Simply Left Behind

Ice Age Meltdown

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 06:25:00 PDT

It's been very interesting to watch the dynamic of the Republican party over the past six or seven months, ever since losing the 2008 election in a landslide.

For example, the intramural backstabbing is beginning in earnest on the one person who probably stood the best strategic chance of reuniting the party quickly, Sarah Palin:

What is remarkable is the contempt Palin has engendered within her own party and the fact that so many of her GOP detractors are willing, even eager, to express it publicly -- even with Palin an early front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Some admit their preference that she stay in Alaska and forget about any national ambitions.

"I am of the strong opinion that, at present day, she is not ready to be the leading voice of the GOP," said Todd Harris, a party strategist who likened Palin to the hopelessly dated "Miami Vice" -- something once cool that people regard years later with puzzlement and laughter. "It's not even that she hasn't paid her dues. I personally don't think she's ready to be commander in chief."

And Harris was polite, compared to some of the vitriol!

What I find most interesting is that this is the precise venom spewed by the conservatives and Republicans for the past sixteen years as they held sway over, first, Congress, then the Presidency and finally the Supreme Court. Liberals and Democrats were not only attacked, they were mutilated.

Having seen a country grow tired of these divisive tactics and having seen their power slip like an ice cube down a glacier on a sunny day, Republicans have not learned to put the flame-throwers down, instead finding the one target left that they can legitimately hose down.

Each other.

It is more than cruel sport, this picking apart of Alaska's departing chief executive. The sniping reflects a serious split within the Republican Party between its professional ranks and some of its most ardent followers, which threatens not only to undermine Palin's White House ambitions -- if, indeed, she harbors them -- but to complicate the party's search for a way back to power in Washington.

There's the power brokers on the one hand, the rank-and-file on the other hand. The brokers know how to get things done. The rank-and-file knows how to get people nominated. Palin stood a chance at pushing the rope that is the Republican party towards unity. Her massive appeal with the masses would have put her in good stead with the powers that be if she learned to be a bit more flexible in how she is being handled.

Indeed, I suspect part of the problem the GOP has now, and perhaps the problem the Democrats finally shed with Barack Obama, is the need to micromanage even their candidate for President (nominally the party leader). The Republican party has been the slave to a formula laid down in the 1980s by Lee Atwater, reinforced by Newt Gingrich, and then set in stone by Karl Rove, a strategy of attack without mercy, propose with as little detail as possible, and spin, spin, spin.

And as the last twenty five years have shown, it works. For a while.

It didn't hurt the GOP that the Democrats threw candidates against the wall men who had no business running...Michael DUKAKIS?!?!?! John Kerry????...which only reinforced the general notion (which they then incorporated) that the GOP was invincible. It also didn't hurt the GOP that demographics were on their side, as manufacturing jobs, generally held by more conservative elements of society, fled the bluer states into the redder states, replacing dying agricultural jobs.

Now that those jobs are being offshored, it's left conservative men and women angry, but has also marginalized the GOP as a regional powerhouse and nothing else.

Hard to say where this ends. My suspicion is the Republican party will cleave open and a third party will emerge, which will pretty much guarantee a Democratic hegemony for a decade easily, and perhaps two, until a candidate emerges for either of the two fractions of the GOP that can heal the wounds and attract followers from the other party.

Perhaps this is Palin's ultimate goal.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:00:10 PDT

1) Michael Jackson...murder victim????

2) News headline I'd like to see: SLEAZY POLITICO HOLDS ENTIRE STATE UP FOR RANSOM, because that's truly what Espada did.

3) The score stands as follows: Humans 480 Bulls 15.

4) Truly, this has been an Endeavour.

5) If you were at the restaurant at 354 Metropolitan Avenue last night, yes, that was me. I made a rare public appearance at Fette Sau, a new barbecue place. Looks interesting. It's an old commercial garage. I may have to go back for food one night.

6) Not in a million years would I have realistically given Lance Armstrong a chance to win an eighth Tour De France and vindicate his earlier victories. He has voluntarily submitted to daily testing AND has been subjected to at least two other surprise "random" tests.

7) Of course, if Lance did drug, maybe marijuana was his drug of choice. Sure didn't hurt Michael Phelps any.

8) Somehow, shooting gerbils doesn't seem like much sport.

9) This is why women don't cook anymore.

10) Terrorism or dumb prank? You decide.

Sub-burpin' Sprawl

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:23:52 PDT

I am a black hole.

I'll get back to that in a minute. Let me do the set up first.

I would argue that, while perhaps not an overwhelming number, a pretty big segment of society is pretty shallow, perhaps even a majority.

Psychic space being a finite element if you look in two dimensions, part of the reason we end up in conflict with each other is that your sprawl ends up butting against my sprawl, because each of us is trying to get more sprawl.

I'd wager this large segment of society are always busy doing, well, something: Running out to meet friends, working too hard at a job, jetting off to the next vacation. They need the trappings of a "good life", the condo on the beach, the car, fine wines.

They expand sideways because they can't know there's a depth to life, too.

I call these people "Flatlanders". In the guise of "expanding themselves," adding sides (to extend the metaphor), they gain no third dimension. They buy this trinket or that souvenir and proudly display them on their shelves to boast of their travels.

They claim understanding of the world around them, but in truth, this is a false logic.

For how can you truly relate to the world if you do not relate to yourself? How can you understand someone else and have compassion for their plight if you don't understand yourself and extend that compassion to yourself?

How can you love if you have no love to give?

Love is a commitment, and commitments always demand faith. You can only have faith by delving deep into those parts of you that lie covered in darkness, shrouded by the sprawl of your flatlandedness.

Faith is not based on logic or hunches. Indeed, faith is that thing that keeps us tied to what we love when "evidence" suggests it might be time to let go.

I put "evidence" in quotes because none of us can ever really know a truth outside of ourselves. our eyes deceive us. Our ears hear distant noises that emanate from within us.

Our minds lie to us for...what? Fear? Our protection? Freud was not far off, I fear, when he spoke of the id, the ego, and the superego. Many people you'll meet have a champion superego, but no id.

Well, that's not completely true. That id shows up in the weirdest ways and those are the behaviors we look at and wonder what the hell were they (or we) thinking?

Faith comes from belief. Faith is a never-ending well to draw from.

I am a black hole.

Spending my adult life extending my self-knowledge, I have been able to give love completely.

Love does not necessarily mean another person at all times. One can love yourself, for example, or find love in the smallest acts of kindness and in the roughest, bleakest landscape.

I express this love through my art: my photography, my acting and performing, and especially my writing. By opening my heart to what goes on around me, by drinking in from the fountain of the world, I can absorb that which I see and express how it affects me.

This is something that Flatlanders never get: it's not about seeing the temples at Angkor Wat or the pyramids or Mount Everest, taking a snapshot, buying a trinket, and bragging about it later, maybe saying how you "soaked up" the local culture with a beer and some local food at a boîte.

