit you possibly can and accuse them of saying it anyhow.

Racicot's e-mail attributes quotes to several Democratic presidential hopefuls criticizing Bush. Among them, Racicot says former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean stated that Bush might suspend the 2004 election, called Bush "reckless" and "despicable," compared him to the Taliban and said Bush was trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, public schools and public services. "This ugly, overheated rhetoric shows Democrats will say anything and stop at nothing to defeat this president," Racicot wrote. (emphasis added)

Asked if the comments attributed to Dean were accurate, Dean spokeswoman Tricia Enright was incredulous. "Compared him to the Taliban? Absolutely not. Suspend the 2004 election? What is that about?" Enright asked. "He said his (Bush's) tax policies were reckless. Obviously all this was taken out of context."

Taken out of context? Sounds to me like it was made up out of whole cloth. Now that the rules are clear, I guess I can go ahead and reveal that just last week I heard Dick Cheney say that he had photos of Richard Gephardt banging high schoolers at a kegger with the Church of Satan and that Joe Lieberman drinks the blood of Gentile babies. Yep, he said it right on Oprah.

Have Graven Image, Will Travel

Sigh.

Democratic Gov. Ronnie Musgrove and his Republican rival Haley Barbour said Mississippi would take the Ten Commandments monument that was removed Wednesday from a public area of the Alabama Supreme Court building. The separate statements were issued within minutes of each other, and it's unclear which was written first.

[...]

"Tell Judge Moore, who is a hero to so many of us, that if they don't want the monument in Alabama, we want it in Mississippi," Barbour said. "I'll send a truck over today to pick it up, if they'll let me have it for the Governor's Mansion."

Musgrove said he would display the monument in the Mississippi Capitol for a week starting Sept. 7 and he hoped other states would take turns showing it. "It is my intent to move this monument to other states to show support for our common Judeo-Christian heritage," Musgrove wrote.

Great. Roy's Holy Boulder is going on tour. It's a rock star now.

Why does it always have to be the South? Year in and year out, the gold medalists in synchronized ridiculousness. Just when California had finally pulled ahead of us, we reach deep down into our collective regional self and find that last bit of energy, of courage, of determination, and WHOOSH! We're watching Larry Flynt and Arnold Schwarzenegger fade to specks in the rear view mirror.

It was a noble and valiant effort, California, but just as Minnesota found out, this is not a sport for amateurs and the season isn't over after just one game. Now step aside and we'll show you what championship-level surreal looks like.

Cull the Sack

growing around your waist and buttocks, you bulbous burbanite.

Urban Sprawl Makes Americans Fat, Study Finds

U.S. researchers said on Thursday they had quantified the price of living in sprawled-out American communities and weight gain leads the list -- six pounds on average, to be precise.

[...]

"We found that U.S. adults living in sprawling counties weigh more, are more likely to be obese and are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure than are their counterparts in compact counties," Reid Ewing of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland told reporters.

[...]

The study found that people in far-flung communities walk less for leisure, but this factor did not account for all the weight difference. "It may be as a result of the lower level of physical activity they get as part of their daily lives -- driving to work, driving to school, driving to lunch, basically driving everywhere," Ewing said.

I'd like to see additional work on how bad this sprawl phenomenon is on our spines, too. Car seats are so damn uncomfortable. There are gobs of reasons why compact communities are healthier for us and the planet, but we can compensate for the four-lane fat feature because my guess is that the suburbs is where we'll find more lizards.

PARIS (Reuters) - Exenatide, an experimental diabetes drug derived from lizard saliva, not only controls patients' blood sugar levels but also cuts their weight, its developers said on Monday.

I bet the guys in this bedroom community not too far from me are pretty thin.

Cut him some slack.

If I was standing next to Anna Kournikova, I'd probably have the same goofy look on my face.

Photo from Yahoo News with the caption: "Tennis player Anna Kournikova (L) and Amazon.com Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos applaud at the opening of trading at the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York on August 22, 2003. Bezos and Kournikova are promoting the new Shock Absorber sports bra that will be sold on Amazon."

Good thing they let readers know that Anna is the one on the left. For a second, I thought she had really let herself go.

Informed Comment

More from my fave. Go read today's log.

*Intra-Shia politics

[...]Although the August president of the IGC, Ibrahim Jaafari, is a leader of the London branch of al-Da`wa, al-`Anzi seems to deny that Jaafari is in any way representing the party.[...]

*Ahmad Chalabi & Richard Perle

[...]All Perle is doing is criticizing the State Department and the CIA for refusing to work with the corrupt expatriate financier Ahmad Chalabi. [...] Actually, refusing to preside over the coronation of Chalabi, who has no support whatsoever inside Iraq, was among the few things the US got right. The CIA and State called this one.[...]

*Great stats index

-Number of 27 major Iraqi cities where water is dirtier and less often available now than under Saddam: 12 (includes Baghdad, Najaf & Tikrit)
-Cost of providing clean, reliable water to Iraqis: $16 billion.
-Percent by which Saddam's regime outproduced the current American administration in electricity: 28
-Cost of modernizing the electricity grid: $2 billion
-Amount of money Bremer administration in Iraq has left: $10 million

*more

As a matter of fact I suggest you read his log once per day. Bookmark it or just hop over to the 'blogs of note' after visiting apostropher.

You will have a broader and deeper understanding of what's going on in Iraq and the rest of the Mideast than if you don't. Period.

Signs of Sanity?

A sign of hope, I hope I hope.

A top State Department official Deputy (Froz: Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage) says Washington is exploring the idea of a multinational force in Iraq that would be led by U.N. officers serving under an American commander.

[...]

The statement marks the first time U.S. officials have said they may be willing to give the United Nations a leadership role in Iraq. Several countries including France, which opposed the U.S. led war in Iraq, have ruled out sending troops to the region unless there is a U.N.- authorized multinational force in place.

Much more with a simple Google News: 'World'.

Please.

Piss Poor and Off Kilter

The EPA doles out some major goodies today and the headlines read:

EPA Exempts Old Plants from Key Rule -San Jose Mercury-News

New Federal Air Rule Draws Sharp Criticism -Washington Times

New EPA Rule Draws Flak, Smog -Christian Science Monitor

EPA Eases Pollution Rule at Power Plants -Reuters

EPA Sets Clean Air Act Exemptions -MSNBC

and...

New Rule Encourages Plant Modernization??
Huh? That can't be the same sto... Oh.
From our inimitable friends at Fox News.

Afraid of Bias?
Go here to read the rule in full or summary form in PDF for yourself. In the meantime let's look behind the media to who is fighting this out.

From Natural Resources Defense Council, a regular plaintiff in these suits:

NRDC obtained a leaked copy of the final rule, which essentially repeals the "new source review" provision of the Clean Air Act. That provision requires industrial facilities to install modern pollution controls when they make upgrades to plants that increase air pollution. The new final rule would allow facilities to avoid installing pollution controls when they replace equipment -- even if the upgrade increases pollution -- as long as the cost of the replacement did not exceed 20 percent of the cost of what the EPA broadly defines as a "process unit."

[...]

At the same time that the Bush administration has been preparing this new rule, the Department of Justice, state attorneys general, NRDC and other organizations have successfully prosecuted or settled new source review lawsuits that the Clinton administration brought against the 12 owners of the country's oldest, largest and dirtiest coal-fired power plants. [...] EPA officials have estimated that if it won all of the enforcement cases involving the 51 plants, it would cut nearly 7 million tons of harmful air pollution annually. That would amount to a 50 percent reduction of air pollution generated by U.S. electric utilities.

[...]

The same companies that are currently being prosecuted for new source review violations are major contributors to the Republican Party and had easy access to Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force. For example, the Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group comprising the power plant defendants in the Justice Department new source review cases, had at least 14 contacts with the Cheney task force and contributed nearly $600,000 to the Republican Party from 1999 to 2002.

From Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Trust, also a (less-frequent) plaintiff, via Tom Paine:

The Bush proposal triggered a firestorm of criticism, including from (Froz: soon to be the new EPA Administrator, pending confirmation) Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt's director of air quality, Rich Sprott. At an April 1 EPA hearing on the proposal, Sprott called it a "disastrous approach to managing air quality" and said it would create a "train wreck" that would be virtually impossible to enforce. (Sprott may not have understood that's exactly what the Bush White House and its power company friends want.)

From The American Lung Association, who I don't know if have ever taken part in a CAA suit, but who I know are advocates and lobbyists:

The American Lung Association strongly opposes the rule issued today by the Environmental Protection Agency that will roll back key provisions of the Clean Air Act, called New Source Review. The Environmental Protection Agency's decision is the latest in a series of steps that undermine large parts of the most effective environmental law in the United States.

And from the other side, for fairness and balance, of course.

From EPA

The changes we are making in this rule will provide industrial facilities and power plants with the regulatory certainty they need,” said Acting Administrator Marianne Horinko. “This rule will result in safer, more efficient operation of these facilities and, in the case of power plants, more reliable operations that are environmentally sound and provide more affordable energy.

[...]

In today’s action EPA is finalizing changes to the definition of “equipment replacement” under NSR. These changes were proposed in December 2002. EPA opened a 120 day comment period and held five public hearings across the country to ensure ample opportunity for public comment on the proposed changes. EPA received over 150,000 written comments and heard from over 450 individuals who participated in the public hearings. After reviewing the comments, EPA decided to move forward to finalize part of the proposed rule.

Froz: ", Anyway!"
Hey, maybe I could do Bill O'Reilly's job.

From Edison Electric Institute (The Electric Utility Trade Group) not on their website, however, even under press releases; Only as a Yahoo news bit (from which they're the submitter and the source). Like Yahoo has reporters...Puh-leeze. Cut the crap and quit hiding your PR as journalism.

Kuhn (Thomas R., President of EEI) noted that for the past several years, power companies have faced an uncertain and sometimes hostile regulatory environment in which even the most routine power plant maintenance practices or efficiency improvements are called into question. "We are pleased that electric companies will be able to get on with doing the job they do best -- generating the electricity that powers our economy and way of life," Kuhn said.

Froz: Mnmn, An amazing story. Wait. No, It isn't. You stank then and you stink now and you'll always stink.
Hey! I'm getting better at this! Bill, buddy, let me intern.

Ahh, back to the, um, "journalists":
From Fox News

"We're going to really, I think, create certainty going forward for industrial facilities, by spelling out what specific replacement is exempt," Horinko said. Supporters of the rule add that efficiency gains from plant upgrades will benefit the environment while also ensuring that electricity gets to its end. [...] The new rule, supported by the electricity utilities and oil industries, allows manufacturers, chemical plants and pulp and paper mills to modernize a fifth at a time.

Who needs a "Ministry of Information" when you have guys like this?

Things are looking up.

Not only does red wine contain a life-extending chemical, apparently frequent masturbation prevents prostate cancer, chocolate prevents heart disease and cigarettes stop bullets. Oh mighty death, how I mock thee.

Try to work THAT into a conversation.

Today's word of the day from wordsmith.org:

dasypygal (da-si-PYE-gul) adjective

Having hairy buttocks.

[From Greek dasy- (hairy, dense) + pyge (buttocks).]

A related word is dasymeter, an instrument for measuring the..., no, not that, rather the density of gases. Another related word is callipygian, having a beautiful behind.

"...optimists are harder and harder to find."

Rory McCarthy returns to Baghdad after two months and finds that even the optimists there are losing heart.

A wave of fury and despair among Iraqis has drowned out the few voices that filled me with hope. Those of my Iraqi friends who clung resolutely to their optimistic dreams are finally losing heart. They shrug their shoulders and begin to list the unrelenting failures of the new Iraq.

It is not that the power supply has still not improved. It has worsened. Four months after television screens across the world showed the victorious toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Firdous Square, power cuts are more frequent, not less. In many Baghdad homes the water that flows from the taps is brackish and undrinkable. Water treatment plants, short of electricity and poisoned by their own rusting pipes, are failing.

[...]

Two months ago eager aid workers were arriving in droves, filling empty hotel rooms and beginning dozens of long overdue projects. After last week's bombing at the UN headquarters in eastern Baghdad, those same young people are hurrying to leave. Many UN staff, some deeply traumatised by what they have suffered, have already gone.

At the weekend the Red Cross, an organisation with a reputation for enduring the riskiest of environments, from Afghanistan to Chechnya, announced it would drastically reduce its staffing. Yesterday Oxfam pulled out too.

So to help deal with the steadily crumbling security situation, we're starting to recruit the old Mukhabarat sadists into our service. Charming. Bet that goes over really well with all those liberated Iraqis.

Bless the BBC

Well, how 'bout that?

Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, has announced plans to give the public full access to all the corporation's programme archives. Mr Dyke said on Sunday that everyone would in future be able to download BBC radio and TV programmes from the internet. The service, the BBC Creative Archive, would be free and available to everyone, as long as they were not intending to use the material for commercial purposes, Mr Dyke added.

"The BBC probably has the best television library in the world," said Mr Dyke, who was speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival. "Up until now this huge resource has remained locked up, inaccessible to the public because there hasn't been an effective mechanism for distribution. But the digital revolution and broadband are changing all that. For the first time there is an easy and affordable way of making this treasure trove of BBC content available to all."

Lovely. Chalk one up for the virtues of public broadcasting.

UPDATE (1:20 am): Paul Boutin discusses some of the technical aspects of this at Slate. And linked from that page: I had no idea you need a license to watch television in the United Kingdom. You can be fined up to £1,000, they say they catch up to 1200 people a day watching unlicensed television, and get this:

Our detection equipment will track down your TV
The fact that our enquiry officers are now so well equipped with the latest technology means that there is virtually no way to avoid detection.

How our detector vans can catch out licence evaders
We can detect a TV in use, in any area. That's because every TV contains a component called the 'local oscillator', which emits a signal when the television is switched on. It's this signal that the equipment on our vans picks up.

But, what if you live in a block of flats or a house without road access? Well if this is the case our enquiry officer can simply use one of our hand-held scanners. Measuring both direction and strength of signal, they make it easy for us to locate television sets in hard to reach places.

Are you kidding me? My goodness.

Frog Marched?

'Scuse me?! That's a new one on me. But if this Joseph Wilson outing Karl Rove as Robert Novak's 'Senior Administration Source' story turns out true, it's a MAJOR move on the offensive. And I can't imagine CIA folk don't "choose their words carefully". I also don't imagine they take to kindly to having one of their own "outed".

Ambassador Wilson (2d hand, from 4 sources):
"At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words."

I've seen references via Calpundit and Mark Kleiman

Gotta keep digging on this one.

Heh heh. Frog-marched. Heh heh.

Update before I even hit save; quote is about 2/3 down through the transcript.

Heh heh. Frog-marched. Heh heh.

Update 7:45 AM Wed: After finally being able to watch the video (sound card out at the other computer) I would say Wilson doesn't seem to be accusing Rove directly, more stating that he thinks Rove knows who the source is and would love to see him asked by some MiB. But the quote is slam on target; good job, Natasha. here is the long video; "frog marched" quote is at about 3/4 of the way through it. cross reference your status with the transcript linked above.

All this is tea-leaf reading to some extent, but...

Heh heh. Frog marched. Heh heh. Karl Rove. Heh heh.

UPDATE 9/6 11:30 AM:
This link should be taken with several tablespoons of salt. I have no independent verification of it anywhere, but because of the crazy amount of traffic from Googles about Rove, Wilson and the humorous 'Frog Marching' that we're getting I'll put it up anyway. I'm keen to see if anything appears in the Washington Post from the supposed affadavit. There is a linking of Rove to a supposed family member named Roverer who helped build concentration camps in Europe earlier this century. When folks start flying 'Nazi!' accusations around, I get skeptical. When and if this starts to emerge more clearly, I will take this out of the apostropher archives and make a new post.

Heh heh. "Frog Marched!". Heh heh.

Wilson has announced that he will have his private attorneys petition the Department of Justice demanding that Roverer a/k/a Karl Rove be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identity Protection Act .

The investigation held thus far by the State Department's Internal Security (ISD) has stated that Rove did indeed leak the information out about the Ambassador's wife, CIA agent Valerie Wilson, to the Washington Post. Apparently they have an affidavit from the reporter he leaked it to.

Update October 29,2003

But Meanwhile...

As long as you're here, why don't you take your boots off, sit a spell and peruse the this that thusly is, was and becomes apostropher. I'm froz gobo and he's the apostropher. Wrap your head around that one, why don't ya. Aside from oblique political vista, dissecting and tangential warblogging, and distinctive middle eastern commentary, you'll find just about anything under the sun - and far away from it, too - when you visit.

It can be hard to put on a graph and impossible to quantify at times, but there's nothing on the web quite like it.

Sometimes we just can't help but rant.

Enjoy your visit, drop us a line in the comments, and check out our favorite links in the side bar. It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance.

It's Official

More dead American Soldiers since Flyboy-in-Chief said "Mission Accomplished" than before he did.

On Tuesday, a soldier was killed in an attack on a military convoy near Baghdad, bringing the death toll since May 1 -- when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat operations over -- to 139.

Between March 20, when the war began, and May 1, 138 U.S. service members died, according to the U.S. military.

And Billmon has a good look at some "revisionist history" going on right under our noses.

If Only

You tell 'em, Maddie!

In an opinion piece published in the September/October 2003 issue of the scholarly journal Foreign Affairs, Albright also accused the Bush administration of blundering by invading Iraq before Afghanistan was truly stabilised, Osama bin Laden had been caught and his al-Qaeda network smashed.

"I remain convinced that had Al Gore been elected president (Froz: Um, he was, kinda), and had the attacks of September 11 still happened, the United States and NATO would have gone to war in Afghanistan together, then deployed forces all around that country and stayed to rebuild it," she wrote.

Thanks, Ralph

Oh, I see the evil spirit, alright.

This makes me so angry that I shake.

An 8-year-old autistic boy who died at a prayer service where church members tried to heal him of "spirits" was suffocated, the medical examiner's office said Monday. Terrance Cottrell went to a prayer service Friday with his mother, who prayed over him with a pastor and other church members. By the time the two-hour service was over, Terrance was dead. The official cause of death is mechanical asphyxia due to external chest compression, meaning Terrance was suffocated. The death has been ruled a homicide.

That's enough to make me red-faced, spitting mad. Here's where I tip over the edge into inchoate rage.

Asked whether church members could have confused Terrance's autism with evil spirits, [Head Pastor] David Hemphill said no. "It wasn't confused," he told CNN. "I know what I'm talking about." Hemphill said Terrance "had spirits in him," and church members simply asked God to "deliver him."

I resisted the urge to put Pastor in quotes up there. This guy is in no way a "man of the cloth," whatever that means; he's an ignorant charlatan and a murderer that shouldn't see one more day as a free man. I seem to read a story like this about once a year, and each time I just feel more furious than the time before. The case has been ruled a homicide. They better damn well prosecute it to the full extent of the law. I know this is intemperate, but screw freedom of religion. Fat lot of good that freedom did for Terrance Cottrell. When your god leads you to asphyxiate eight-year-olds, that isn't religion. It's psychosis.

As you might expect, Dwight Meredith at Politics, Law, and Autism has some things to say about this case. And you'd better believe he's angry, too.

Thou shalt not...

...be quite certain to which commandments the lord thy god doth refer.

Here's a short but entertaining article from the San Francisco Chronicle's religion writer about the confusion surrounding exactly how many commandments there are (somewhere between 10 and 29) and what they actually command.

Run, Wesley, Run

Froz does a good job with the pros and cons of Wesley Clark in the post below this one, so I won't do much elaborating here. But if you haven't read the Esquire article on Clark, I recommend you go do it now. Any doubts I had previously were answered. For my money (though admittedly, that ain't much money), this is THE guy.

I've been hesitantly supportive of Edwards to this point, mostly because I think he matches up with Bush better than anybody else in the field (sorry, Dean supporters - I like him and he is doing vitally important things for the Democratic Party, but he is at best a 50/50 shot against Bush, and this election is too important to take that gamble). But Wesley Clark ought to be president regardless of who else is running. As Digby says, "Wesley Clark isn’t just smart. He's brilliant. Overachieving Clinton-brilliant."

Before any of you gag on that statement, there is plenty to criticize Clinton for, but gray matter just isn't one of them. If you think you could beat Clinton in a policy debate, you probably think you could beat that Japanese guy in a hotdog eating contest, too. Trust me, you can't do either one and you'd just get hurt trying.

Anyhow, back on topic. The fact that Dean is the front-runner in the Democratic race and that no clear opponent has emerged has been taken as a sign of strength from the Dean camp. Unfortunately, I think it is more an indicator of the weakness of the field overall. Clark wouldn't just beat Bush, he would embarrass him throughout the campaign. Just try and imagine those debates without shooting coffee out of your nose. Moreover, I believe that a Clark candidacy would have serious coattails. He'd deliver several close Senate races to the D column - especially in the South - and I seriously doubt that any of the other candidates have that sort of pull.

Sure, I realize that the Esquire article is something of a puff piece, and the writer is more than a little enamored with the general. But read it and tell me that you aren't a little inspired. Clark is the real thing, an honest-to-god American hero with security bona fides unequalled anywhere. More importantly, he knows how to fight back, and to smile calmly while he's doing it. I know that Dean appeals to the anger of many Democrats, but anger plays well in primaries, and horribly in general elections. The Rove machine will find it all too easy to needle Dean until he explodes with something intemperate that will become a slam-dunk campaign commercial for Bush.

If he decides not to run, then I guess I'm back to Edwards, though I have doubts that he can win the nomination and I have even bigger doubts that either Erskine Bowles or Dan Blue could keep that Senate seat in the Democratic column (sigh). But should Clark's announcement come, I think the other Dems in the field ought to start clearing the deck and coalescing behind him. Clark will clean Bush's clock and, I suspect, reshape the very landscape of American politics.

UPDATE (12:22 pm): Amy Sullivan in the Washington Monthly on how Wesley Clark can win despite the late start.

Strange Bedfellows

The Democratic Presidential field may very well get a little shook up "by labor day" or "in a week or two" or "by the end of the month" or "in and around Baghdad and points north, south, east and west somewhat” or…wait… wrong story.

Anyway.

Maybe General (retired) Clark will run and maybe he won’t run, but just in case, who will gravitate to him and what does that mean? He’ll obviously get the kind of candidate honeymoon that would make Ah-nold jealous, being a highly visible "blow-dried Napoleon" and all. (Froz: Swish! 3 points!). Honeymoons don’t last forever, however; at least I have much more faith in his mastery of the issues than the Terminator’s. But the kind of impact he’ll have on the Demcratic Primary RACE could be interesting, largely because of people who can’t vote in the Democratic Primary.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy started 40 years ago. Many, if not most, but certainly not all, of those conservatives have gone ahead and changed their registration to Rep. A decorated soldier boy with the second sweetest flavor of Southern drawls (to North Carolina’s, of course – see John Edwards) will get regardfully raised eyebrows from many of these folk and there’s nothing Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh can do about it. That’s a real American over there; he’s a soldier.

But he’s still got to get the Democratic operatives and base to swoon if he’s to get the nod in Boston in July. I'm about as straight as they come, but as I told the Apostropher Prime a few weeks ago in conversation: Hell, those broad shoulders and confident, caring eyes even make me feel a little tingly. A pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, progressive-taxation and global warming-concerned (Froz: I’ve given up on ushering the political discourse towards the scientifically correct “global climate change”) guy with the ability to rub the chickenhawks’ lack of foreign policy credentials in their faces is a Democrat’s wet dream, right?

Or is it?

The word on Clark’s stance on the domestic issues seems to be soundbites selected by drafters, not the draftee himself. They are universally regurgitated, given a slight slant dependant on the particular drafting organization’s prevailing tendencies, and remarkably short on specifics in terms of policy agenda. Does he have electability written all over him, though. That smile... Talk to me.

Unfortunately, with that electability come some strange bedfellows.

We can lead by example. We can show our character. In 1980 and 1984, a group of Democrats had the courage to elect a Republican President, to help stir our country from its slumber. In a way, that small group, by putting their consciences ahead of their party affiliations, and by turning the tide of two elections, gave us an American President who restored our credibility in the eyes of the world. We have the opportunity to show the same courage and strength of character in this election; we have the opportunity to be this era’s Reagan Democrats.

Now am I all pumped up about a candidate that has the enthusiastic support of folks that thought Iran-Contra, El Salvador, and the Afghan Mujahidin (didn’t we see them again recently) “restored our credibility in the eyes of the world” and thought the war on drugs, disregard for our most unfortunate and a legacy of environmental degradation “help(ed) stir our country from its slumber”? Not without two teaspoons of trepidation.

And some of his pals make me a little nervous. From a Salon interview:

I like all the people who are there. I've worked with them before. I was a White House Fellow in the Ford administration when Secretary Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney was the deputy chief of staff at the White House and later the chief. [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz I've known for many, many years. [Deputy National Security Advisor] Steve Hadley at the White House is an old friend. [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] Doug Feith I worked with very intensively during the time we negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement; he was representing the Bosnian Muslims then, along with [Pentagon advisor] Richard Perle. So I like these people a lot. They're not strangers. They're old colleagues.

Not quite so enthralled anymore. But, Mmm, that Uniform… with medals, no less. What was this pretty red one for?

A Clark candidacy will cause several things:

1. Gephart wins Iowa convincingly. “Whew”, as far as he’s concerned.
2. Kerry, without the best “soldier image” in the field gets lost
3. Edwards files papers as a Senate candidate
4. Dean… Damn, where do you start here. Undoubtedly he’s hurt, but the grassroots organization is unlikely to jump ship. The level of deflation it experiences will largely depend on how successful Clark is in winning the spotlight and prolonging the honeymoon. That grassroots organization is exactly what Clark is missing. In a way, these guys really need each other.
5. Lieberman has to play more to the left. No, the recent enviro-kick won’t do it. Good luck, Joe.
6. Karl Rove starts sweating bullets as fast as an AK47 fires them.

And finally, The Democratic Party soul-searching gets a lot more interesting. I guess that’s what primaries are for. Will I change my registration from “Ind” and vote for him in the primary? Maybe. Would I vote for him in November? Certainly. Will that be as Pres or VP? Only he can say.

I'd show you my massive penis...

...but I'm afraid to get more than three feet away from the toilet.

This is the headquarters of Performance Marketing Ltd., one of the world's purveyors of so-called penis-enlargement pills. [...] But don't bank on the promised "three inches." There is no scientific evidence that any pill can enlarge the penis, says Franklin C. Lowe, professor of clinical urology at Columbia University. "If it were legitimate," he says, "I'd be a billionaire." What some customers might get from Performance Marketing's pills is a less-than-sexy dose of bacteria and other contaminants. Commissioned by The Wall Street Journal, Flora Research, San Juan Capistrano, Calif., conducted an independent laboratory analysis of a composite sample of 10 Performance Marketing pills and turned up significant levels of E. coli, yeast, mold, lead and pesticide residues.

The amount of E. coli bacteria - 16,300 colony-forming units per gram - appears to be particularly high, experts say. "I think it's safe to say it has heavy fecal contamination," says Michael Donnenberg, head of the infectious-diseases department at the University of Maryland. Although E. coli won't necessarily make you sick, Dr. Donnenberg says fecal matter, which might have come from animals grazing near herbal ingredients harvested for the pills, is prime breeding ground for all sorts of viruses, parasites and bacteria.

Oh well, back to Plan A, fellas. Or you could just take this guy's approach.

UPDATE (4:24 pm): Ogged at Unfogged one-ups me on this story: "If I've ever implied that you don't get shit for your money when you buy penis enlargement pills, let me say for the record, I was mistaken."

Morale Builder

The abysmal morale of American forces in Iraq has been well-documented. There is no clear mission, pinning down a date for the end of their tours is like nailing Jello to a board in a windstorm, and the conditions there are flatly horrific. Recruitment and re-enlistment rates are in a predictable freefall. The strain of being away from their families for a year at a time is unimaginable for us lucky people sitting behind our computers and flipping through cable channels.

Other countries are looking at the situation in Iraq and justifiably telling Washington that there is no way in hell they are plopping their soldiers down in the middle of this debacle. The civilian contractors that Rumsfeld expected to do much of the heavy logistical lifting for this operation are no-shows. Doctors Without Frontiers, the bravest SOBs on the planet (they still maintain a team in Bunia, Congo, for crying out loud), have withdrawn from Basra due to safety concerns. Something has to give, right?

Well, this should help everybody buck up.

For the first time since the all-volunteer Army began in 1973, a significant number of U.S. combat soldiers may have to start serving back-to-back overseas tours of up to a year each in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and South Korea, top Army officers say. [...] If the prediction is accurate, as many as 45,000 soldiers would have to double up. Some of the second tours would be for six months, but those in Iraq and Korea could require a second full year during which soldiers would be separated from their families. [...] Commanders are worried that the added tours will lower morale and cause a wave of exits throughout the Army. A key concern is that the deployments will cause an exodus of experienced, mid-career veterans such as sergeants, staff sergeants and captains, who are harder to replace than younger soldiers.

By next fall, Bush may have another truly amazing accomplishment to tack on to his resume: driving the rank-and-file of the military away from the Republican Party. They know who got them into this. And if General Wesley Clark enters the race - as many expect - you could see parts of the officer corps defecting as well. In the meantime, give up one evening out on the town and use the money to send a care package to a soldier (also here and here). It's a tiny sacrifice to us, but nothing you do could mean more to them.

The little president who cried wolf.

Steve Soto sifts through the tidal wave of bad news (for Bush, that is) that combined to make last week the most foreboding of this presidency. Specifically, he is losing to the Democrats now on every single issue, including those that his advisors have always assumed were unlosable. Much of the information comes from the most recent Newsweek poll, which makes nothing so clear as the fact that Americans have finally opened their eyes about Iraq and are starting to ask, "Just what in the hell are we supposed to be doing there?" Rest assured that the figures distressing Karl Rove most are these: 49% of registered voters say Bush should not get a second term (44% say he should) and his approval rating has dropped 18 points since April, to a barely-above-water 53%. Just for comparison, in the days immediately following his impeachment, Bill Clinton had approval ratings ranging from 67 to 73%.

Boo-yah. So much for the "wildly popular" Bush; that's just one more exploding myth. And speaking of exploding myths, one more leg propping up Bush's case for war just got snapped like a twig. Remember that nefarious fleet of drone aircraft that Bush swore was going to sweep over the United States and drop chemicals on us all? Yeah, sure you do. US weapons hunters have just confirmed that the drones are utterly unsuited for any such purposes and moreover, the US Air Force told Bush as much back when he was making the claim. To wit, he and his equally untrustworthy Secretary of State Colin Powell knew full well that this was bullshit, and went right ahead with the LIE all the same.