It's about how these affect you. I probably have fewer pictures of more places in the world that I've been than anyone else. And I'd wager I have a deeper understanding of anyplace I've been than a million other tourists.

Let's say five people, including me, see a house on a high cliff and take pictures of it.

Most people will center on the house, and the good ones will get enough of the cliff to allow for the precarious position of the building.

I will take that same picture and focus on the cliff: the striations of layers of history building, year after year, one on top of the other, the roots breaking out into the air, the grass overhanging the lip.

Oh, I'll include the house, to show it as the burden the cliff must bear until it can no longer bear it, to highlight the foolish transient nature of people who build on land that is ultimately destined to fall.

To highlight the Flatlanders.

I take that picture that way because I understand the precarious nature of life, how tomorrow, we might all be gone. Or more to the point, how tomorrow I might be gone.

So I want to leave a piece of me in these places. Many people talk about leaving their heart, but for me, I've shredded little bits of my soul and left them behind. Places don't steal my heart. I steal places' hearts.

I am a black hole. I leave a small footprint on the surface, but once you've peeked into the abyss, you realize there's a lot more down there than up here.

The trouble with Flatlanders is, they insist on painting on the surface what they want me to be, to define me somehow. But you cannot define that which you cannot understand.

And then they get frustrated that I no longer fit the definition they gave me in the first place.

I am a being, not a doing. I don't worry that I've held the same job for eleven years, because while I don't enjoy it much, I know that it's comfortable for me, and as many places as I've worked, this is pretty sweet and stable.

Some may jump jobs every other year and believe they are improving their lot, but they collect nothing but a paycheck and a too-long resume. Like children with french fries, they are grabbing for the next one before they're finished chewing the first one.

Further, I understand that my discomfort there has to do with boredom, the terrible mind draining tedium of having conquered all I can on this employment.

My faith tells me this. I am enough, and my needs beyond the space to explore my space are few. I don't need to be "seen" in a hot exotic restaurant with friends who I can only truly stand when I'm drunk, but my influence is felt none the less.

I am a black hole. By knowing myself, I know everything I encounter. No, I might not know every single fact about everything...altho most people will swear I do...but I have a deep comprehension of the truth of it.

It is that truth that gets expressed, like the radiation bursts out of the black hole.

You Keep Telling Yourself That, Sparky

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:12:22 PDT

Poor Sarah Palin:

The Alaska governor spoke in taped interviews on ABC, NBC and CNN broadcast Tuesday morning.

She told CNN that "all options are on the table" for her future.

But told ABC's "Good Morning America" that she recognizes she might not have political staying power after her surprise resignation Friday, which came just as she had been expected to elevate her national profile ahead of a possible 2012 GOP presidential run.

"I said before ... 'You know, politically speaking, if I die, I die. So be it,'" she said.

Speaking in fishing waders from the town of Dillingham, Gov. Palin said her administration has been paralyzed by fending off frivolous lawsuits.

So let me get this straight: you're frustrated by your inability to win a fight in your administration because your administration has been under investigation for possible corruption...and leaving is somehow fighting?

I might be wrong, but "fighting" to me means throwing a few haymakers back. Anything else is quitting.

Cute touch with the fishing waders and the whole "family fishing business" thing. Most people in the lower 48 will assume it's like the Gloustermen of The Perfect Storm, you know, weeks on a boat, reeking of bait and a lone shower, the things real men do.

I'm betting that "fishing business" means hiring boats to go out and do the dirty work for you.

Imagine, if you will, what would happen if, say, she somehow got caught in the Oval Office with her pants down and Congress launched an investigation that lasted six years and culminated in an impeachment trial.

Think she'd quit? I do, based on this silly little girl's tale here.

Personally, I don't think she's going to run. Between the campaign jokes made about her, the recent kerfuffle with David Letterman and this obvious grandstand ploy, she's come to the realization that, goshdarnit, people really don't like her very much.

Yes, she has immense support from the conservative wing of the Republican party, but other conservatives in the party are balking mightily at the fact she seems to be dividing the party up, perhaps to create her own ("Dominionist"?) third party.

It's hard to predict where this is really going to end up. On the one hand, a Palin party would both destroy and save the Republican party from itself. It would attract the John Birchers and the fringe members of the media and with the help of Rush Limbaugh et al, would establish a legitimate national party.

For a while. See, moving the inmates out of the asylum doesn't make the inmates sane, but it makes the asylum safer.

Fear is the mindkiller

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:16:46 PDT

Rigid thinking and black and white solutions are the mark of children, the small-minded, and Republicans.

I started thinking about this over the weekend, attempting to flesh out why so many people in this country are patriarchal.

It's the whole "my way or the highway" logic. I never understood the lack of of compassion for another person's situation. I mean, it's not like we're discussing things that require immediate action or snap judgements.

It's true, even framing the discussion as black/white (either/or) often precludes a meaningful discussion and b) any hope of solving complex problems, like immigration and of course, abortion.

So why do people do this? Why is it so easy, left and right, to paint the opposition as radical and dangerous and thus shut off dialogue?

Rather than be open to compromise and new ways of seeing things, to simplify things to some arbitrary "essentials" ignores nearly the entire tale of history. Things are never as easy as they appear.

What's turned this entire thread around was that I wanted to understand why some people can't seem to let go and grow up, that they feel the need to control and dictate over things they have no business controlling.

Like other people. Indeed, the essence of controlling someone else is to negate any possible value of that person's opinion in favor of force-feeding them your position, and then intimidating them into accepting it.

I think it comes down to views from the extremes, which I find are propelled by fear and when grabbed by fear it is extremely difficult if not impossible to see clearly and with distance.

Fight or flight. You panic and all you can think about is whether your gloves are high enough in front of your face or your running shoes are laced tightly enough.

People can't manage to take a breath and assume the other party perhaps has some validity to their views, and incorporate those, rather than attacking the views, the other party, or usually both.

But why?

I think it has to do with knowing yourself. In getting to know yourself, you learn two things:

1) The world is a lot more complex than you ever gave it credit for and, 2) you have to incorporate as much information as you can in order to present an informed judgment on something. You have biases, but as you gather information, you learn what those biases are and try to compensate.

In gathering this information, you learn about different views of the world. You learn that other people see things just as logically as you do and can yet come to completely different solutions.

When you don't know yourself, when you make knee-jerks reactive judgments based on biases or incomplete information, you panic when presented with alternative views and alternative information that discredits and maybe negates your own conclusions.

And panic leads to immature behavior. And children don't think, they believe, and when those beliefs are threatened, they try to believe even harder.

Making a commitment to something-- a relationship, a religion, a job, whatever-- requires an act of faith. It says that "I am in this fully because I believe in this and good will come from it."

When evidence to the contrary presents itself, how many people sit down and try to understand if it means something? Instead of trying to incorporate the new information either into their faith or to perhaps look more closely at that faith, the larger number of people with either reject the evidence out of hand ("He can't be having an affair! We just made love last night!") or reject the faith-object itself ("Boss, you promised me a promotion! I quit!").

Both of those are intelligent reactions, so long as they remain in the realm of first stage reactions (what we tell ourselves). Neither of those is intelligent actions until we can look deeper into the abyss of this new information and uncover what's really going on.

Our fears: justified, or not?

Nobody Asked Me But....

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:51:31 PDT

1) *crossing legs tightly*

2) *putting on my walking shoes*

3) *getting my hot dog jones on*

4) *putting on my lead suit*

5) *checking my computer cache*

6) *dipping my teabag in a big fat cup of shutthefuckup*

7) *dipping my Boehner in a big fat cup of shutthefuckup*

8) *checking my bank balances*

9) *checking my liver*

10) *wondering about segregation in cyberspace*

Le Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:07:12 PDT

In France, those two words stand for one of the most important events on the French calendar: The Tour of France.

The 2009 Tour begins Saturday, July 4. Rather fitting, as America's hopes in this event have been given a kick in the butt by the return of Lance Armstrong.

It's a bit over the top to say, as Mike Paterniti claims in Bicycling Magazine this month, that a victory by Lance Armstrong this year would help lift America out of its doldrums.

But Paterniti does make a pretty compelling case for Armstrong-as-hero (right down to his name). America is a bit down, and listless, and looking for some good news. She's feeling old, and has lost some innocence. The Bush years took care of the delusion that America is somehow always in the right, that America is some sort of Superman, doing right without doing much harm.

Not only didn't we do right, we did harm.

Lance Armstrong retired in 2005 after seven Tour De France wins, the premier event of the elite cycling circuit, and while cycling as a sport in America is a very small niche (everyone rides, so everyone wonders how hard it can be), Lance's pile of victories has him among the best known men in America.

And Armstrong's very public life apart from racing (the Kate Hudsons, the Sheryl Crows, the Ashley Olsens) and his character (rumours of doping, his nasty divorce from his first wife, his rude engagement and dissolution to Sheryl Crow, his impregnating a woman who is not his wife yet) have taken some of the glow off his luster.

And then there's cancer and the Livestrong movement.

In short, Armstrong at 37 is at a crossroads in his life, just as America is sat trying to figure out which way to turn next.

Like America on 9/11, Armstrong has risen from his own devastation to greatness, to be even greater than he was before his tragedy. America looks to do that, as well. We've just been scared, brutalized into terror first by the attacks, and then by eight years of being told the other shoe was about to drop.

All this is just a backdrop now to the very real threats to our personal security, our jobs, our homes and our retirements.

America needs heroes. It's no surprise to me that, in the years since 9/11, we've turned to television programs like Smallville or Friday Night Lights or indeed Heroes, looking for our heroes, someone to swoop in and save us.

Can Armstrong be that hero? I doubt it, because America doesn't have the day-to-day attention span such that even if he were to somehow break out of the pack and chase down Alberto Contador or Carlos Sastre or Denis Menchov or any of the half-dozen other serious contenders, America would really find the story gripping and compelling.

All most Americans would do is shrug as Lance stood on the podium in Paris in three weeks.

But that doesn't mean he shouldn't try. He's accomplished some pretty incredible feats in his day:

Lance has mentioned that he's riding this race to highlight the battle against cancer, that he's content with being a domestique for one of his teammates, Alberto Contador, or Levi Leipheimer, possibly Andreas Kloden, a support rider who helps build his captain to a victory. And it's easy to see why.

At age 37, riding in a race no man over 35 has ever won and only one or two have even won a single day's racing, Lance doesn't need the weight of a team's hopes, much less a nation's hopes, on his shoulders.

And yet, by sheer dint of will, it's possible he may pick that weight up and carry it with him down the Champs d'Elyseé.

In 1980, an improbable bunch of college kids and minor league hockey players gelled together to defeat the greatest hockey team on the planet, and went on to win the gold medal in Lake Placid.

So, do you believe in miracles?

Senator Al

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:10:18 PDT

I have mixed feelings about Al Franken as a Senator.

On the one hand, he's an intelligent compassionate man, Harvard educated and yet from a working class background. My exposure to him has been limited to his stint on Saturday Night Live and his daily radio show on Air America, in which he spoke to progressives who were tired of being made to feel like second class citizens. His thoughts on his show were better than most hosts of talk radio, even lefties, and you could tell he'd made an effort to understand the other side.

On the other hand, he's a Jew!!!!!!!!

Just kidding.

On the other hand, because he's a thoughtful and intelligent man who's reached out to the other side, you have to wonder about his loyalties. After all, a liberal from Minnesota is more like a New York City Republican than a true progressive, altho Franken may be the exception that challenges that rule-o-thumb. A liberal from Minnesota who can count Norm Orenstein of the American Enterprize Institute (who's considered a liberal there, but you know...) and Joe Scarborough, that's a tough call.

On the other OTHER hand, to quote Tevye, Al was a protege and admirer of Senator Paul Wellstone and no one could ever accuse Wellstone of being anything less than a progressive.

The other misgiving I have about Al is, well, he comes off as kind of smarmy and unctious. When I listen to him, I feel like I need a shower sometimes and not because he can curse a blue streak. There's just something in his manner that rubs me the wrong way. I wonder if it's just me (probably) or if this is a general impression and so how is he going to work with other Senators?

Not that other Senators are necessarily down-to-earth people who can't rub a cat the wrong way, mind you, but there is a hierarchy and it will be interesting to see if, like Hillary Clinton, Franken can work with the system or if he'll end up like another famous Minnesotan flop, Jesse Ventura, and rail about "process."

We shall see. Certainly, the fact that this election was as close as it was in a year when Barack Obama established new records for a first term Democratic President speaks volumes about the two men running (who actually had a chance of winning, I mean).

A dead heat tells me this election was between Odious and Odiouser in the eyes of Minnesotans. Neither candidate amassed a simple majority of the vote and many people registered their disgust by simply voting for the third candidate in the race.

But, another famously odious politician won his first Federal election in a similar manner and went on to become the "Greatest. President. Ever, to quote Al Franken: Bill Clinton.

So Senator? Congratulations. Don't fuck it up.

Fun For Oil

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:59:49 PDT

You might recall that, during the Bush administration, much was made about the invasion of Iraq (and to an extent, Afghanistan) and the connection to the oil reserves, how secret plans had been drawn up by Cheney's energy task force before the war to divvy up the fields, and how the oil fields would pay for the war.

What we hadn't considered was that a free and independent Iraq, sans Saddam Hussein, might feel a little differently about it's main natural resource:

Only one of the bidders for the eight contracts to run oil and gas fields in Iraq has accepted oil ministry terms.

Six oil fields and two gas fields were available in a televised auction that was the first big oil tender in Iraq since the invasion of 2003.

Iraq has asked the rest of the companies to consider resubmitting bids for the other seven contracts.