But the Air Force, which controls most of the American military's UAV fleet, didn't agree with that assessment from the beginning. And analysts at the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said the Air Force view was widely accepted within their ranks as well. Instead, these analysts believed the drones posed no threat to Iraq's neighbors or the United States, officials in Washington and scientists involved in the weapons hunt in Iraq told The Associated Press. The official Air Force intelligence dissent is noted in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons programs, parts of which were declassified last month as the Bush administration tried to defend its case for war.

"We didn't see there was a very large chance they (UAVs) would be used to attack the continental United States,'' Bob Boyd, director of the Air Force Intelligence Analysis Agency, said in an AP interview. "We didn't see them as a big threat to the homeland.'' Boyd also said there was little evidence to associate Iraq's UAVs with the country's suspected biological weapons program. Facilities weren't in the same location and the programs didn't use the same people. Instead, the Air Force believed Iraq's UAV programs were for reconnaissance, as are most American UAVs. Intelligence on the drones suggested they were not large enough to carry much more than a camera and a video recorder.

The fort is crumbling quickly. Is there any question why the Republican Party is so desperate to push through all this mid-term redistricting? They fear they have hitched their wagon to a horse that's headed to the glue factory - extra-legal shenanigans are the only thing that can save their sorry asses now. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and you can fool the Republican base all of the time (as they stand, fingers in ears, screaming LA LA LA LA LA), but eventually people notice that the emperor has no clothes. I'll bet it's getting pretty cold up there for ol' naked W.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to try to figure out how to get that mental image out of my head. [shudder]

I'm going to live forever.

NY Times: Life-Extending Chemical Is Found in Certain Red Wines

I'd better up my 401(k) contribution.

When Mathematicians Attack

LA Weekly has an interesting article about the search for a proof of Riemann's Hypothesis - the greatest unsolved math problem in existence, the mathematical Holy Grail. Even stating the hypothesis is a challenge, though in large terms it boils down to proving that prime numbers do have a purely logical distribution.

In essence it links the distribution of prime numbers to a complicated equation called the Riemann Zeta Function. For some values this equation equals zero, and it turns out there are an infinite number of such values, which mathematicians refer to as the "zeros" of the zeta function. Riemann demonstrated that there is a beautiful and unexpected link between these "zeros" and the pattern of the prime numbers.

Each Riemann zero can be represented as a point on something called the complex plane, one of mathematics’ most truly enchanted places. Formed from the intersection of the "real" and the "imaginary" numbers, the complex plane is also where the fabled Mandelbrot Set lives. To his astonishment, Riemann discovered that on this plane the zeta-function zeros seemed to lie in a strict vertical line, which is now called the critical line. Why this might be so is one of the deepest questions in mathematics. It was Riemann’s intuition, his hypothesis, that all the zeta zeros must lie on this line. [apostropher: links not in original passage]

Got it? The article explores some of the work of Andrew Odlyzko, who over the past 25 years has calculated over 30 billion zeta zeros in an attempt to find one outside the critical line. As you might imagine, he is now working with inconceivably large numbers, though he believes if there are any to be found, they would probably exist in ranges well beyond current computational power, as the "wildness" in these zeros increases glacially. But as tends to happen in science, by exploring the apparent randomness to the limits of our observational abilities, a larger metapattern has begun to emerge.

Already Odlyzko’s forays into the stratospheric zone of the Riemann zeros have verified something astonishing. It turns out these zero points are not arranged randomly on the critical line. Mysteriously, they follow the same statistical pattern that physicists have found in some kinds of atomic systems — specifically, what are known as "quantum chaotic systems." Thus, what seems at first a purely abstract discovery has turned up in nature. Nobody has the slightest idea why this might be so. But the revelation suggests the incredible possibility that we might be able to find (or build) a quantum system — perhaps some bizarre kind of atom — that would prove the Riemann Hypothesis. A number of physicists are now working toward that goal.

The interplay between mathematics and the material world has fascinated philosophers and scientists alike. "God ever geometrizes," Plato declared. "All is number," Tierry of Chartres concurred in the Middle Ages. Riemann himself developed his radical non-Euclidean geometry because he was convinced there must be a geometric explanation for the force of gravity. Fifty years after his death, Einstein demonstrated the truth of that insight. The link between Riemann’s zeta zeros and quantum mechanics suggests that understanding these zeros will help to illuminate the deeper mysteries of atoms, molecules and atomic nuclei.

Though Riemann’s Hypothesis was originally stated merely as an aside, it has turned out to be one of the most profound mathematical statements ever uttered. The deeper mathematicians go into it, the more connections they continue to discover. As Sabbagh writes, "The Riemann Zeta Function extends its tentacles into so many branches of mathematics it’s impossible to say where a solution might come from."

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Bush predicts more allied troops in Iraq

Bush said his administration is working with the United Nations to encourage allies to help bring peace to the country. "There will be more foreign troops in Iraq," he said.

Well, I suppose Americans have always preferred their presidents to be optimistic. And talk about optimism in the face of adversity:

Coalition forces in Iraq begin to be deserted by their allies

Mr Straw faces an uphill struggle to convince more countries to take part in coalition-led operations, and the creation of a UN force of "blue helmets" has already been ruled out by both the Americans and the UN.

Poland, which is to take military control of Iraq's central sector, signalled yesterday that it was handing back some territory to US troops, because of the heightened security risk after the bombing of UN headquarters. In Spain, opposition parties called for the withdrawal of the 1,300 troops committed to Iraq for peacekeeping operations, after the death of a naval officer in the attack.

Japanese Rethink on Iraq

Japan is considering reneging on its commitment to send troops to Iraq to assist in the aftermath of the war. The terrorist focus on soft targets, including the bombing of the UN offices in Baghdad on Tuesday, has led Japan to rethink its commitment of military personnel, while the US is looking for more international forces in Iraq. Japanese official sources said the lack of security in Iraq left a question mark over whether troops would be sent. If they were, it would be next year at the earliest, rather than the anticipated deployment in October.

At some point, though, optimism becomes self-delusi-- Hey look! here come some foreign troops!

Postwar Iraq has become magnet for terrorists

Although the United Nations has pledged to remain in the country, it has pulled out a third of its staff, and other organizations are reassessing their presence. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, whose loans will be essential to rebuilding Iraq's economy, withdrew their personnel this week.

Terrorists find Iraq an easy place to operate. It's a giant ammunition dump, filled with discarded and deadly explosives that are easy pickings for would-be bomb-makers. Saddam spent years building up his weapons arsenal. As the war wound down in April, many Iraqi soldiers just abandoned their guns and ammunition and walked away.

In a country the size of California, no number of soldiers can protect every hospital, hotel, bridge, electrical station, water and oil pipeline, especially from determined suicide attackers. Even if more troops could make a difference, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has refused to send them. Efforts to bring in more international troops have stumbled over the Bush administration's unwillingness to cede control to the United Nations.

Judge not, lest-- eh, just judge not.

If your television has been on during the past week, you already know about the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who placed the 5000+ pound monument to the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court in the middle of the night, then refused to remove it. The other eight justices unanimously agreed that he hadn't a legal leg on which to stand and ordered its removal.

My father's entire side of the family still lives in Alabama, most of them one county over from where this is all transpiring, so I'm somewhat familiar with the state and its politics. Rest assured, those eight justices ain't wild-eyed libruls. Chief Justice Moore, however, remained steadfast in his refusal to uphold the law, as his oath of office, sworn before God, required and thus earned himself a suspension pending an investigation.

"I've been ordered to do something I cannot do. I cannot violate my conscience," he pontificated. Well, guess what, Gomer? You can't be a judge either, then. Them's just the rules. Of course, he hardly needs the gavel now; expect to see him running for elective office very soon. Expect him to win.

I was all set to write something satirical about the judge and the throng of oppressed believers who crowded around their Dixie-flavored Qaaba, but I really don't think I can compete with Tom Burka's wickedly funny job of it, so go give your laughs to him. He's earned them.

Fox's Injunction Denied

In one of the least surprising rulings in many moons, a federal judge denied Fox News Channel's attempt to stop the release of Al Franken's new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.

[Franken] also said he was grateful for the publicity generated by the suit. Publisher Penguin Group added 50,000 copies to the original run of 270,000 after Fox filed suit, and rolled out the book Thursday instead of its planned September release date. "In addition to thanking my own lawyers," Franken said, "I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life." On Friday, the book was listed at No. 2 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, behind The South Beach Diet.

And just like that, "dumb like a fox" has an entirely new implication.

Steady Flash Mobbin' Your Ex-Steady

The flash mob phenomenon, where large groups of people show up unexpectedly at a predetermined location, perform some random act, then disperse to the puzzlement of onlookers, is one of those clever ideas that seems less clever with each iteration. The inevitable skewering parody has arrived, via the priceless mcsweeneys.net. Go get your chuckle on.

UPDATE (August 24, 2:36 pm): Yawn.

Warning: Do not point at head while using.

Honestly, I don't want anybody to get hurt and and I know that burns totally suck. But as someone who finds cellular phones profoundly annoying and vaguely but undeniably creepy, I'll admit I did have to chuckle at this story.

Spongewired

Sponges. Crazy sponges.

Scientists say they have identified a deep-sea sponge living in the darkness of tropical ocean waters, which grows thin glass fibres that can transmit light at least as well as industrial fibre optic cables used for telecommunications.

I don't foresee any patent lawsuits by our invertebrate inventors; their plan has nothing to do with cashing in on the latest technology. Turns out the prevailing theory for why these guys do this is that, like most adaptations, there's an ecological relationship. This one's symbiotic:

You scratch my back...

And now the big question: what can be the function of these light gathering and conducting structures? The most obvious idea is that they transmit light to symbiotic green algae for their use in photosynthesis and, indeed, this might be the case in Tethya seychellensis, a tropical sponge where green algae curl in strands around spicules, which radiate out from the interior to the surface.

and I'll scratch yours.

[...] the presence of symbiotic algae (Zoochlorella) that in exchange for having a good place to live, limited light and lots of necessary carbon dioxide, produce carbohydrates that the sponge uses as food.

Just as natural as can be. Why wouldn't you do this if you were a sponge?

I guess it's kinda like us and corn.

This world is too weird for words

And no, I'm no Mystaran bewildered by the fauna of the Hollow Moon

I gotcher power right here.

The Stranger has some bumper sticker ideas. And he's right. Why shouldn't the other six deadly sins get in on some of that patriotic, ass-kicking action? I'm pretty much holding out for these two, though.

(thanks, Steph)

Oh, that's reassuring...

Rats. I overwrote this post and in the process killed the comments, too.

It was something like this:

The Register reports news you'd rather not hear about a nuclear plant owned by FirstEnergy, the company that has become the focus of the investigation into last week's giant blackout.

The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, despite a belief by plant personnel that the network was protected by a firewall, SecurityFocus has learned. The breach did not post a safety hazard. [apostropher: Well, that makes me feel a little better.] The troubled plant had been offline since February 2002, when workers discovered a 6 x 5in hole in the plant's reactor head. [apostropher: Okay, no it doesn't.]

[...]

The Slammer attacks came after years of warnings about the vulnerability of power plants and electric distribution systems to cyber attack. A 1997 report by the Clinton White House's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, which conducted a six-month investigation of power grid cybersecurity, described a national system controlled by Byzantine networks riddled with basic security holes, including widespread use of unsecured SCADA systems, and ample connections between control centers and utility company business networks.

(tip: tengu)

My delete finger hurts.

I'm a lifelong Apple user, ranging from the hulking Apple II in my earliest computing days to my shiny, tiny Powerbook today, so the endless virus scares are a total non-threat for me. Nonetheless, after deleting at least 100 emails containing the inert (to Macs) Sobig.F virus over the past 24 hours, I think that if the authorities ever discover who set this thing free, I'm ready to impose the death penalty. And I propose we employ the piñata method: beat him with sticks until candy comes out of him.

Not quite the Queen's English.

Despite being something of a stickler for correct spelling and linguistic precision, I agree that languages are living, evolving creatures and truly comprehensive dictionaries should incorporate slang words that have entered common usage sufficiently.

However.

Not that anybody asked for my judgment on the matter, but I think it a step too far that the granddaddy of dictionaries, the Oxford Dictionary of English, just bestowed its official mark of legitimacy upon "bootylicious."

Guess that's one way of lookin' at it.

Via StoutDem, who was very busy between six and ten Wednesday morning, comes this Houston Chronicle article with the truly astonishing lead-in:

Charges against a man accused of driving his van through the front entrance of a Houston abortion clinic in March were dismissed by a federal judge who ruled a part of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act unconstitutional.

Read it again; it starts to get really funny after a while. I suppose they were discriminating by not providing sufficient access to pop-eyed wackjobs in vans? "Nope, see, them front doors shoulda been bigger. He di'nt have no choice." The ruling turns on a semi-arcane question over interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution relative to a 2000 review and ruling on the Violence Against Women Act, but it's probably worth mentioning that the judge is Kenneth Hoyt, a Reagan appointee who has proven before that, well, that he's an idiot, mostly.

Hoyt, who is black, said at one point that race is not a factor in some diseases -- including sickle cell anemia -- and has refused to admit evidence about the rate of lupus contraction among blacks "because white people wrote it."

The recusal motion also quotes a remark Hoyt made that physical differences among races were the product of their environments. "Why do you think Chinese people are short? Because there is so much damn wind over there they need to be short. Why are they so tall in Africa? Because they need to be tall. It's environmental," he said. "I mean, you don't jump up and get a banana off a tree if you're only 4 feet. If you're 7 feet tall and you're standing in China, then you're going to get blown away by that Siberian wind, aren't you?"

That's right. He's a federal judge.

Secondary Horror

Bob Herbert gets it.

And for the folks posting "clever" comments here and here and here: you're a bunch of f***ing ghouls whose humanity has been whittled down to the point where it wouldn't fill a thimble. Don't ever lecture me about morality and values again.

Search engine weirdness

Apostropher is the #1 hit out of 24,083 returned at alltheweb.com for insect porno.

Caught on film, no less.

My father often said, "That's dumber than a whale fart."

Really, he did.

A Small Sense of Humor

I had to share.

The almost 4 year-old Froz Junior, after contemplating and gobbling his Goldfish (TM) munchies for a few minutes, walks into my study holding a half-finished bowl of said snacks and announces:

"Daddy, heh heh, I've got a fishbowl! heh heh."

Attaboy!!

It's OK to Be Vague

Time Out Youth is a twelve year old group in Charlotte, North Carolina, composed of human services professionals, educators, physicians and clergy, who offer counseling and support services to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (hereafter referred to simply as "gay" to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome) adolescents. This is the billboard they attempted to put up in Charlotte:

Adams Outdoor Advertising said no, and the general manager of their Charlotte office explained, ""Because it's targeted to kids, this would be very, very offensive to parents of those children. It's a message that sounds encouraging." So AOA offered some billboard messages that they would be willing to host, including:

*Be who you are.
*Friends that know what you're feeling.
*Life is good! Everything will be OK!

A little vague, no? That's like restricting GM's billboard choices to "Wheels save time" and "Antifreeze helps." I'm surprised their list didn't include "Quit bitching. Self-loathing is part of the teenage experience." To be fair, AOA is a private business renting private ad space and as such has the right to accept or reject any message they damn well please. But their case might be strengthened if some of their other billboards weren't carrying ads for Powerball, Budweiser, Hooters, The Men's Club, and The Paper Doll Lounge. The previous link has another good replacement slogan idea: "Just pray ... maybe those funny feelings will go away."