How this worked was, Iraq set a minimum output for each of the fields (current production levels, which are minimal, were generally used). Output up to that level was free. After all, the government could do that now without help.

Beyond that level, companies were free to submit bids per barrel based on the amount of oil they predicted they could extract and sell to Iraq. Iraq would then sell to the lowest bidder.

But...

The catch was, Iraq also had a secret ceiling figure in mind of what it would pay for each field, effectively putting a cap on how much oil each contract could produce.

If the bid exceeded that figure, either due to too high a per barrel price or too many barrels predicted, Iraq would then offer it to other bidders.

As you can imagine, this knocked out of the pack any of the more rapacious...pardon me...*koffkoffkapitalistkoffkoff*...sorry, the more rapacious oil companies.

In lieu of this, what you now have is a few oil companies who would treat the Iraq fields as a hedge. Since the per barrel fee is fixed and not subject to the vagaries of the market, oil companies have both a guaranteed income stream from it, and can ramp up or reduce production as they see fit, to ameliorate their corporate income flows.

Making them a little less subject to the crazy pricing that we saw in 2007-2008, when oil was all over the map. The Iraq government is the one picking up all the risk on the commodity exchanges.

But note that the oil people of the Bush administration can still make out on the deal. After all, Iraq owes America a big debt of gratitude and so would not be in a position to march lockstep with OPEC on price increases and could even sell to us at a discount.

The greedy oil barons will still be greedy, but their greed will now be at the mercy of the Iraqi parliament.

Justice Served

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:28:04 PDT

The day of reckoning for Bernie Madoff is here.

The prosecutors have asked for 150 years, but the victims as well as the rest of society will not be satisfied unless they hear the word life come out of the judge's mouth.

In my opinion, it should. Madoff, through his unrelenting greed, took people's lives. Perhaps not as directly as taking a knife and stabbing them, but already two suicides have been reported linked to the Madoff scheme, and any number of charitable organizations have folded their tents and closed their doors, depriving innocent people of the help those charities would have provided, in a "thousand points of light" fashion.

The 150 year sentence pre-supposes that the judge agrees to consecutive sentences on the maximum term for anyone of the eleven counts, 15-20 years. The defense will ask for concurrent sentencing, meaning as he serves one term, he serves all terms, and Madoff could be out in less than a decade.

Given Judge Denny Chin's record, I do not think it is likely that Madoff will get off easily. I do not expect he will sentence Madoff to 150 years, either, and in this case, he has the option to go off the reservation and come up with a different sentence, although that could be an appealable error, dragging this case out, and keeping Madoff relatively free for years.

Madoff is only 71 and looks to be in reasonably good health. The people he robbed are not so lucky. Life would be a fair and just sentence, in my opinion.

UPDATE: Surprisingly, altho only mildly, Judge Chin agreed with the prosecution recommendation and sentenced Madoff to 150 years in prison, to be served somewhere in the Northeast.

The actual prison will be determined by the Federal Prisons Board, but under Chin's recommendation. That he specified the northeast tells me he wants Madoff to suffer in the winters and summers. No Miami Beach for him.

The transcript of the liveblog of the sentencing was interesting to read:

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE DENNY CHIN:

"Mr. Madoff's crimes were extraordinarily evil."

"The breach of trust was massive."

"I simply do not get the sense that Mr. Madoff has done all that he could or told all that he knows."

"By any of these monetary measures, the fraud here is unprecedented."

In the end, while Madoff made a plea for leniency on his own behalf, Chin was unswayed, and mentioned the lack of supportive testimony and/or affadavits attesting to Madoff's character.

In other words, a shitty man dealt a shitty hand and got shit-canned.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:41:26 PDT

Thanks For The Thrill(er)s!

I don't have the snark in me today.

I had a nice eulogy planned for Farrah, about a young boy who through a combination of hormones and later, an appreciation of her character, loved a woman who never knew he existed. And then...well, now I have to write about two cultural signposts in America.

First, let me write about Farrah Fawcett. Farrah was the embodiment of what became known as T&A-BC television. Her single season on Charlie's Angels (the first crime drama to feature next to zero violence, we should point out) catapulted a nearly unknown Texas blonde from obscurity (absent the occasional shave commercial) to superstardom. If indeed the 70s could have a single pin-up girl, Fawcett more than lays claim to the title with her iconic poster.

She followed in the footsteps of actresses before her like Marilyn Monroe, turning her body into art and art into her body. Not nearly as talented as Monroe, she nevertheless managed to find roles later in her career that defined her craft to show she could act, and not just jiggle for the camera.

Fawcett paved the way for actresses to follow, from Suzanne Sommers to Lydia Cornell (a regular reader of this blog) to Christina Applegate to...well, whoever the blonde-du-jour of this decade is, probably Tara Reid.

By all accounts and like Monroe, she started out with trouble dogging her footsteps: a difficult marriage, paparazzi following her, and some antics better left unsaid. How many television stars and movie stars could have followed that script?

Fortunately, through love, she quieted and settled her life, and she lived a full and rich life, and died happy. What small comfort Ryan O'Neal can take from that, I hope it helps. she certainly changed his life, as well.

She became proud of who she was and she touched the world. We can only hope the same for all of us.

And now, to MJ.

It's difficult to write a eulogic piece for Michael Jackson. You can't ignore the musical genius or the fact that, well, like Astaire, the man could dance a bit. His artistic vision is legendary and the only thing we really need to note is Thriller is the best selling original album in history.

And you can't ignore the creepy side of him, the little boys, the outrageous behavior, the tragic attempts to be accepted as normal. It's very very hard to reconcile those.

I'll take a stab at it, being the observer of the human condition that any blogger should be.

People have variously claimed it was his childhood, the brutality of his father and the almost icicle-like passivity of his mother (after all, she didn't step up to protect her kids), that made him who he is. There is truth to this, but there's more, and no one really wants to look at the evidence.

When I think of Michael Jackson, I see a boy frozen in time in his adolescence, let's say thirteen or fourteen. He is, or was, exploring the world, and his boundaries.

And that's going to include seeing what he can get away with, and also coming to terms with his sexuality, without appreciating the extent of the consequences and that actions cause reactions. Too, his infantile (used without judgement) expressions of hope for peace and love and harmony in the world speak to me of someone who didn't really understand the world around him, who had a very naive view that, if we could each just ask ourselves to change our ways, we could feed the hungry, stop nuclear wars, unbreak hearts.

As he said in his signature song "Man In The Mirror." Curiously, that song also displays one shining moment of self-knowledge:

I've Been A Victim Of A Selfish

Kind Of Love

It's Time That I Realize

That There Are Some With No

Home, Not A Nickel To Loan

Could It Be Really Me,

Pretending That They're Not

Alone?

And here, I think, we have to take a closer look at his life. Michael Jackson was literally the Boy In The Bubble, and it is here that I believe his life froze. Enormous success at a tender age, and he never really had to deal with the real world outside. He maintained the naive world view that all pre-teens have. Ironically, he saw things in "Black Or White."

Indeed, in that song, we see the strange dichotomy of MJ's life:

I Took My Baby
On A Saturday Bang
Boy Is That Girl With You
Yes We're One And The Same
[...]

And I Told About Equality
An It's True

Either You're Wrong

Or You're Right

You're not black or white, but you are right or wrong. The strange collision of divergent ideas is the hallmark of adolescent thinking, and being unable to reconcile two opposite ideas defines the frustration that teens feel. You feel an urge, but must fight it because the world tells you its wrong, but you feel the urge strongly, but the world tells you its really wrong, but you really want to do it, but you can't.

Coddled and protected (except from his father), Jackson viewed the world around him from behind a clear wall. Unable to touch and unable to be touched by the world, he relied wholly on his handlers.

It's clear that some of these handlers had other agendas and those agendas did not put the needs of this child first. When he did badly, as all children do, he was not punished but protected from the consequences. When he was punished, it was violently, abusively, and painfully, but it was not punishment for what he did, but what he was: a freak of nature, a boy with a man's soul and a woman's voice. He was an emotional hermaphrodite growing in a forcedly androgynous body.

That he ended up touching growing boys inappropriately was inevitable. It's not an excuse, but a description, for Jackson certainly had the resources to find the help he so desperately needed. For that, we can be angry at him.

But we cannot hate him and I suspect this is the problem the US media is having with his death. Because the mainstream media had such great sport with this tragic car crash of a life, making cruel jokes at his expense and tut-tutting the obvious pain he felt, they never took a really close look at him. They never looked at the man in the mirror.

At his death, we see this discontinuity in the coverage. If instead of mocking his weakness and urging him to find the help he needed, to break out from behind his handlers and let the world just love him, we could have focused on his genius.

Instinctively, his audience knew the pain. We may have all made fun at his expense, and in that we all bear a measure of responsibility, but we knew the jokes rang hollow.

That hollowness was chalked up to the subject matter: pedophilia, which should be shunned. As a victim of sexual abuse myself, I can tell you that I would want my attacker sent to prison for the rest of his life. To me, that would be justice, but I also know that I speak from my anger and my fear, and the greater part of me, the better angel, begs that my attacker be studied and understood, so that in some small way his story can help us find treatment for and more important, prevention of, future attacks on defenseless children.

In truth, the hollowness we felt in telling those jokes about MJ was more fundamental than that: he was sick and we knew it, and we watched in horror as he swirled down the toilet that was his personality.

MJ, I pray that you find the forgiveness in death that your home could not give you. For my part, I've spent the last half day contemplating your music and your genius, and your pain.

One final note on the death of Michael Jackson: it is possible in death he will have accomplished the rehabilitation he was unable to find in life. If my suspicions regarding the circumstances of his life bear out to be true, his death will focus a spotlight strongly on the abuse of not only prescription medicines, but steroids. Based on the fact he was training with Lou Ferrigno to strengthen his fragile body for his upcoming farewell concert grind, I have few doubts that in some form, steroids were used to enhance his muscles, and give him more stamina.

If his death can make kids realize it's not just professional athletes who die after their careers are over who are affected by steroids, but even superstars who look nothing like the bloated giants of the NFL.

In this, he may touch millions of kids. The right way.

Sanford & Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:15:37 PDT

Unlike many of my fellow bloggers in Blogtopia (©Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo) wide, my attitude towards this story is "I don't give a flying fuck."

Here's why:

1) I believe that in order to fix the very real problems facing this nation, we have to beat the bastards on substance.

2) I don't believe that a person's humanity is within bounds. It wasn't for Clinton and while we had great sport with hypocrisies at that time, that was a different era. There, the Republicans were attacking the very foundation of the nation over a blow job. What's at stake here? Not a goddamned thing.

3) As an erstwhile philanderer myself, I can guaran-damn-tee you this his hurting his wife more than him, and we ought to respect that, unlike the Republicans who went after John Edwards after he dropped out of the race.

Now, issues of substance have been raised, both here and elsewhere. Let me address those.

1) Sanford ditched his sworn duty to the people of South Carolina. Possibly. That takes into account the stories that his staff and his wife "did not know his whereabouts" and then made up a story.

That is a very, very VERY large assumption on our part. Which is more likely: a high profile governor "abandoning his post", or his staff covering for a very public (his wife admits she'd known for months) affair?

Occam's Razor and all.

2) Sanford jeopadized his state. What if an emergency had happened? Now, here is a truly substantive point that has no defense, and should be brought up.

But let's face facts: it's small beer and hardly worth the left getting all giddy over. The state will handle this and that should be all we need to cover.

By the way, now we know why he was able to refuse the stimulus package...

Linkage

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:27:29 PDT

We may never know for certain the role, if any, the CIA and MI6 has played in fomenting the Iranian protests, but I do think these two items are linked in some way:

Item the first -- Iran arrests foreign nationals in connection with protests

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- Iranian authorities said Wednesday they have arrested several foreign nationals, some with British passports, in connection with the country's post-election unrest.

Item the second -- Obama Condemns Iran's Iron Fist Against Protests

WASHINGTON — President Obama hardened his tone toward Iran on Tuesday, condemning the government for its crackdown against election protesters and accusing Iran's leaders of fabricating charges against the United States.

Obama fancies himself a pretty good poker player (by all accounts I've read, he is) and so what I'm seeing here is a classic bluff: caught with his friend's hand in the cookie jar, Obama is trying to fishtail his pursuers by divesting himself of any knowledge of the British nationals in Iran. He attempts this by amping the pressure on his opponent, "upping the ante" as it were.

Despite all appearances, poker is not a card game. It's played with cards, but it is a really good test of one's ability to size up someone else's behavior, and as such is far more psychological than a mere game of chance. You don't win with your hand, you make the other guy lose with his.

Many in the popular press have said this was Obama's capitulation to the Republican party, that the pressure on him to upgrade his rhetoric is his way of getting the GOP off his back.

Bollocks, to continue the British theme. Re-read that article about Obama's poker strengths, and then consider this:

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way. (wish that was original with me, but it's a paperweight on my desk)

In other words, making him lose with his hand.

President Obama has very carefully made the case for supporting the opposition uprising without making any overt attempts at interfering with the democratic process or sovereignty of another nation, no matter how anathemic that nation is towards us. This was the lesson lost on both Bushes (you may recall that Bush the Elder goaded the Kurds into rising up against Saddam Hussein, only to abandon them after Gulf War I).

Thus, Obama has left the patina of propriety against Iran's charges that Obama has meddled in its internal affairs. Ahmadinejad's words carry weight within Iran and to an extent the Muslim world, but beyond that, cooler heads recognize that Obama has been scrupulously careful in his choice of words.