Kidding aside, though, their reluctance is a little odd, since it was just two years ago that Adams Outdoor Advertising did rent billboard space to Time Out Youth, to very little controversy. That time, it was a picture of four adolescents with the caption "We are your gay youth." I can't for the life of me figure out how the latest billboard's message is any different than the one that they did host.

But then maybe I've just been swayed by all that gay food I've been eating. More Pineapple Betty, please!

Mmmawwiage

Tips to Calpundit through Atrios for the link.

The Presidential Prayer Team wants us to:

Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to biblical principles. With many forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government.

So, Alex Frantz at Public Nuisance proposes the wording for the Defense of Marriage Amendment:

1 Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women.(1) Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives.(2)

2 A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed.(3) Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden.(4)

3 Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce.(5)

4 If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law.(6)

1: Gen. 29, 17 - 28; II Sam. 3, 2 - 5.

2: II Sam. 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21

3: Deut. 22, 13 - 21

4: Gen 24:3; Num 25 1 - 9; Ezra 9:12; Neh. 10:30

5: Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9

6: Gen. 38 6 - 10; Deut 25 5 - 10

I'm breaking the first law of journalism here by not checking ALL the Biblical references for accuracy. If anyone finds one failing I promise I'll self-flagellate for them as penance. But I get to wear a clown suit.

Suckered!

I was, anyhow. Sharp-eyed reader Stu just sent me this link, about the British reality show I blogged last week:

Lapdance Island, a new E4 reality series where 10 males are stranded with 40 lapdancers on a tropical island, is actually a fake, according to this week's Broadcast. The programme - which has the catchphrase "you can look but you can't touch" - has been heavily advertised on E4 in the past few weeks, inviting would-be contestants to apply for a spot on the show. Lapdance Island is actually a fake for new comedy series called The Pilot Show, however, where members of the public put themselves through embarrassing auditions for a chance of getting on TV.

Heh heh. Somehow, that's even funnier. Wacky Brits.

Mullet haiku anew

Aerodynamic
Run fast, my hair's a spoiler
Just like my Trans-Am

(from Mark Morford's email newsletter)

Previous winner here.

Horror

Here is the direct link to a clip on CBS News' website (pointed out first by Josh Marshall, but without the direct link) shot by a film crew that happened to be filming proceedings at the Iraqi UN headquarters when the car bomb exploded. Warning: this is extremely graphic and disturbing footage, and if you find that sort of thing upsetting, you will be very, very upset at this. All the same, it's important to remember that as disturbed as you may be watching this roll, the troops are seeing this sort of thing every day, only on a slightly smaller scale. But every rocket-propelled grenade attack on an armored vehicle produces the same sort of chaotic, blood-spattered horror. Salam Pax was there an hour after the bombing. After witnessing the carnage he closes his post about it simply despairing, "we have plunged into darkness."

This is not a winnable war. We will not bring democracy, peace, or any other high-minded ideal to Iraq. We can't even bring water, power, or security reliably. And if we leave now, an all-out civil war will begin. We have taken a country that was marked by organized, psychotic violence and mediocre services and turned it into one marked by chaotic, psychotic violence and close to no services.

If Israel can't stop these sorts of bombings in the tiny West Bank, against a lightly armed populace with severe restrictions on its movement, what chance do we stand in sprawling Iraq, which positively bristles with weapons and has utterly porous borders? None. Bringing Iraq under even nominal control is going to take at least 3 times the number of soldiers we have on the ground now, and we don't have nearly that number of forces to spare, without massive National Guard call-ups or a draft, both of which, Bush must know, would result in an all-out revolt stateside. It would be a declaration of surrender in the upcoming election, and we all know that the election is the only real motivator for this administration.

I constantly heard arguments leading up to and during the invasion that if we didn't remove Hussein, then he would just stay in power until he died, to be replaced by one of his sons. I think the latter is false: Qusay was an ineffectual drunk and Udai was hated and arguably psychopathic. The idea that either of them could hold power for any amount of time is questionable at best. The death or fall of Saddam (and I don't think lifelong rule was in any way guaranteed, either) would likely have set off a series of palace coups and an ugly civil war, which is, of course, where Iraq is probably headed now, no matter what we do.

But at least then we wouldn't be stuck in the middle of it, having claimed responsibility for the entire horrific affair. Yesterday it was the UN headquarters. How long before we have another event like the Marines in Beirut in 1983? Granted, that was a MUCH softer target than we present in Iraq, but does anybody doubt that somebody, somewhere in Iraq is planning it right this moment?

I don't have any good solutions to offer. This administration fucked up in the worst possible manner with this invasion, and the flag-wavers fell right in line behind them, numbed to the realities of occupation from a steady diet of remote-control air wars and an unholy barrage of deception from our foreign policymakers. We cannot control this situation. We will not control this situation. How many people - Americans and Iraqis - are we willing to sacrifice before we admit it?

I'm desperately trying to find a silver lining in all of this, and the best I can come up with is that maybe it will serve as a slap in the face to Americans and force them to realize that even with the most powerful military in all of human history, we are not omnipotent. Perhaps we will begin using our defense department for defense rather than constant offense. Arrogantly using it for the latter has earned us bitter hatred from too much of the rest of the world. Salam Pax has a quote from Samuel Huntington as the tagline on his site:

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

The latter have figured out how to match that power through asymmetrical methods of warfare. And yet, our dim-witted, faux-cowboy president just keeps swinging at this tarbaby, though the price is not being paid by him personally, but by your friends, relatives, and neighbors. Or their widows and their children. Not to mention 22 million Iraqis. End your vacation on your pretend ranch, get the hell back to the White House, and start working on extracting us from this nightmare. You have played right into bin Laden's hands. You have done exactly what he hoped you would do; better, even, since it's much easier for the jihadis to get into and move about Iraq than Afghanistan. Neither your military nor your god can produce a victory here.

Cut your losses now, you ignorant, arrogant, blood-soaked prick. Except they aren't your losses. When I see your daughters being fitted for artifical limbs or having their faces surgically reconstructed or being lowered into the ground in a flag-draped coffin, I'll believe they are your losses. I didn't think my esteem for you could sink any lower than it already was, but at this point, I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.

In sickness and in health...

Does that include a tendency toward drunken berserker rages?

But the real drama didn't begin until the newlyweds got into a screaming match in the idyllic restaurant's parking lot. Samen [...] "spit on her ring and smashed her wedding cake on the ground," Wolf said. Then she took out six or seven flower-filled vases, he and cops allege.

The bridegroom "started driving off and she took a run at the car and, like an eagle, spread herself on the hood in her wedding gown and fell onto the ground," said Wolf, who noted he had never seen anything like it in his 19 years as a restaurateur.

[...]

Wolf called the cops when the bride began walking barefoot down a state highway. [...] When cops tried to calm Samen down in the police cruiser, she kicked the window and then tried to bite an officer, police said. That's when they slapped the cuffs on her.

Well, at least she was dressed all pretty for her mug shot. After posting a $1000 bond, the happily married couple is now on their honeymoon. Not an auspicious beginning, methinks.

Update: Part II, Part III

Planes, Trains, and...

Gassbags.

Here’s a newsflash: Amtrak “lost” just over a billion dollars last year (FY02). Or rather, The Federal Government had to “bailout” Amtrak to the tune of a billion dollars last year. Or rather, it “cost” just over a billion dollars to keep our National passenger rail line operating.

I was surprised at the pervasiveness on the web of that special brand of vitriol reserved for this particularly despised fleecer of the American taxpayer. I thought we liked choo-choos. Every citizen under 8 that I know does; and I’ve often thought we should look to children for context, if not outright leadership in our public discussions. I digress, perhaps that’s another topic for another apostrophization. Where was I? Oh, right: Amtrak executives (or are they bureaucrats? How do you tell the difference?) are ripping us off.

A common reference in these rants is how the leadership of a “true business”, that sacred embodiment of all that is just, right, and honest in its actions and that daily faces the laws of nature – prosper or perish – with noble realism and adaptive agility well outside those protective, perverting shields of public procedure, would have rolled up their sleeves, tightened their belt, asked the honest questions, and solved the problems when presented with the first signs of trouble. Perhaps those Amtrak bureaucrats (or are they executives? How do you tell the difference?) could learn a thing or two from the private sector. I bet they could. And from companies who similarly were having a few cash flow problems.

First they’d need to grease the palms of the relevant elected decision makers; call it insurance. Then maybe some layoffs; play hardball with unions if you have to but get concessions on benefits. If you can accomplish the first two with some success, give the top dogs some big bonuses for their efforts. Instead of or in addition to those, maybe just raid the employees’ retirement funds and cook the books to look good enough to pump up the stock price (NOTE TO SELF: remember to dump stock before the secret gets out we’re broke) and hope the problem disappears before anyone sees it. If all else fails, go before the US citizenry crying and say it’s essential – for the public good, of course - that they continue cutting you checks.

These morons that think that our society’s parasite problem is the staff, operations, and investments in the public sphere are seriously barking up the wrong tree.

Just by comparison, $1 B is:
The average amount lost by the 10 largest US airline carriers last year.
By the way, it may sound like I’m against airlines, I’m not. They’re important parts of the national transportation infrastructure as well. But continue to compare:
Roughly one-third of what the Federal expenditures on airport construction will be next year.
Approximately one-fifth of the annual budget of the TSA.
Almost one-eighth of the FAA budget for air traffic control.

It’s also:
The amount ConocoPhillips will spend on oil exploration and infrastructure in Alaska next year.
The subsidy (primarily road building before cutting and replanting afterward) for the timber industry to log in our National Forests each year.
The average amount spent on each of the four largest urban loops in my great home state of North Carolina. And…
Don’t do it…Don’t include an Iraq reference…Don’t Include An Iraq Reference…DON’T INCLUDE AN IRAQ REFERENCE!… Ah, shit. The amount we spend occupying Iraq every 8 days.

If all that it costs to fund a passenger rail system in the US is a Federal outlay of $4 per man, woman and child in America per year then it’s a bargain.
Shut up.
Fund it.
Next line item, please. We have far fatter fish to fry.
Let Mr. Gunn do his job of running and improving Amtrak instead of being dragged into political fights for its survival.

As a matter of fact, if we can manage to replace the Goofball responsible for proposing Amtrak solutions next year, maybe we can install someone with the brains and guts to double or triple that amount. Oh, wait; priorities: Let’s postpone the increases; we need to clean up these gargantuan Republican deficits first.
Ah-gain.

Amtrak is transportation infrastructure. It is important for it to be in good shape. Starving it and throwing it out on the street is not the answer. Carving it up is not the answer because, contrary to popular belief, there are no money making runs. The only way any private entity would buy any of them, even the Northeast Corridor is if it came with big subsidies. Kinda puts you back at square one, doesn’t it.

The classic corporate solution: send the work overseas where it’s cheap, is not an option. It’s our passenger rail line; it’s kinda fixed here. One (of many) reason that it’s vital to not let Amtrak wither on the vine is because with all the uncertainties regarding energy (primarily the increasingly obvious costs involved in procuring petroleum from the middle east and rather significant concerns about global climate change) rail is hands-down the most energy efficient way to move people around. Abandoning the passenger rail system to entropy is a bad idea for North American civilization.

A Q&A session with Don Phillips, a rail expert of whom I’d never heard before researching this post, is a good followup read.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday dear Bubba,
We sure do miss you.

And Hey! We have another one in the house!

Dear Afghanistan,
Sorry we forgot your birthday.
We’ve been kinda busy around here.

Hope you have a good one nonetheless.

Your pal,
America

What?

Karachi, Pakistan. Sunni militants kill a Shi'ite doctor. In response, Shi'ite mobs . . . attack a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Did I miss part of this story?

Coral Reefs Doomed?

Marine paleontologists say that a thousand years of overfishing have killed coral reefs to the point where they could disappear altogether in a matter of decades without drastic multi-government intervention to expand no-take zones. In some spots like Jamaica, the amount of the coral still alive is down to 5% of the reef.

Besides threatening the food supply of much of the world, reef loss could imperil natural harbors that are sheltered by coral formation and could undermine tourism based on the appeal of vibrant coral life. Failure to prevent continued coral reef deterioration could turn countries such as Australia -- which are dependent on tourism at attractions such as the Great Barrier Reef -- into "Third World countries," Pandolfi said.

Some anti-environmentalists might scoff, saying that humanity will continue to muddle through whatever happens to the coral reefs, Pandolfi acknowledged. He added: "If you want to live in a world where the ocean is mostly jellyfish and bacteria, there's nothing I can do about it."

Well, if Larry Flynt can run for governor...

Zack Medford is a 20-year-old junior at North Carolina State University who is running for a seat on the Raleigh City Council. There is still some doubt as to whether he is actually allowed to run, since the state constitution requires candidates to be 21, and the Wake County elections board has said no. Medford holds that since he turns 21 on October 7th, prior to the December swearing in date, that shouldn't be an issue.

But that's not his biggest problem at this point. Medford was a columnist for the NCSU student newspaper, and maintained a (now defunct) personal, um, "humor" website. And the News and Observer runs down a few of the "humorous" items.

Explicit descriptions of 33 hard-core sex acts, many of which harm and demean women. The list describes punching women in the face, nose or back of the head during sex; defecating on them; or "ramming" a woman's head against a wall. [...] A diary of his 2002 spring break trip that describes meeting four women at the beach. He says when one woman ignored him, he wanted to fill her mouth with sand and urinate on her. [...] An advice column that describes breaking up with a past girlfriend by having someone douse her with vodka then throw a lit match in her hair. He wrote that he "laughed heartily" while urging a transvestite to urinate on the woman to put the fire out.

"You have to look at this, basically, through the view of college students," the article quotes him as explaining, amid a torrent of backpedaling and apologies. Umm, yeah, you do, I suppose, particularly since his campaign platform seems mostly predicated on having Raleigh police lay off of breaking up college parties. Unfortunately for Medford, the website also contained "descriptions of drunken antics," which, given his not-yet-legal-to-drink status are problematic. Now, I think the 21 year drinking age is absurd and counter-productive, and I frankly believe that everybody should be able to put whatever - or whoever - they wish into their bodies. But:

Medford, a member of the city's Substance Abuse Advisory Commission, does advise students to drink responsibly. He acknowledged that, though underage, he has been a drinker. He said that he could not recall whether he has consumed alcohol since being appointed by council members to the substance abuse board July 1.

He can't remember? Puh-leeze. He would sound less guilty just admitting it. To be fair, this all paints him as no different from 80% of the students on any college campus to the left of Bob Jones University. And none of it should be disqualifying. But I suspect this isn't going to be his year, all the same. It's just too easy to ridicule.

The lesson in all of this? The internet has a long, long memory. I'm pretty certain apostropher.com has already scuttled my future Supreme Court nomination by the inevitable Olsen Twin co-presidency (and yes, those pictures make me feel dirty and ashamed, but DAMN!). On a related note, this week I had my first ever experience of seeing a porn ad page on the internet, and realizing, "Hey, wait a minute... I KNOW HER."

Energy Schemes

The intent that buildings are supposed to protect us from the elements juxtaposed with the fact that residents of high-rises throughout the Northeast US and Canada have been sweltering precisely because their homes or offices are designed to operate, with huge consumption of energy, on the principle of canned, conditioned air strikes me as the height of irony. Especially because we

WASTE SO DAMN MUCH OF IT.

While offering little consolation to those who are suffering through circumstances I know to be disruptive at best and deadly at worst, there are better solutions. From where do they come? You’d be surprised.

Now, Africa is paying an offbeat tribute to these ugly towers of bug-holed mud. Harare's newest office complex is said to be the only one in the world to use the same cooling and heating principles as the termite mound. That's no mean feat. Termite mounds are marvels of engineering. Deep inside, the insects farm a fungus, their only food. It must be kept at exactly 87 degrees, while the temperatures on the African veld outside range from 35 degrees at night to 104 degrees during the day. They do it by venting breezes in at the base of the mound, down into chambers cooled by wet mud carried up from water tables far below, and up through a flue to the peak. Toiling with the tireless, compulsive work ethic of all ants, they constantly dig new vents and plug old ones to regulate the temperature.

Now before anybody offers comments (below) that the article further down states “you couldn’t do this in New York” and tenants are quoted as saying “ it can be stuffy at times” so Froz Gobo must be some off-the-deep-end enviro-wacko that worships trees (I don’t…exactly) and thinks children ought to run around naked (mine does, however) might I state that this is the first time to my knowledge anyone tried to model a 33-storey office building on a termite mound. Give biomimicry and greenbuilding a break. New (however low) technologies are experimental. I would guess that the first time a human being tried to cross a creek with an ingeniously positioned log, she probably got wet.

Around here they’re known more for destroying structures than building them, but researching this post this evening, I came across one , two and three particularly cool links with different foci about termites. Read if you’re into that sort of thing.

My 2.5 seconds of fame.

Blogland VIP Kevin Drum at Calpundit says maybe I should write his blog for him. I'm all yours, Kevin, if you're willing to adopt a 34-year son and give me a big enough allowance to pay my mortgage...

Three cheers for evolution!

More at http://www.humandescent.com/index2.shtml

Props to TrickL-D for the link, because I desperately needed a laugh today...

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282

In the middle of June, I moved from Chapel Hill to Durham, where my sole choice of local phone carriers was Verizon. It has not yet been a pleasant business relationship, for reasons too prosaic to go into here. So I took some additional satisfaction in reading this article in the Village Voice (courtesy of Nathan Newman):

For the first time in years, the Communications Workers of America, the largest of Verizon's unions, broke with its policy of no contract, no work, a posture of militancy designed to bring management to heel and win last-minute concessions. But different times breed new and different tactics.

Instead of walking out, the phone company unions went into a labor version of rope-a-dope, the brilliant Muhammad Ali boxing tactic of covering up and burrowing down while your opponent uselessly flails about, unable to land a solid blow. Replacement workers remained holed up in their hotels, representing a hefty added payroll as regular union workers went about their normal routines.

"We didn't stay at the table because we thought we were close to a deal," said one union leader last week. "We chose to stay because the company was totally geared up for a strike and had expended millions. There were tens of thousands of management people flown in, most of them from Verizon West. This totally shocked them."

Give 'em hell, guys.

"We have no mission."

These are last week's letters to Stars and Stripes, the US military's flagship news publication. You can read all day long about the godawful situation for soldiers in Iraq in the news, but here are the words of the poor men and women that are mired in the middle of it. Notice how many times you read some expression of frustration at having no mission.

Soldiers trained to operate artillery pieces and tanks are doing foot patrols and police work. Military parents are sending their children water, for Christ's sake. Guys are dying in their sleep, likely from dehydration and heatstroke. An unexplained, deadly disease is popping up around the country. Others are taking their own lives. For every dead soldier, there are many others whose bodies have been mangled, teenagers who will spend the rest of their lives in a wheelchair, others who will come home to their spouses and children disfigured and disabled. We aren't seeing many pictures of these soldiers, we aren't much hearing their stories. But we will.

There is no winning here. Morale is abysmal, and that bodes very poorly for our soldiers' relations with the very people they are trying to protect. Troops are so nerve-wracked, frightened, and hostile that they will shoot at anybody - even Iraqi police trying to arrest car thieves.

Every Iraqi shot turns another group of family and friends from grudging neutrality toward open hatred. The entire situation is a disaster. If power couldn't get back on in New York City in another couple of days, it would be a very dangerous place to be after sundown. Imagine, then, that it's 30-40 degrees hotter, unemployment is rampant, clean water is haphazard, you need an automatic weapon to defend your home against roving criminal bands at night, and you've been dealing with daily blackouts for six months. And then the army of the country that destroyed your power grid and water system and put you out of work shoots your brother or your neighbor or your husband.

Or your child.

It doesn't matter what you thought of the former regime; it's history and good riddance to it. Qusay and Udai Hussein are dead? Whatever. Now there is a new regime and, let's be honest, your day-to-day life at the moment is decidedly worse under it. How much longer is rhetoric about freedom and democracy from a smirking, pretend cowboy in air-conditioned DC going to keep you content to wait and see what happens?

The links in this post (and bits of the content) are from Steve Gilliard's blog, which doesn't seem to have any permalinks to reference. I share his fear that we may to have to fight our way out of Iraq, and I'm afraid that what follows that is a savage free-for-all. The Spanish Civil War with an Arabic accent. This administration has set a ball in motion that they have only a slim chance of controlling, and it isn't like they didn't have plenty of people warning them.

Every congressperson that voted to authorize this should have to suit up in full body armor and patrol Sadr City. And the PNAC crew that worked so hard to get us into this? They should be run out of Washington on a rail.

Turning Tides?

Well, this certainly comes as a surprise.

Nearly 8,000 American doctors, arguing that U.S. health care is collapsing, have called for a national health insurance system similar to the one Canada has had for nearly 40 years. Their appeal was made this week in an article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. The doctors, from all parts of the country, say that only a government-administered program can solve existing American health care problems. More than 41 million Americans have no health insurance and millions more have inadequate coverage.

[...]

Currently, about 26 cents on every U.S. health care dollar is spent on paperwork and administration. Replacing private health insurance companies with a single, government insurer like Medicare, which spends about 3% on administration, would save the U.S. $200 billion dollars annually.

It's important to note here the differences between the Canadian system and, say, the British system. The Brits have socialized medicine, while the Canadians have socialized insurance. It has become an accepted article of faith by many on the right (hell, by some on the left as well) that private industry is, by definition, more efficient than the government. This is, of course, utter nonsense. Industry is better at some things, government is better at others.

Private insurers play no role in delivering your healthcare. None. They only serve to shuffle money and paperwork around, and in the meantime, they have to extract an entire stratum of profit for their shareholders. Every single complaint that could be levelled at government-provided health insurance can just as validly be pinned on private insurance as well.

"Collapsing" is not too strong a word for our current health care system, and as the boomer generation starts retiring and entering the age where medical problems balloon, this process will only accelerate. Unfortunately, Democrats are still so spooked by the insurance industry's broadside against Clinton's middle-of-the-road scheme that they are afraid to touch the subject. Maybe this will embolden some of them and an honest debate can begin. Maybe.

An Army of One

I'm swamped at work and going out for dinner with my brother for his (belated) birthday tonight, so there likely isn't going to be much written here today. I did, however want to post a link to a mighty powerful and sobering clip running at takebackthemedia.com called An Army of One. Don't miss it. Forward it extensively. Then try to figure out why the GOP continues to hold the reputation as the party of the military when their treatment of it is, at best, cavalier.

I found the link (as is so often the case) through Daily Kos.

What a bunch of fox-ups.

Yeah, yeah, I'm late to the game on this, but after FoxNews sued Al Franken for using the words "fair and balanced" in the title of his latest book, his sales rank on amazon.com went from #489 to #4. "I'm not worried," Franken said in a statement, "but I'd like to thank Fox for all the publicity."

I'd call them halfwits, but I think that's about 50% too generous.

Next up: Wendy's sues the porn industry.

Can't Say I'm Surprised.

The drip, drip, drip of revelations of lies and distortions about Iraq's weapons programs continues. Josh Marshall links to this WorldNetDaily article:

A former Energy Department intelligence chief who agreed with the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its defunct nuclear-arms program was awarded a total of $20,500 in bonuses during the build-up to the war, WorldNetDaily has learned.

Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September. His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say. Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.

[...]

Rider is said to have earned his second bonus of $13,000 from [Energy Secretary Spencer] Abraham in February for exceeding performance expectations as head of the intelligence office. Sources say the secretary wanted to pay him $20,000, but was informed he'd already received $7,500 just nine months earlier. Bonuses that big are rare, and Energy insiders say they cannot recall previous intelligence chiefs receiving as much bonus money as Rider, who is said to be close to Abraham.

Rider served as DOE's acting intelligence chief for just nine months, stepping down in February, right before the invasion began. Put simply, he was installed as intelligence chief at the beginning of Bush's march to war, overruled the guys who have spent their careers assessing these sorts of situations and knew the administration's nuke claims were pure crap, got paid twenty large, and then stepped down once the war was a fait accompli. What had he done prior to his nine-month stint? He was an HR manager with no intelligence experience. Could the fetor rising from this be any more repellent?

Unrealistic Reality TV

Lapdance Island (UK - Channel 4)

Guys, they have a form to fill out if you'd like to be a contestant that includes the questions:

1. What is it about a tropical island inhabited by lap dancers that appeals to you most?

Um, the fact that it's a tropical island inhabited by lap dancers.

4. Your sexual urges are likely to increase dramatically throughout the show. Give us one example of how you might take this matter in hand.

My inner Beavis is simply beside himself at that question.

Internet Killed the Porno Mag Star

General Media, Inc., publisher of Penthouse Magazine, has filed for bankruptcy after watching circulation fall from 5 million to just over 500,000. Apparently, it's really hard to compete with an ubiquitous, mostly free product. It makes me wonder how all the newspapers with websites stay in business. I never buy a paper any longer unless I'm in a coffeeshop or waiting at an airport.

Bush has a plan to fix the deficit.

To fix it in place for the rest of your tenure on Earth, that is. The administration is preparing to try to make permanent the already-passed temporary tax cuts for the rich, while gearing up to present yet another round of new ones for next year. However, the Washington Post, who inexplicably lit into Al Gore for criticizing Bush's fradulent case for war while their own reporters were revealing yet more brazenly fraudulent claims, says that the price tag for this misadventure is going to be entirely more expensive than any of us were told.

In a recent interview on CNBC's "Capital Report," Bremer said of rebuilding costs: "It's probably well above $50 billion, $60 billion, maybe $100 billion. It's a lot of money." President Bush and other administration officials have refused to provide projections, saying too much is unpredictable. That has angered lawmakers of both parties, who are writing the budget for the coming election year even as federal deficits approach $500 billion.

[...]

Brookings Institution fellows Lael Brainard and Michael O'Hanlon said in a Financial Times article this month that military and reconstruction costs could be from $300 billion to $450 billion. Taxpayers for Common Sense said postwar costs over the next decade could range from $114 billion to $465 billion. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences projected 10-year expenses from $106 billion to $615 billion.

That's all over and above the $60 billion we have already thrown away on this. See, nobody would have signed on if Bush had stood up in the State of the Union address and said, "We want to spend roughly half a trillion dollars and an indeterminate number of American lives over the next decade to invade and occupy Iraq because we have evidence that the Ba'ath regime might one day reconstruct their illegal weapons programs, which we know for a fact were at least 95% destroyed during the inspections regime."

Instead of using the USS Lincoln to "prance around on a flight deck dressed up like a pilot" (as General Wesley Clark put it) and declare "mission accomplished," Bush should have been informing the American people and the world that all that had been accomplished was the first and simplest stage of a decade-long, half-trillion dollar undertaking. No, scratch that. He should have levelled with the public about that before the first bomb was dropped. But then he wouldn't have been able to get his war that gave him such a chubby.

The Democrats should be hammering this one home. Many (perhaps most) Americans will shrug at the fact that the entire weapons argument was a charade and that the links to al-Qaeda were demonstrably false from the get-go. As evidenced by all the post facto rationalizing and justifying from the right wing media, Americans expect politicians to lie to them.

Sticker shock, on the other hand, is quite a bit more visceral and immediate. And this may set the bar for all shocking stickers to come. Unfortunately but predictably, this administration's f*ck-you approach to diplomacy has placed us in a situation where most of the world would sooner spit in our passed hat than drop doubloons. What we are witnessing is either gross incompetence (gross incompetence = normal incompetence x 144) or a level of dishonesty to which not even Richard Nixon and Oliver North's secret love-child could ever hope to achieve.

BOING!

So late last night I was flipping through channels on the television, speedily moving past the dead zone in the middle where there is seldom anything I would stop to watch. As the Spike network flashed past (the cable channel formerly known as TNN, now that Spike Lee dropped his ridiculous lawsuit), I was certain I'd seen a glimpse of a fellow dunking a basketball. Not unusual, except that this guy's waist was about rim-level. Now, having grown up in North Carolina, I've seen my share of flashy dunkers - Jordan, Stackhouse, Vince Carter, Grant Hill, et. al. - but I'd never seen anybody soar that high.

When I turned back, I discovered it was something called Slamball, full-contact basketball played on a court with four trampolines built in at each end of the floor, heavily padded rims, and hockey-style plexiglass walls around the court. The rules, well, there didn't seem to be too many. Guys check each other into the boards, they bounce eight or nine feet in the air soaring toward the basket, while the defenders do the same in an attempt to block dunks with mighty body crashes waaaay up in the sky. And these are some big guys playing it.

At first I thought, "Just what the world needs. Another ridiculous 'extreme' sport." But after watching for a few minutes, I couldn't change the channel. It is an amazing, acrobatic, insanely entertaining spectacle, though it seems like injured ankles should have been occurring every other play. In fact, I didn't see a single injury, which seemed to defy the laws of both physics and anatomy. The official rules, photos, and video clips can be found here. Apparently, this is the second season, and I'm unsure how I'd not managed to hear of it previously. Though it makes me feel a bit the sucker, I'll sheepishly admit that I'm hooked.

If a Picture...

is worth a thousand words, then a good map is worth a million. Let's go to Palestine.

A little stage setting first: We'll start with who owned what in Israel/Palestine/Includingthewestbank (Heretofore known as ‘The Holy Land’) in 1945.

With the world just out of a horrible mess, the newly unpackaged United Nations proposed the Colonel's Own, Original Recipe 2 state solution in the Holy Land. These are the people on whom it was deposited.

Well, a bunch of neighbors with stronger cultural and religious ties to one of those groups than the other said we won’t stand for that shit and invaded in 1948.

But OOPS! that invasion didn’t fare so well, so they said Uncle in 1949.

Meanwhile, Europe wasn’t the only place going through anti-Jewish convulsions. About as many Jews were being run out of town throughout the Arab world as Palestinians would ultimately be from, well, Palestine.

After some on and off fighting in the 1950s, a seriously threatened Israel preemptively attacked her neighbors in 1967 and her neighbors said Uncle again.

Feeling pretty confident, Israel started “requisitioning” land in the West Bank.

Well, that pissed off her neighbors again and they attacked when they really shouldn't have. But alas, her neighbors had to say Uncle a third time

After calling so many Uncles, one and then another of her neighbors signed peace treaties with Israel.

That left the other two neighbors as the prime points of friction and Israel dealt with them quite differently throughtout the 1980s.

To further flesh-out the present context, here are a few more maps of themes or regions neglected in the synopsis above, such as:
The Gaza Strip
The neighborhoods of Jerusalem
And the all important, yet horribly under-reported, status of WATER.