Let's assume that I'm right (usually am) and that the CIA has been operating behind a curtain to instigate an uprising. We would not expect Obama to come out and pre-emptively admit that he has done this based on the capture of some British nationals. On the other hand, not ramping up the rhetoric, particularly in light of the death of Neda Agha Soltani, would have been viewed in many quarters as a singular admission of complicity.

The Republicans, for sure, would have gone after Obama hard on this. After all, millions have witnessed her death on YouTube and the nightly news now. But her death occured four days earlier, certainly in time for Obama to have his posse make the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows to condemn Iran more forcefully.

And yet, he waited. And then the Brits were captured.

I suspect this broadside was fired in order to return attention where it rightfully should be focused: On Ahmadinejad and the Ruling Council, and their attempts to tamp down what is clearly a significant minority if not a majority of Iranians. Ironically, none of this was necessary as Ahmadinejad probably won the election in the first place, albeit not by double digit pluralities.

Politicians make mistakes, especially when they believe they are beyond reproach.

So, under the political cover of his domestic critics (see, they aren't useless idiots!), Obama was able to lash out at Iran with little to fear in terms of repercussions, and should an American turn up in the Iranian net, well, that's just a decoy now, since Obama has raised the stakes.

Another chip in the pot.

It's hard to say where this is headed. For one thing, no matter who won the election, Obama is going to have to deal with the Ruling Council through their stooge. For another, Ahmadinejad would have a strong voice, even a shadow government, should Mousavi prevail, and Ahmadinejad would have to be confronted eventually. Obama's hand seems fixed.

Now, it's just a matter of getting the Iranians to lose with their cards.

Why Gun Laws Need To Be Harsher

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:16:06 PDT

GAO Cites Gun Sales to Those on Watch List:

People named on the government's terrorism watch list have successfully purchased firearms hundreds of times since 2004, government investigators reported yesterday. In one case, a known or suspected terrorist was able to obtain an explosives license, the Government Accountability Office reported.

U.S. lawmakers requested the audit to show how people on the watch list can be stopped from boarding airplanes but not from buying guns. Under federal law, licensed firearms dealers must request an FBI background check for each buyer but cannot legally stop a purchase solely because someone is on the watch list. The study found that people on the list purchased firearms 865 times in 963 attempts over a five-year period ending in February.

Now, the general portrait of a gun dealer is someone who is a very narrow patriot: guns are necessary in order to keep the tyranny of government at bay, but they would never be used unnecessarily.

Right?

Apparently, not even that much. Suddenly patriotism and homeland and personal security fall by the wayside when profit becomes the overriding concern.

Interesting how greed can trump enlightened self-interest, the very basis of capitalism, isn't it? Here we have numerous instances of a gun dealer selling guns or explosives to a bunch of people whom the government, the BUSH administration in most instances, deemed a threat to the security of the nation.

So it's not like we have a bunch of "militiamen" (domestic terrorists with an acceptably cretinic agenda) purchasing guns to keep BATF agents at bay. These are folks the FBI won't let get on an airplane.

These dealers are selling weapons to presumed terrorists with no place to go...meaning the odds jump that the same gun dealers may be dealing with the aftermath of their greed right in their own home towns.

Worse, I can almost imagine that some greedy bastard went one step further, and told his other customers that "them terrists is loadin' up on guns, so kin Ah sells ya this here semi-auto unner th table?" I certainly hope I'm wrong, but my guess with respect to the inherent greed of humanity is I'm right. We'd sell our countrymen out for a bowl of soup, and now, I'm betting, we'd sell our neighbors out, too.

You can blame the loophole in the law, and the temptation to do so is pretty strong. After all, if you can't legally stop someone from buying a gun, then you're just following orders, right? But let's face facts: it's very easy to just say no.

And they cannot. It is apparent that not only should this loophole be shut tight, but that gun dealers should face increasingly stronger punishment for lapses in judgement. A gun is intended to harm. Period. In many instances, I have no problem with that, but we ought to limit the sale of weapons to only those instances as much as possible and since we've given loopholes of all sizes to gun dealers to slip through, then it's only fair that when they do screw up, it ought to cost them a lot more than just a few bucks.

Money =/= Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:15:34 PDT

Kris Kristofferson once wrote that "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."

Truer words were never written. To be truly free, as any Buddhist, even Jesus Christ himself, would tell you, requires surrendering all your worldly possessions in search of your soul.

Sadly...we live in a different world. So we've created this false front: to be free takes money. The more money, the more freedom.

And believe it or not, there's some truth here, too. If you accept the rules of this game, then you need at least as much money as it takes in order to satisfy your needs. Above that, you start to get greedy, and the rules of humanity start to ebb away, as I wrote last week.

Paradoxically, then, you become less free with the more money you have. You have to pay taxes, of course, because goodness knows enough people are greedy enough that if they have one dollar and their neighbor has none, they wouldn't dare give him fifty cents or even a quarter and the country needs roads and bridges and police and firefighters and doctors and so on.

Freedom is a life lived without responsibility except those you personally accept as your own. The greedy anti-tax crowd would tell you that taxes are unacceptable, but they are the price for living in this "free" society. You accept them.

There comes a point, however, when more money can buy you a sort of freedom. It is at this point that you can buy freedom from politicians.

You see, power, like money, is not freedom. The social construct of power is that you have a duty to those over whom you exercise power, to protect them, and to look out for them.

Indeed, the great cognitive dissonance of American politicians is to reconcile taking money from the powerful and repudiating the powerless, all while trying to secure enough votes of the powerless in order to remain in power.

Last week I wrote about rational markets, about how in theory markets are effective only when everyone has equal access to information.

But look around you. This isn't happening. Right now, you're ingesting all sorts of chemical crap with your food because the USDA has not required food processors (you can't really call them anything but) to clearly label foods as genetically modified, say, or to even fully disclose when they've screwed up in packaging a product, unless it creates a public health crisis.

You'd think this doesn't matter, but when genetic modifications of food require the E. Coli bacteria to express genetic traits like herbicide resistance into crops, and there's a spike in E. Coli outbreaks...well, let's just say a bunch of Messicans didn't stop washing their hands suddenly.

And that's just one instance of what goes on under the table that you don't know about. For example, did you know the African wheat crop was being wiped out? Is it any coincidence that this is happening just as the attention of the GM folks has turned to wheat?

Wheat, corn, rice, cotton...these are all staplec crops of the American consumer.

Are we free? I'd argue not, not so long as tinkering with this basic kind of crop can go on under our noses and we are not kept apprised of it.

Nobody Asked Me, But....

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:43:45 PDT

1) On the one hand, you have an aging pilot base. On the other, you pay pilots way below their value in an attempt to cut costs, and planes drop out of the sky. Do you think there's, say, ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, a connection here????

2) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you this generation's Christoper Reeve. Poor kid is going to be stuck with fanged teeth until his own fall out.

3) Quietly, swine flu is not going away. This should be the dormant time. It's summer. Fewer people stuck indoors together, schools are letting out, kids are getting healthy sunshine and air.