So, who has offered insulting and retractable pittances, who has made impossible and unreasonable demands, who is guilty of duplicity, who is vested in lasting conflict and retribution? Well, pretty much everybody in any position of power at this point. Here’s what we’ve seen:

The Wye River Accords, 1998.

Augmented by the Sharm el Sheik Memorandum, 1998.

Subsequented by Barak’s Offer, 1998.

Arafat may have turned down quite the offer there. Although it would have been utterly unpalatable to two factions that ultimately have as much pull on him as he does on them.

Maps are quite malleable to your aims, so here are one and two other versions.

Then we a had a little thing about a war-criminal-Prime-Minister wannabe staging a high-profile leisurely stroll that was something, to the Palestinian sensibility, akin to, say, The Chinese Peoples’ Army marching, unmolested, up the DC Mall and ceremoneously urinating on the Washington Monument at the height of the Cold War. Then he got elected and said…

You don’t like that offer?!?

OK, fine then. Compare to the original plan.

Presently, the issue that will have the longest reaching (destructive) influence on security - much less civility - in the quote-unquote Holy Land is The Wall. This is in four maps - look at them all.

OK, that was quite a bit to put together. Please let me know if this is the kind of production in which you’d like the vice-apostropher to engage.

It ain't the religious right...

...but it sure sounds like the right religion.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon weighs in on the Republican claims that Democrats are anti-Catholic due to their holding up of rabidly anti-abortion judicial nominees:

Here's a question: suppose I believed that all Jews should be killed. It would, of course, be a prescient question to ask whether or not I could do a given job if I came into contact with anyone of Jewish descent. What Novak and Republicans are arguing is that I should be given a pass on things like this if I can reasonably claim it's a "religious belief." Their convenient reading of the first Amendment declares that "freedom of religion" supercedes the other freedoms and rights held by the American people, betraying that old axiom that the right to swing your fist ends at the other man's nose.

My religion states that all rich people should give their money to me. It also says that all attractive women between the ages of 18 and 30 should oil themselves up and dance for me. What, are you going to discriminate against me based on my religion?

Exactly. And please direct me to the application forms for your seminary, Reverend Taylor, because I am so there.

Slow Joe Says No Go.

Senator Joseph Biden announced today that he will not enter the presidential race. I never could figure out why he thought anybody was clamoring for his entry in the first place.

Buggin' Out, er, I Mean In

There are few things quite so bizarre as the insect world. Texas A&M researchers studying Strepsiptera, a parasitic insect that spends most of its life living inside fire ants, have discovered behaviors in both the parasites and the hosts that defy expectations and easy explanations.

Strepsiptera "are poorly understood and so exotic," Johnston said. "The male and female look completely different." Both use the same mechanism – the tiny, first instar stage – to attack hosts. The ones that attack ants develop into males, and the ones that attack crickets, grasshoppers and mantids turn into females. All of the hosts of the female, and in particular, crickets, are a favorite part of the fire ants' diet, he said.

Once the parasite has entered the host, it forms a protective bag of tissue around it that has ant DNA rather than its own, so that the ant's immune system cannot recognize it as an intruder.

Kathirithamby observed Strepsiptera actually entering a host. She found that the first-instar infective larva of the Strepsiptera jabs itself between the outer shell and the skin of the host. Once the entire body has penetrated its layers, it remains in constant motion for 24 to 36 hours until it is enclosed by the host.

The host's skin forms a bag, which at this point is suspended by a thin stalk. Later, the larva develops into another stage and the stalk eventually pinches off from the overlying epidermal layer. The second-instar larva moves passively through the host, eventually residing into the abdomen. It goes through two more molts and develops into the fourth-instar larva, all the while deriving its nutrients from the host, Johnston said.

The female develops no further, except to harden an anterior portion (the cephalothorax), which squeezes out between abdominal segments and emits a male attractant. The male develops within the ant, and the day it is to emerge, it elicits a strange behavior in its host: The ant will leave the colony and climb to the top of any grass or twig it encounters. "I'd love to know how a pupae enclosed in a bag in the abdomen does that," Johnston said.

The short-lived male Strepsitera emerges from the ant, finds and mates with a female. She develops up to 800,000 eggs and lays live young, which emerge from the female to start the cycle all over again.

The researchers believe that understanding the Strepsitera will lead to an effective non-chemical method for controlling fire ant infestations. "[C]rickets could be mass-reared, contaminated with the parasite, and released, or the first infective stage – if it is the right sex – could be sprinkled on mounds." Stranger still, the females seem to actually increase the life span of the host crickets. They are unsure whether the same holds true for the ants, but infected drones are rendered sterile and workers stop biting or contributing, so that they just suck up nutrients and act as a drain on the colony.

Earlier this year, entomologists in Gainesville, Florida began releasing tiny (one-millimeter) phorid flies to combat the imported fire ants.

The female fly hovers over the ant, then swoops in to inject a torpedo-shaped egg into the ant's thorax -- or midsection -- in one-tenth of a second. Any slower, and it could get chomped, Porter said. ''The ants do that with great relish,'' Porter said. "They just crush it with their mouths.''

If the implant is successful, an egg hatches inside the ant a couple of days later. The fly maggot, or larva, crawls through the ant's neck into its head. For the next two and a half weeks, the maggot ''slurps'' the ant's body fluids, then releases a chemical that causes the ant's head to fall off, Porter said.

''The maggot proceeds to eat everything inside the head,'' Porter said. "It cleans that out just as clean as a whistle.'' The adult fly emerges two and a half weeks later to live only two or three days. During that time, a female fly can inject eggs into several dozen ants.

You may have figured out that I have an abiding fascination with ants. Their behavior is so varied and strange that I could fill pages and pages with odd ant stories, like the ones that herd and protect aphids in order to milk the sap that they produce. The green tree ant in Australia builds leaf shelters for a specific species of caterpillar that also produces a sap, going so far as to fight off spiders and wasps with streams of formic acid. Other caterpillars, they just eat.

Weird, weird, weird...

The Mother of All Screw-ups

The LA Times has an interesting article today about the chaos, incompetence, disinformation, and myopia from the top of the Iraqi military chain of command during the invasion that rendered what was already a practically impossible task into one that was utterly so. Troops were without maps or radios, receiving militarily disastrous orders from the Husseins by courier. Saddam's military strategy was apparently predicated upon the notion that they could actually repel American tank batallions, hence no mined bridges or roads, and no plans for a guerrilla campaign. Due to Saddam's paranoia about coups, there was never coordination between the Army, the Republican Guard, the Special Republican Guard, and the Fedayeen.

All in all, the mother of all screw-ups, it seems. Not, though, at odds with the rest of Saddam's military history, which is indeed a long narrative of exceedingly poor judgment. You'd love to play five-card draw with this guy. As a leadership strategy, surrounding oneself with yes-men and punishing the bearers of bad news has some quite clear disadvantages. Interestingly enough, "the former Iraqi fighters said orders to use chemical or biological weapons were never given because no such weapons existed."

Mystery Illness Gets More Mysterious

Mystery shrouds soldier's death

The last time Cindi Neusche touched her son she was required to wear rubber gloves and protective clothing from head to toe. [...] "The doctors told us that while Josh was in Baghdad he picked up some type of unknown toxin," Mark Neusche said of his oldest son. "That toxin, whatever it was, started eating at Josh's muscle system, liver and kidneys."

Mark Neusche said he then looked around and saw that dozens of soldiers were being brought into the hospital by the busloads. "Their families told us they had the same symptoms as Josh," Mark Neusche said. "As many as 30-40 of the troops in Baghdad came down with a mysterious, flu-like bug they also said was pneumonia."

To be sure, Iraq is a country awash in toxic chemicals, particularly after the orgies of looting, and any time that you put people in unfamiliar environments, the possibility of contracting diseases for which your body has no defenses jumps sharply. But here is the suspicious part.

In Josh's last letter home, postmarked June 30, he said he was fine and was headed out on June 26 on a 30-hour "haul" mission. For security reasons he could not divulge what the mission was or what type of material he might be hauling. The area of the mission was reportedly near Baghdad. A soldier in Josh's unit told the Neusches that by the time their son returned to his unit he said he had a sore throat and didn't feel well. Other soldiers found Josh in a coma the next day.

That description sounds not unlike the inhalation anthrax cases that dominated the news last year. David Kay keeps coyly hinting that "surprises" will be in store regarding the hunt for illegal weapons. You can never lodge a serious accusation of anything based upon unconfirmed, circumstantial evidence (unless, you know, you work in the executive branch), but given this administration's antagonistic relationship with honesty, would it be at all out of character if they were ensuring a "surprise" just in time for the election?

Good news from the right.

Some of them are starting to catch on.

Going...going...gone?

Uri Avnery's latest column predicts that Abu Mazen will fall by mid-autumn unless the Americans step in now to save him by turning the screws on Sharon to get serious about concessions. Don't hold your breath waiting for said screw-turning. Ariel Sharon is clearly head-and-shoulders smarter than Bush and has played him like a piano since their first meeting. I mean, you see the shape the guy is in, right? And yet one headfake to the left, and he rumbles past the entire American foreign policy apparatus for a first down. Over and over again. After a while, you just have to shake your head and admire it. He's very good at what he does.

Sharon could have saved Abu-Mazen if he had wanted to. But here, too, it is advisable to ignore what Sharon says and to pay attention to what he does: undermining Abu Mazen. He is worried by the respect paid to Abu-Mazen by the White House and Congress, fearing that American support of Israel might shrink from 100% to a mere 95%.

The fall of Abu Mazen in a vote of the Palestinian Legislative Council will be very convenient for Sharon. He believes that it will kill the Road Map, and with it the demands to stop the building of the wall, dismantle the outposts and freeze the settlements.

In this matter, too, Sharon enjoys the support of the army command, which opposes the Hudna (truce) and is longing for the renewal of the violence. As always, the army commanders believe that victory is just around the corner and that Palestinian resistance is on the verge of collapse. All that is needed is one last decisive blow.

Avnery says to keep your eyes on two possible successors: millionaire businessman Munib al-Masri and the new Minister of Finance, Salaam Fayad. Both are respected, accomplished Palestinians that would be acceptable to the US. Unfortunately though, shuffling in new prime ministers doesn't change the equation any.

The notion that Israeli-Palestinian relations made progress due to the invasion of Iraq has become a standard talking point in the talking head community. The argument itself is a sterling example of a post hoc ergo propter hoc logical error, but it also rests upon an assumption that some sort of substantive progress had actually been made, a proposition that is arguable at best. But a larger danger of linking the two conflicts exists. When the peace talks break down into a new round of violence - as they always have and inevitably will - there will be fewer and fewer Iraqis who do not see a direct analogy to their own situation.

Experts? We don't need no esteenkin' experts.

Our misadventure in Iraq was undertaken to return Iraq to the Iraqi people and assist them in rebuilding their society and economy. Yeah, sure it was.

Isam Alkhafaji does little to hide a growing sense of bitterness and frustration at how his mission in Iraq has shifted away from its intended course. "I felt that we were swiftly sliding from the status of democrats working with a democratic ally to build a democratic Iraq into collaborators with an occupation force," Alkhafaji told Al-Ahram Weekly on Monday, in the first press interview he gave to an Arab newspaper after submitting his resignation from the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC) two weeks ago.

[...]

"We were meant to be the Iraqi experts who would assist in re-establishing the Iraqi state in terms of public services, ministries, municipalities and governorates in order to bring them back to at least 70 per cent of their pre-war performance," he said. "But we gradually realised that there was in fact no advisory role for us. Our role was confined to implementing orders, going to ministries to single out the Ba'athists and the criminals and do administrative work. We were not asked for advice or sat on committees. The result was a situation on the ground which is getting worse by the day."

[...]

Alkhafaji is pessimistic about the future of the IGC and the kind of changes it could introduce to the Iraqi political scene. He criticised the criteria upon which council membership has been established as it reflects what he refers to as "a process of primordialising Iraqi society". The IGC, argues Alkhafaji, is based on a reductionist view of Iraqi society. According to this view, the representatives of the Shi'ites must be religious men and those of the Sunni population are the tribesmen. "The issue here is not Shi'ites versus Sunnis. The real issue has to do with the question of whether or not the council members truly represent the will of the Iraqi people? The majority of the members are Iraqi exiles who have no real constituency on the ground, so it is almost inevitable that they will be played against each other," he said. In order for the IGC to be more effective and reflect the will of the Iraqi people, Alkhafaji thinks that the IGC members should agree on a common platform and act as a pressure group that could initiate a process of political reorganisation.

Alkhafagi lamented the fact that the year-long work of prominent Iraqi researchers and intellectuals -- which was produced even before IRDC was formulated -- tackled all aspects of post-Saddam Iraq, including issues of water, oil and transitional justice have been completely wasted. "Nobody inside the US administration ruling in Baghdad wants to make use of those studies to understand the situation in Iraq," he claimed. "I am not saying that what we have done is perfect but there is a sense that nobody wants to use them even as groundwork for the policies that should be adopted." In lieu of a solid implementation of IRDC's meticulous work, done by various workgroups and in different workshops, stereotypical assumptions thus became the criteria with which the Americans judge the Iraqi scene, according to Alkhafaji.

Isam Alkhafalji is a Political Economy professor who has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the UN Development Program, not to mention having spent his life studying the Iraqi economy and society, so you would think his recommendations ought to carry some considerable weight. But then he apparently made the assumption that America's reconstruction plans aimed at benefitting Iraqis, rather than western oil companies, so what the hell does the Paul Bremer need with his obviously misguided opinions?

More Lies Unravel

Walter Pincus at the Washington Post is doing a good job of exposing the slipperiness and deception that pervaded the administration's building of their case for war. Yesterday, he demolished the argument that the much-ballyhooed aluminum tubes were intended for a nuke program, and any possible administration retort that they had good intelligence otherwise. Well worth the read, and entirely more damning than the 16 words.

Oh, and if you have somehow clung to a belief that Colin Powell is in any way more honest or trustworthy than the rest of this administration, any fair reading of this article should shake that belief severely.

Recommended

As is so often the case with Blogspot-hosted sites, the permanent links at Orcinus are broken, so you'll just have to go to the main page and wander through all of it, which you ought to do anyhow because it has been especially good recently. Over the next couple of weeks, David Neiwert is republishing the final version of his Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism series (an 87-page pdf version is also available). It has been tightened up and edited since the first run through, and it really should be required reading. Given the last two years' examples, it's possible that our alma mater still might do just that.

He also has great posts up now about the history of lynching in the south, the unpleasant politics and odd religious beliefs of Mel Gibson's father, the difference between Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, and Katherine Harris confiscating opponents' literature at a town hall meeting and then distributing her own. But as I say, the links are all broken. So just go.

Long Lost Cousins

Our distant kin?

Or just another Bigfoot?

I'm skeptical about Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Gorillas. I think they're smarter than they're letting on. They just know that if we were aware of their skills (language, symbolic thought, arithmetic, etc.) we'd just put them to work in sweatshops or call-centers or burger joints.

Digging Deep

Professor Juan Cole over at Informed Comment - Who, by the way, does a far better job at digging deep into the Iraq stories than anyone else I've seen in the Blogosphere - has two entries that caught my eye this morning:

One from today (He teaches at U Mich and I read it at 6:45 EST - that's dedication... or insomnia) Describes how the grandson of the late Pat Robertson of Persia himself, Ayatollah Khomeini,

wants to establish a modernist seminary in Karbala that would work for the separation of religion and state and would compete for influence with Najaf and Qom, the other two great seminary cities. He asked for Iraqis' help in secularizing government in Iran and said that only liberty and democracy could form a solid basis for good relations between the two countries. He said that seminary education in Shiism was out of step with the times. He also condemned religious tyranny as the worst sort of tyranny, worse than communism, fascism or Baathism, because it affected humankind's humanity and their relationship with their creator.

These cultures couldn't be more fascinating.

The other entry that you should read before the guilty party in the Jordanian embassy bombing is determined by political convenience, is yesterday's exploration of who could be responsible.

Note: All this is mere speculation on my part, and there is no proof [...] I’m simply laying out who has means, motive, and opportunity.

If I ever end up at or near the University of Michigan, I'm taking one of this guy's classes.

As my last offering before heading off to a Saturday of outdoor tasks, is this article from Perspektif, an Indonesian news site. It posits an Asian (vis-a-vis Paul Wolfowitz's) reading of the US role in shaping post-WWII Japan into a beacon of democracy and shining example for Asia in the second half of the 20th Century.

Wolfowitz, who was President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is turning history on its head. Japan was not the inspiration for the democratic upsurge that swept through East Asia in the 1980s. Instead, it was the junior partner to the United States during the cold war, when Washington created an alliance of anticommunist dictators who supported American foreign policy while repressing their own people. Those policies didn't inspire democracy in Asia; if anything, they helped to stifle it.

Have fun.

Here We Go Again

The war between the neo-con cabal in the Defense Department and CIA/State Dept. has opened a new front.

Pentagon hardliners pressing for regime change in Iran have held secret and unauthorized meetings in Paris with a controversial arms dealer who was a major figure in the Iran-contra scandal, according to administration officials. The officials said at least two Pentagon officials working for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith have held "several" meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian middleman in U.S. arms-for-hostage shipments to Iran in the mid-1980s. The administration officials who disclosed the secret meetings to Newsday said the talks with Ghorbanifar were not authorized by the White House and appeared to be aimed at undercutting current sensitive back channel negotiations with the Iranian regime.

"They [the Pentagon officials] were talking to him [Ghorbanifar] about stuff which they weren't officially authorized to do," said a senior administration official. "It was only accidentally that certain parts of our government learned about it." [...] [A second administration source] said that the immediate objective of the Pentagon hardliners appears to be to "antagonize Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden U.S. policy against them." He confirmed that Secretary of State Colin Powell complained directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld several days ago about Feith's policy shop conducting missions that countered U.S. policy.

Add this to the speculation that the leaks regarding Powell and Armitage leaving the administration were orchestrated by the same clique. Then add the redistricting grabs in Texas, Colorado, and Georgia, the California recall, Grover Norquist's belief that "bipartisanship is date rape," and the "Republican riots" during the Florida recount, and it gets harder and harder to deny that the defining characteristic of today's conservative movement is a putsch mentality.

My branes hurt.

Theoretical physics is confusing.

[S]tring theory requires the universe to have at least 10 dimensions, as opposed to the usual three in space and one in time that we perceive. "In string theory you learn one thing—you are in higher dimensions," says string theorist Burt Ovrut of the University of Pennsylvania. "Then the question is, where does our real world come from? That's a damn good question."

Paving the way for an answer in 1995 were Petr Horava, then at Princeton University, and Ed Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, who showed that strings could also exist in a more fundamental, 11-dimensional theory. They collapsed one of these dimensions mathematically into a minuscule line, yielding an 11-dimensional spacetime, flanked on either side by two 10-dimensional membranes, or branes, colorfully dubbed "end of the world" branes. One brane would have physical laws like our own universe. From there, Ovrut and colleagues reasoned that six of those 10 dimensions could be made extremely small, effectively hiding them from everyday view and leaving the traditional four dimensions of space and time.

Early in 2001, cosmologists Justin Khoury and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton, another inflationary pioneer, Neil Turok of the University of Cambridge, and Ovrut put their branes to work on the big bang. By turning back the clock in string theory, they found that as our universal brane passed through its starting singularity in reverse, it went suddenly from a state of intense but finite heat and density to one that was cold, flat and mostly empty. In the process, it shed another kind of brane into the 11-dimensional gap. Run forward in time, the big bang appeared as nothing more than two branes smacking into each other like cymbals.

[...]

The branes' oscillating motion would work to pump space into our universe like a bellows, explaining the acceleration that we see today. So "when you ask why is the universe the way it is," Turok explains, "well, it's because it has to be that way in order to repeat the next time around."

Uhhh, I like cheeseburgers.

There is a Times for laughter...

Steve Martin in the New York Times:

See, I can "have" something without actually having it. I can "have" a cold, but I don't own the cold, nor do I harbor it. Really, when you think about it, the cold has me, or even more precisely, the cold has passed through me. Plus, the word "have" has the complicated letter "v" in it. It seems that so many words with the letter "v" are words that are difficult to use and spell. Like "verisimilitude." And "envelope."

Therefore, when you ask me, "Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction," I frankly don't know what you're talking about. Do you mean currently? Then why did you say "did?" Think about "did." What the heck does that mean? Say it a few times out loud. Sounds silly. I'm beginning to think it's just the media's effort to use a fancy palindrome, rather than ask a pertinent question.

And how do I know you're not saying "halve?" "Did Iraq halve weapons of mass destruction?" How should I know? What difference does it make? That's a stupid question.

And via Calpundit, this gem from the LA Times' Michael Hiltzik:

Now [Bill] Simon is threatening to run in the recall. Under the circumstances, to believe that it would mean a significant improvement in state governance to replace Gray Davis with Bill Simon is like thinking that if Moe can't handle a job, the answer is to bring in Larry or Curly.

In the last few days, a few political pundits have tried to find a virtue in the unfolding free-for-all by suggesting that it's gotten Californians interested in politics again and therefore might lead to serious contemplation of solutions to our problems. Like much else written about California from beyond its borders, this is a caricature. That motorists rubberneck at a car crash doesn't mean they're acquiring an interest in automotive engineering, or even in traffic safety. What has the voters captivated in the recall is the spectacle, not the substance, because there isn't any substance.

The sad fact is that the electorate placed itself in this situation -- through its search for a scapegoat for the crumbling economy; its demand for state-funded programs and reluctance to lose them when the money dries up; and its inattention as power deregulation got written by utility companies, electoral campaigns (including this one) got overwhelmed by corporate and special interest money and the intellectual level of our political leaders deteriorated on both sides of the aisle.

Or, as H.L. Mencken put it, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." In the Calpundit post linked above, Kevin asks for a realistic proposal for fixing the $38 billion budget shortfall in California before he will commit his vote to recall or a candidate. Easy enough: raise the filing fee to $38 billion dollars and let Bill Gates and Prince Bandar battle it out.

Expansion

As you may have noticed at the end of the post below this one, there's a new author 'round this parts that's going to be apostrophizing alongside me. Say hello to Froz Gobo, whom you may have bumped into previously whilst wandering around the comments. Good Sir Gobo and I go back about twenty years, and while we agree far more often than not, the standard disclaimer holds: Froz's opinions are his, mine are mine.

Mark my words: this doubling of the non-paying payroll (this site being a non-profit in the truest sense of the word) will more than double the quality of apostropher.com. We'll be getting up a "What's a Froz?" page shortly. Enjoy and extend your warm welcomes.

So Sue Me

PSYCH! You can't.

This Order, with broad language that seems to sweep aside federal statutes, including the Alien Tort Claims Act, has received no public attention. It has been brought to light by a researcher with the Sustainable Energy and Environment Network (SEEN).

Under this Order, an oil company complicit in human rights violations, or one that causes environmental damage, (Froz: or anything else, apparently) would be immune from lawsuits. The language of the Executive Order is so broad that it might as well have been written by lawyers for Halliburton, ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco.

Read Executive Order 13303 here. You'll have to grab a PDF off the page.

Now, I understand that the war booty business involves some serious risks. And heaven knows these whiny second-guessers of the strategic importance of securing the second largest petroleum reserves on the planet by force are your typical litigious types. But golly, "any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void"? That seems a little over the top, Shrub, ol' buddy.

We all know that Presidents aren't above the law, but damnit, these guys and these guys sure as hell will be.

How 'bout that?

A Harley-Davidson made out of 300 pounds of 5-year old butter.

There are still spaces left on the 2004 Dirk Benedict Cruise. If you're wavering, here are the 2003 pictures.

Seven asteroids named for the Columbia crew.

Performance artist Stelarc is growing an ear in a biotech lab and is going to have it grafted to his arm.

A Wichita Falls mechanic is suing doctors for removing his penis and testicles during a bladder cancer surgery without consulting him first. The amputated genitalia later proved not have been affected by the cancer. Actual quote: "I'd love to have had a second opinion."

Your buddy's finally getting out of prison on drug charges, so you go pick him up in a mobile meth lab?

Smack My Bush Up

New Horizons in Violence: The World's Worst Leaders

(link via Ruminate This)

But I asked for a twelve-inch pianist!

Via Tom Tomorrow:

"BBI proudly introduces the latest issue in its Elite Force series of authentic military 12-inch figures, President George W. Bush in naval aviator flight uniform."

Guess it all depends on your definition of "authentic," "military," and "president."

Order yours today.

Bad Faith Agreements

Remember the Iraqi nuclear scientist who dug up the centrifuge parts from under his rose garden? Haven't heard much from him since then, have we? Now we know why. Josh Marshall reports that he and his family are being held in Kuwait and prevented from leaving by American officials, because he won't tell them what they want to hear. Namely, he keeps insisting that the much-cited aluminum tubes weren't for nuclear weapons, that no significant amount of chem or bio weapons exist, and there was no significant active nuclear program.

The one thing that no one wants is for Obeidi to make it to the United States where he's liable to end up on Larry King Live telling a story that would, to put it mildly, be very unhelpful to the White House. That means it's in everyone's interest - or at least in the White House's and CIA's interest - to keep Obeidi on ice in Kuwait. Maybe he'll become more helpful. Maybe the search in Iraq will come up with other evidence that will make Obeidi's revelations less embarrassing. Whatever happens, it'll keep him out of reach of journalists and from telling the very off-message story he apparently has to tell. It kicks the can down the road, as they say. No one in the government has any interest in getting Obeidi out of his odd de-nationalized limbo. So it's best just to leave him in Kuwait.

Now, having come forward already at great risk to himself and his family, it seems iffy that he'd revert to lying about the programs now. Marshall ends the post with this teaser: "Coming up later, how Obeidi has told the US about some on-going WMD work by the Iraqis, but why that hasn't come out either." Curiouser and curiouser...

Well, he did say he'd be back.

And now Arnold is in. Gary "whatchoo talkin' 'bout Willis" Coleman, too, but he says he'll be voting for Arnold anyhow. Did every Hollywood agent recommend that their clients run for governor? Only needing 20% of the votes to claim the governorship means that really any damn thing could happen now, and you can never overestimate the power of celebrity. Still, I don't know that Schwarzenegger is the shoo-in some people think. He is quite liberal socially (pro-choice, pro-gay marriage) - probably too much to garner any significant religious right support - and has a history of oddly inappropriate comments and the tabloids are dying to start publishing their dirt, now that the lawsuits would be less of a threat. Hard to know what to make of any of it at this point; the very things that would hurt others could help him. *shrug*

Meanwhile, some actual politicians are getting involved - Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is in and US Representative Loretta Sanchez will probably announce one way or the other tomorrow. As this gets increasingly bizarre, California voters may well just decide to stick with Davis. Predictions at this point are pure folly, I suppose. Is Charles Manson barred from running? After all, oddly-coiffed James Traficant, the former Ohio congressman serving a prison sentence for racketeering and bribery, is running for president.

Ah yes, the political silly season is in full swing...

It's official, dahlink.

Arianna Huffington is a Democratic candidate for governor of California. Is she qualified? Hell if I know, though probably not any less so than the other 250 people who have signed up so far. The question now is will Democrats give up on the (probably) mortally wounded Gray Davis and coalesce behind her? If they do, she should coast to victory. Or will this be the crack in the dam that opens a flood of serious Democratic candidates into the race? And given the state of California's budget, why does anybody want this job anyhow?

More importantly, will California and Michigan get to duke it out over who has the hotter governor? Stay tuned...

The Americans Are Coming!

And in numbers big enough to field a basketball team! That is, unless a couple or three guys sprain an ankle. I suppose at least we are likely to be spared endless media recountings of how Bush's Liberia policy is "bold."

After at least two months of studying ways to help wartorn Liberia, President Bush has decided to send six to 10 American troops to assist West African peacekeepers, defense officials said Wednesday. Though an additional dozen could be added to the team, no decision has been made to send anything beyond 20 people to the West African nation, three officials said.

"Do not look at this as a vanguard of more people to come," one official said on condition of anonymity.

I've said before that I think we should be very hesitant about placing troops in Liberia, but if you're going to do it -- six to ten guys? If I was one of the Liberians pleading with the Americans to come in, I'd be disappointed if the US flatly refused, but I'd be insulted by this.

UPDATE (5:10 pm): And the official number is seven Marines.

The horror, the horror...

ABC News: 800K Gallons of Ky. Whiskey Burn in Fire

Please join me in a moment of silence.

Thank you. When you go home tonight, be sure to tell your bourbon that you love it. I just want-- I wan--

I'm sorry, let me compose myself.

Okay.

[B]ourbon found its way into a creek that runs near the charred warehouse, but the environmental effects were expected to be minimal. About 90 minutes after firefighters arrived Monday, bulldozers were brought in to dam the creek, halting the downstream flow of bourbon, officials said.

And lo didst they ascend unto Heaven, where winged angels sat in golden splendor and the rivers flowed with bourbon, eight years aged...

Like leaves in November.

Before you believe that the drop in the unemployment rate from 6.4% to 6.2% is good news, keep in mind that drop had nothing to do with new jobs. It was driven by 470,000 people giving up on finding a job and dropping out of the workforce. From today's money.cnn.com:

U.S. job-cut announcements jumped in July to their highest level in three months, an outplacement firm said Tuesday, another sign that the longest job-market slump since World War II continues. U.S. employers announced 85,117 job cuts in July, a 43 percent jump from 59,715 in June, according to Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, which publishes monthly tallies of job-cut announcements.

One troubling aspect of the report is that the size of the cuts ran counter to normal seasonal patterns. "Summer is always a slow job-cut time. Management is away, and vacations are going on," said Challenger spokesman Herb Rozoff.

The five states with the highest planned job cuts for July are Texas (9593), Massachusetts (9235), Illinois (8438), North Carolina (7963), and Washington (7892). Remember how GWB's tax cuts were going to create millions of new jobs? Of course, he didn't say where they would be created (India and China, mostly), so like the "British intelligence has learned" statement, you could argue that it's "technically" true.

Here's a tip. You want to create jobs? Try a freaking jobs program instead of another round of tax cuts, because I've begun to suspect that digging might be a sub-optimal strategy for getting out of this here hole.

Jesus and Movies and Jews! Oh My!

Holy moly. As you surely have heard by now, Mel Gibson has made a movie about the last 12 hours of Jesus' life that has caused something of an uproar. Which, of course, is exactly what Gibson wanted, because how else would he get butts in theater seats for a movie that has no stars, dialogue entirely in Aramaic and Latin, and possibly without the help of subtitles?