4) As unhappy as this proposal makes me, it's a baby step towards universal coverage.

5) Why is it every time the market crashes, there's a set of people indicted for fraud? As I mentioned yesterday, it's clear markets are not rational, and this is precisely why.

6) We had SCOTUS. They have their own supreme. We went quietly into that not-good night. I don't suspect Iran will.

7) I do marvel at the United States. In the name of freedom and living under the rule of law, we allowed ourselves to put up with the Bush administration, His Fraudulence, for eight years, rather than opt for the easy way out and riot. While it's a tribute to our idiocy, it's also a tribute to our commitment to the Constitution. Pity the (s)elected didn't show the same respect.

8) This is just wrong. According to the Constitution, you are entitled to confront your accusers. You ought to have access to every single means of exonerating yourself. Admittedly, in his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts did not ban the use of DNA testing, but said it was up to the legislatures. In states, like Texas, where segregation-through-sentencing is enforced, what are the odds the Texas state legislature will pass a law allowing a black man to show that his DNA doesn't match the crime?

9) Drivers in Massachussetts are soooooooo bad, they threaten air traffic.

10) Goatse in action. (If you don't know what "goatse" is...well, I'd tell you to Google it, but I'm not sure your stomach can stand it)

Aw, what the hell...I'm feeling generous today...a bonus item...

11) Llllllllet'sssss allllll hhhaavvvvve a mmmmmommmmmmmennnnnttttt offffff silllllennnnnnce....

Whomanity

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:10:35 PDT

It is to laugh.

Former President George W. Bush fired a salvo at President Obama on Wednesday, asserting his administration's interrogation policies were within the law, declaring the private sector not government will fix the economy and rejecting the nationalization of health care. "I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in," the former president said to applause from members of a local business group.
"You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money." Repeatedly in his hour-long speech and question-and-answer session, Mr. Bush said he would not directly criticize the new president, who has moved to take over financial institutions and several large corporations. Several times, however, he took direct aim at Obama policies as he defended his own during eight years in office. - Washington Times (ed. note. I purposely pulled this from a right-wing website that filtered the Times' story, so you could see that I'm not far off base, even if I come to different conclusions.)

Couple of points before I dive headlong into the fray here:

- It was private enterprise that got us into the mess, and (bear with me for a moment here) you take the toys out of the child's hand after he's broken it.

- Former President Who, now?

- Under the Bush administration, we went from a half-trillion dollar budget surplus to a half-trillion budget deficit (before TARP and ignoring the costs of two wars) in 2008. Bush added $5 trillion dollars to our national debt.

But I digress. Let me get to the main course.

The free markets are powerful engines that take an unlikely concept, the greatest social good can come from the self-interest of enlightened individuals, and puts it into action.

For the most part, it does a pretty good job of this. For instance, no one can argue that deregulating the airline industry kept the price of flying from coming down, although the ancillary problems cannot be ignored: more late flights, unsafer planes, all due to staffing cuts to maximize profits, as just one set of examples.

Here's the thing about free markets and what even Adam Smith, the founder of laissez-faire capitalism, warned against.

People are children, essentially. See, the key concept of capitalism is that whole "enlightened self-interest" thing, emphasis on the enlightened bit. The key to efficient markets is all information is readily available to anyone and everyone. This is the enlightenment. When you shop for a new car, generally you go out and compare different models and scout out for the best information on each, compare prices and make your decision based on that. You want the best value for your hard-earned money.

In many cases, particularly as the stakes get higher, the self-interest part kicks in. People get greedy. Knowing that full disclosure will provide for rational decision-making, manufacturers and vendors will withhold information. Whle this creates a temporary (sometimes long-term) profit ubermaximization for the seller, it is unhealthy and inefficient for the market in general.

We've seen this time and time again within the last year: banks in particular got greedy. The subprime mortgage crisis, for all the conservatives want to point fingers at the poor and at Democrats for forcing mortgages on people who didn't need them, created a monster profit for companies like Countrywide and Ditech. You can't blame that on the poor or the Democrats.

By dicing interest rates as teasers, and making current money on fees and mortgage churnings and repackagings into instruments that shed their risk without creating wealth, banks neglected to think through to an obvious conclusion: when those mortgages reset, the economy, particularly wage growth, had better have kept pace.

Under the Bush administration...well, let's just say that if you made $40,000 in 2000, it took until 2005 before you actually saw an increase in real income. If you made $400,000 in 2000, you went swimmingly along. If you made $400,000, you didn't have to worry about a subprime mortgage, tho.

So when the mortgage resets occured, people simply hadn't been able to keep their incomes apace, and they got hammered.

Justin Fox of Time Magazine has an intriguing article about how greed and free markets have worked during the last 100 years. Entitled The Myth Of The Rational Market, Fox points out that trouble occurs in the economy when people forget the lessons of the Great Depression: economics is not rational because it is based on human beings, and human beings are not rational all the time. In other words, prices (particularly of stocks), which nominally should reflect all available information and be "reasonable reflections of economic reality," don't and aren't.

Thus the concept of "irrational exuberance," credited to Alan Greenspan but in truth coined by economist Robert Shiller years earlier, is born.

This is, in part, one reason why I firmly support single-payer health coverage. 75% of the monies spent on healthcare in this country are post facto to cover preventible chronic conditions: diabetes, obesity, diseases from smoking, high blood pressure, heart disease, hypertension.

Why? Two factors: one, the free market system of healthcare is more interested in focusing on profit than on the health of the patient and thus ignores the dictum, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Healthcare in this country is now about diseasecare. Two, also related to free markets, as insurance premiums rise and companies are forced to shop around for lower prices, the insured (e.g. employees) are put into a situation where they may have a good doctor, but are forced to give him or her up because that doctor is not listed on the insurance plan. A long term relationship with a doctor, one who knows you literally inside and out, can create a sense of rapport and a sense of, for want of a better term, ownership on the part of the patient of his own body.

Rather than be viewed as a profit center, the patient is humanized when he can see the same doctor, year in and year out. So the five minutes or so the doctor spends talking about dieting can morph into fifteen minutes or so trying to get to the underlying cause of why the person is overeating (with an appropriate referral to a diet clinic or a psychologist, if needed). Yes. Imagine. A doctor who can actually see you for fifteen minutes on top of an examination and writing out prescriptions! If he's not worried about churning his portfolio to see the most patients he can because he's already assured of a salary, a large, comfortable salary like the doctors in England, he's not going to mutter a few sentences and shove you out the door.

Ironically, conservatives mouth off about "the government choosing your doctor," and the "depersonalization into an ID number of the patient" when they whine about "socialized medicine," ignoring these very basic tenets of healthcare.

The point of this column is to keep all this in mind as you listen to the debate over healthcare, banking reform, and any number of the programs that Obama and the Democrats are going to push thru Congress.

When children break their toys, those toys need to be taken away from them.

Endgame?