Anyhow, the hubbub is being driven largely by Gibson's bankrolling of a Catholic splinter movement that rejects the Second Vatican Council which, among other things, declared the Jews innocent of deicide. The NYTimes has quoted Gibson's father as saying that Vatican II was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews," along with some standard-issue holocaust denials. Gibson has refused to screen the film for Jewish leaders (as is his right - it's his movie, after all), who suspect anti-Semitic undertones/motivations. But what is really driving the dust-up is Gibson's publicity machine itself:

According to databank searches, not a single person, Jewish or otherwise, had criticized "The Passion" when Gibson went on O'Reilly's show in January to defend himself against "any Jewish people" who might attack the film. Nor had anyone yet publicly criticized "The Passion" or Gibson by March 7, when The Wall Street Journal ran the interview in which the star again defended himself against Jewish critics who didn't yet exist. [...] Whether the movie holds Jews of two millenniums ago accountable for killing Christ or not, the star's pre-emptive strategy is to portray contemporary Jews as crucifying Gibson.

In the end, what the argument seems to comes down to, yet again, is: did the Jews kill Jesus? [insert eyeroll] A few points of order before the meaningless blame game begins:

1. It was over almost two thousand years ago. No matter who you pick to try to pin the blame on, the statute of limitations expired a looooooong time ago.

2. Jesus was Jewish. If you cling to the odd notion that he's still alive, then change that to Jesus is Jewish (though probably of the Jews for Jesus flavor).

3. As should be blindingly obvious from point #2, the Jews are not now, nor have they ever been, a homogenous group. Would you blame "the Americans" for the Oklahoma City bombing?

4. Since it was the Romans that did the actual crucifying, howzabout we split the difference and say that the Italians killed Jesus?

Nothing brings out the utterly ludicrous in people more quickly than religion.

California Reamin'

The California recall election is a train wreck, though I'm sure that Darrell Issa and the state Republican Party think they have been very clever. However, they should all keep in mind the old adage: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown warns that if Democratic Gov. Gray Davis is recalled, Democrats may retaliate by launching yet another recall. "If it works for Republicans, all you've got to do is raise enough money," Brown told ABCNEWS. "I have enough money to have it work for Democrats. And believe me, I think the Democrats will do it."

Brown said he would "enthusiastically" participate in any Democratic retaliatory recall effort should Davis be replaced by a Republican in the Oct. 7 recall election. "It would be my duty," Brown said. "The state of California in all of its complexities cannot be entrusted to people who are not qualified to do it."

[...]

"If this recall is successful, then the recall will be used in other states to recall other political officials, and we will have permanent campaigns," said Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. [...] But only a small percentage of voters will be needed in order to hold a second recall vote — 12 percent of the total who turn out for the Oct. 7 vote.

(via Jason Buckley)

UPDATE (2:00 pm): Daily Kos points out that the same logic applies to the GOP's petulant (and legally dubious) redistricting power grabs in Texas, Georgia, and Colorado. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson (D) says that if the Texas debacle passes, he will consider opening redistricting in his state, which "could spark similar redistricting battles in states like Oklahoma, Illinois, Michigan or, heck, even California." If Bush was actually interesting in leading the country instead of being Karl Rove's ventriloquist dummy, he'd step in and put a stop to this. But stepping is difficult when somebody has their hand up your ass.

"My fellow Americans, this, uh, uh, extra-legal electoral stuff is, um, profoundly damaging to our natio-- Hey look! Them filthy queers is tryin' to get married!"

Shorter

Shorter Mona Charen: I'm bored with the Middle East. Let's invade a Latin American country, like in the good old days.

Shorter Michelle Malkin: Showing your butt crack is not cool.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Arabs are liars.*

Bunches more at busybusybusy right now.

*Actual quote: "Too many journalists, anti-American leftists and U.N. apparatchiks are willing to take Arab and Third World rhetoric at face value. Remember how many people pretended to believe the 100 percent pro-Saddam 'election' results?"

Why yes, I do. That would be nobody.

Ummm, okay.

http://www.cafeshops.com/cp/prod.aspx?p=axwear2.4290053

Everybody needs something to be proud about.

Chilling Details

A British lance corporal has become the first (and probably last) coalition soldier in Iraq to require treatment for hypothermia, after falling asleep in a walk-in refrigerator.

The inmates are running the asylum.

California is doing its level best to cement its position as frontrunner in the Most Ridiculous State contest. Long-time title holder North Carolina is still reeling from the retirement of Jesse Helms, and Jesse Ventura's short tenure showed that Minnesota's brief reign was just a fluke. The recall all by itself put the Golden State out ahead of the pack, but now melon-smashing comedian Gallagher and porn mogul Larry Flynt have officially entered the race, with Arnold Schwarzenegger deciding whether to join them. Both conservative-turned-liberal columnist Arianna Huffington and her millionaire ex-husband-turned-openly-gay Michael are exploring candidacies. Porn star Mary Carey is running on a platform of taxing breast implants and making lap dances a deductible business expense.

Another contender is 26-year-old Georgy Russell, a computer programmer who supports gay marriage and is selling thong underwear emblazoned with her campaign logo. Also running is Angelyne, a sometime actress-model who has posted billboards with her likeness around the city for years. One of her concerns is the abundance of city roadwork, which she says has damaged her pink Corvette. (from The Guardian)

Townhall.com reports that both Gary Condit and Michael Savage are considering entering the fray, and that despite the rumors, Bill Clinton is "too busy not running for mayor of New York City to be not running for governor of California." Further:

[Michael] Wozniak, an Oakland Libertarian and motorcycle enthusiast, has said he will make ferret legalization a centerpiece of his campaign. Michael Jackson, Steve Young and Bill Murray are also running, but these candidates aren't singers, former football players or comedians. They just have the same names as famous people.

Google around a bit and you can read about the 18-year-old high school student who is running, or the candidate who lives at a rest stop. Over 250 names (so far) are slated to be on the ballot, including the fellow who spearheaded the recall drive, Darrell Issa. But as folks began checking into Issa's campaign literature, it became clear that Issa has a little trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy, especially in regards to his military service and an imaginary bomb squad job protecting Richard Nixon at a World Series that Nixon never attended.

It's all pretty surreal, isn't it? But wait - it gets better. The New York Times is reporting that "lawyers for Gov. Gray Davis of California said today that they would file a legal challenge on Monday to the Oct. 7 recall election that if successful would delay the vote until March and would allow Governor Davis to run to replace himself."

If only Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf was still alive...

Rick Santorum Has an Opinion

Over at uggabugga, Quiddity runs the highlight reel from Senator Rick "man on dog" Santorum's appearance on Fox News Sunday. While the competition was predictably fierce, when the checkered flag was waved, two snippets had pulled away from the pack for the most surreal argument award.

In continuing his staunch opposition to gay marriage, he proclaimed that marriage was solely about breeding:

It's not to affirm the love of two people. I mean, that's not what marriage is about. I mean, if that were the case, then lots of different people and lots of different combinations could be, quote, "married." Marriage is not about affirming somebody's love for somebody else.

Had to read it twice myself before I was certain he had actually said it. No wonder heterosexual marriages fail more than half of the time; too damn many of us think our marriages have something to do with our spouses. More often than I'd like, my brain will fall just short in its restraint duties and something surpassingly stupid will come out of my mouth before I can slam my lips shut. Happens to all of us, and usually you clam up and hope nobody takes offense or (better yet) even notices. But not Pennsylvania's finest, dammit. If at first you don't succeed:

HUME: Senator Kerry, himself, I believe a Catholic, said, "I believe in the Church, and I care about it enormously, but I think that it's important not to have the Church instructing politicians. That," he says, "is an inappropriate crossing of the line in America." Agree, disagree?

SANTORUM: I disagree dramatically.

...and the horse's ass you rode in on.

Wow. So judges and senators should take marching orders from the Pope. Given the history of the founding of this country, that's an odd position to hold. We sure have come a long way since 1960.

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

-John F. Kennedy, 1960
Address to Southern Baptist leaders

Previous opinions:
Steve Verdon
Sanford Wagner

Femmes Fatales. Très Fatales.

I wonder if Pat Robertson would keep up his outspoken support of (perhaps) outgoing Liberian president Charles Taylor if he read this Slate article. I suspect that cross-dressing disturbs the good reverend more than war.

Few things exemplify the chaos of Liberia more than the sight of doped-up, AK-47-wielding 15-year-olds roaming the streets decked out in fright wigs and tattered wedding gowns. Indeed, some of the more fully accessorized soldiers in Charles Taylor's militia even tote dainty purses and don feather boas.

[...]

According to the soldiers themselves, cross-dressing is a military mind game, a tactic that instills fear in their rivals. It also makes the soldiers feel more invincible. This belief is founded on a regional superstition which holds that soldiers can "confuse the enemy's bullets" by assuming two identities simultaneously.

[...]

The cross-dressing "dual identity" isn't just a source of battlefield bravado, though. Cross-dressing has deep historical roots in West African rites-of-passage rituals [...] A soldier dressed in women's clothes—or Halloween masks, or shower caps, etc.—on the battlefield is essentially asserting that he's in a volatile in-between state. The message it sends to other soldiers is, "Don't mess with me, I'm dangerous."

[...]

After Charles Taylor's Cuttington University attack, other offshoot Liberian militias vying to control the country embarked upon similar gender-bending rampages. One of the more notorious henchmen of the era was Joshua Milton Blahyi, a commander whose nom de guerre was "General Butt Naked." Hired for his ferocity by rebel leader and Taylor contemporary Roosevelt Johnson, his "Butt Naked Battalion" consisted of drug-fueled teens who went into battle in flowing dresses and colorful wigs. The general himself reportedly wore only laced-up boots and his weapon.

There's an awful lot about this conflict that we can't even begin to understand. I have recently been reading a lot of commentary around blogland criticizing Bush for his reticence toward intervening in Liberia. I think that hesitancy is well-founded and to be expected. It does, however, stand contrapuntally to the right wing's newfound concern for Iraqi human rights. In fact, it pretty much gives it the lie.

The despotic president, indicted by a U.N.-backed tribunal for crimes against humanity, came to power by forcibly recruiting young boys and turning them into killers. His troops manned checkpoints lined with human skulls, where the roadblocks were made out of human intestines, the disemboweled victims left by the roadside. For a decade this despot has systematically pocketed the wealth of his country, leaving his people in abject poverty. He has done millions of dollars' worth of business with al Qaeda and Hezbollah. His son is a brutal thug, feared for his executions and proclivity for kidnapping young women and raping them.

[...]

Maybe the United States is reluctant to make the case against Taylor because there are no good alternatives. The rebels fighting Taylor, called Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), are cut from the same cloth. Most of their leaders were commanders of Taylor's forces before splitting off in financial and personal disputes. As much as people hate Taylor, no one is rushing to embrace the rebels. Their record of rapes, murder, child abduction and looting speaks for itself. Their recent behavior is telling. The entire international community begged the LURD to clean up its act as it seemed poised to take power. The rebels responded by attacking the capital of Monrovia, filled with hundreds of thousands of refugees. They lobbed artillery shells not only into hospitals and civilian homes, but into the embassies of the countries they claim to be courting, including the United States. Hundreds have been killed.

Or maybe the reluctance to talk about Taylor is due to the fact that the mayhem he wreaks is in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa and not enough people really care. To acknowledge the murderous nature of Taylor's regime and its ties to terrorists might prompt public demands for U.S.-led intervention and peacekeeping. While U.S. troops would likely face little resistance, rebuilding Liberia would make Iraq seem like a picnic. The nation has been mired in conflict since 1989. Monrovia, the bombed-out capital, has had no running water or electricity for seven years. There is only one hospital; there are no public schools. There is no garbage collection or sewage system. The rest of the country is worse. Sorting out the players and engaging long enough to restore a genuine political process could take years and billions of dollars. That is the true cost of intervening in Liberia and the true cost of taking on Taylor. And that is why it might never be done.

"The President of Voodoo"

Interesting story in this morning's LA Times about the role of voodoo in Haitian politics and society.

In a dark, airless temple decorated with paper flags and moldering food, voodoo houngan Adnor Adely takes on the look of one possessed. His eyes shut tight. His shoulders hunch. His hands leap up as if to ward off danger, and his slim body begins to quiver.

It is not only the rapture of the spirit world that energizes Adely. He is excited by the recent government decree giving the centuries-old practice of voodoo the status of an officially recognized religion. Voodoo priests — houngans — like him will soon be authorized to perform any civil service a Roman Catholic priest can, officiating at births, marriages and funerals.

[...]

Legitimizing voodoo has strengthened Aristide's image as a man of the people and has probably enhanced popular support for the rumored bid by the former Roman Catholic priest to amend the constitution so he can seek a now-prohibited third term as president.

[...]

Voodoo has no formal structure, no hierarchy or geographic center. At least half its houngans and mambos (priestesses) can't read or write, Anantua notes, since they come predominantly from poor, rural areas in a country with 55% illiteracy. To allow voodoo practitioners to officiate at civil rituals, the houngans and mambos must be able to read and write well enough to sign the legal documentation. Because it is the religion of the poor and downtrodden, voodoo has a special power for Aristide, who has the same political base.

[...]

Bestowing of official sanction has also had positive social consequences, according to some outside of political circles. A recent international development conference on combating the spread of AIDS included delegates from the emerging voodoo community, which has a more open and tolerant view of homosexuality than does the Haitian public at large.

"Voodoo is the only environment in which Haitian gays feel accepted and free to talk about issues," says Laurence Magloire, who last year produced a documentary film on voodoo and its embrace of sexual outcasts. "We live in a country where homosexuality is taboo." The religion, which is closely entwined with nature, also offers some hope of halting the rapacious harvesting of trees for making charcoal — a desperate means of making a meager living that has shorn Haiti of most of its forests.

On a barely related note, I saw 28 Days Later this weekend. Beautifully shot movie (an odd description for a zombie movie, but true all the same) which relies more on your imagination than on-screen gore for scares. The alternate ending after the credits, though, was a big anti-climax.

Bargain Crackers.

Well, it's certainly novel.

A black Baptist minister looking to diversify his church wants to pay white people to attend his sermons. For the month of August, whites who go to Greenwood Acres Full Gospel Baptist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, will get $5 an hour on Sundays and $10 an hour on Thursdays, Bishop Fred Caldwell told Reuters on Thursday.

[...]

Caldwell said his budget is limited to several thousand dollars and for now the offer will go only to whites. Hispanics, Asians and other ethnic groups will have to wait. "I'm only paying for white folks in August," Caldwell said. "We'll probably move on to other ethnic groups from there."

Sounds ridiculous at first, except that I'll bet that church has gotten more local press coverage down there than it ever had before. Pretty doggone clever, really.

The War Party

Tonight's Daily Show ran the following footage from Bush's press conference where the president explained away the sluggish economy:

"I remember on our TV screens - I'm not suggesting which network did this, but it said 'March to war' every day from last summer until the spring. 'March to war, march to war, march.' That's not a very conducive environment for people to take risks when they hear 'march to war' all the time." (text here)

Cut to Jon Stewart: "Yeah, why were they doing that? It's not like some asshole was marching us to war."

Speaking of Jon St-- eh, why bother trying to segue? After reading Stoutdem's post about sharing a birthday with Patricia Schroeder, I thought about the potential of a party full of my birthday co-habitants:

Jon Stewart
Anna Nicole Smith
Paul Schafer
Randy Newman
Judd Nelson
Hope Lange
Ed Harris
Berry Gordy, Jr.
Alexander Godunov
Frederick Engels
William Blake

I figure Judd Nelson ends up in a fistfight with Engels and William Blake hooks up with Anna Nicole Smith.