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 06:24:47 PDT

Not that there's a formal clock for this sort of thing...world events tend to lie in the mud until they explode like an IED...but the sense I get from the news is that we're heading for a big, big conflict.

1) Iran protests: Regime cracks down on opposition as further unrest looms -- In itself, this would not be troubling me, beyond my concern about Iran in general, both as a harbor for terrorism as well as a genuine hope for democracy at some point. Iranians are highly intelligent and educated people. But add to this...

2) Carter challenges Gaza blockade as he meets Hamas leaders -- ...and you have the makings of a regional crisis. See, Bibi Netanyahu, the troubled and troubling Israeli prime minister, is on a two-pronged dilemma. On the one hand, he has to assure his supporters with respect to the Palestinians. On the other, he has a credible threat to Israel's very existence with Iran's budding nuclear development program.

It is likely that Netanyahu will compromise on the Jewish settlements question at Obama's behest, in exchange for the very real possibilty of an airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities. Which would then get the attention of...

3) Russia, China urge talks on North Korea -- ...which now brings Putin and Hu into the fray, since both have expressed support in the past for Iran for different reasons, and neither of whom is particularly friendly to either Israel nor its existence. By forcing them to divide their attentions between Iran and North Korea, we have a very real threat from...

4) North Korea threatens merciless attack if it is provoked -- ...which is responding to the Obama statement about their nuclear program being very troubling. Now, North Korea has been sharing technology and resources with...

5) EU to pledge humanitarian aid for Pakistan -- ...which is fighting on three separate fronts, all in or near its borders: the Swat valley, the Indian border and of course, against...

6) Several dead in Pakistan bombing -- ...internal terrorism, the same scourge that killed Benazhir Bhutto. These attacks grow out of the panic and fear of radical Islamists that...

7) Skirmishing ahead of new Pakistan offensive -- ...Pakistan is getting serious about assisting in rooting out the Taliban and short-circuiting their attempts to not only reclaim Afghanistan but to annex the territories of northwest Pakistan, all while...

8) Pakistan sought time to act against militants: India -- ...trying to coax yet another nuclear power, India, into a regional conflict.

Talk about your basic clusterfuck! You have all the elements of a world war right there: radicalism, armaments, regionalism, and three superpowers who seem to be eyeing each other with a mixture of contempt and confusion. And that's before we consider the residual effects of American involvement in Iraq (weakened fighting forces, exhausted materiel, resentment on the part of Iraqis) and the world economic crisis, which is only now filtering down to the very poorest of nations.

And then there's Africa, my pick for the single biggest story this year...hell, even Europe and America are not immune from the vagaries of hate!

All this occurs against the backdrop of the single biggest crisis to confront man in millenia.

And man does not handle crises well.

Oh brudder!

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:03:17 PDT

OK, this one might just be the stupidest piece of dreck I'll read all week:

Pejman Yousefzadeh, Attorney and blogger:

Events of the past few days appear to have done nothing to curb the Obama Administration's fetish for negotiations with Iran -- this despite the fact that Iran is currently in turmoil, and that if the Administration holds off on pressing for negotiations with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it might--might--get a government in Iran more amenable to making a deal with the United States that assists both sides and improves the international security situation.

As a side note of sorts, one might add that while the Obama Administration is right to believe that an excessive degree of interventionism from the United States would likely backfire, hanging back too much would lead to deleterious results. When Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi visited the United States during the Carter Administration, anti-Shah demonstrators organized near the White House while an outdoor welcoming ceremony was being conducted. Things got out of hand, the police responded with tear gas, and unfavorable winds ensured that the tear gas drifted over to the White House--turning the entire event to a disaster. Iranians who learned about this believed that the United States could have stopped any anti-Shah demonstration if the Shah was still in the good graces of the United States. Since the demonstration went forward, they concluded that the Carter Administration had lost confidence in the Shah--allowing the revolution to go forward without fear that the United States would do anything significant to back the Shah. And indeed, the Carter Administration did nothing to save him, thus reinforcing the impression in Iran that they wanted him gone.

First, as Sadly, No! points out, I would sincerely doubt that a demonstration in DC had any bearing whatsoever on events in Iran. Maybe on the lunatic fringe of the most hardcore Islamist fundamentalist ranks, but unless you're going to make the claim that fractal theory would hold that the two or three people who might buy this load of crap could topple a government...

Second, I want to focus on the rather bizarre disconnect between that first sentence and the phrase "hanging back too much would lead to deleterious results." You can't both be talking and not talking at the same time. As Bristol Palin will tell you, there's no such thing as "almost pregnant."

(Go ahead, Sarah. Sue me...)

Is it so hard for the folks on the right wing to accept that maybe, just maybe, the administration is working behind the scenes to try to find an equitable solution that gives Iran a fair election result while respecting its sovereignty? After all, given who is supporting Ahmadinejad (namely, Putin and Hu, neither of whom exactly has a spotless record on human rights when it comes to dissidents), it's a little hard for Obama to come out and make bold statements regarding the results of an election that appears to have been polluted, if not outright stolen.

Too, it's a little hard for America to point fingers about pilfered votes when we've just survived eight years of The Pretender.

This is not the Bush administration. Obama and his staff are not wearing sidearms and marching into the saloon to clean things up, and we ought to get behind his efforts to find a fruitful, peaceful negotiation. Bringing the Shah's name up at this point is truly not helpful, either, even in a sidenote. You have basically just equated Pahlavi with Mousavi. If you're dumb enough to buy into the fact that Iran has it's finger on America's pulse so gingerly as to pick up on tear gas, then surely the ruling Council will trot that equation out in a heartbeat.

Let's let the adults do the adult stuff.

How To Shut Up A Clown

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 06:18:43 PDT

I think Leon Panetta may be onto something here:

CIA Director Leon Panetta's remarks on former Vice President Dick Cheney made in a nearly 7,600-word interview with The New Yorker generated some media attention last night and this morning. Calling them "tough words," ABC World News reported briefly that Panetta said of Cheney, who "has repeatedly, of course, criticized the Obama Administration's approach to terrorism," that "it's almost as if he is wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.'" Panetta, the New Yorker (6/22, Mayer) reports, was responding to a speech the former vice president made at the American Enterprise Institute, where he accused the Administration of making "the American people less safe" by banning brutal CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects that had been sanctioned by the Bush Administration. With "surprising candor," the magazine reports Panetta said, "I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

Thus, in one stroke, Leon Panetta has made the case that, should the United States be attacked in the next eight years, the blame can be traced directly back to the highest levels of the Bush administration.

It's intriguing how, under Bush, any criticism of the President's strategery for combatting terrorism, from the Iraq war to the constant terror alerts anytime the President was trying to usurp power to the strange rash of terror alerts during the 2004 re-election campaign (and nothing much since) to the justifications for torturing innocent Muslim citizens of foreign lands, was greeted with "Why aren't you goosestepping behind Bush?"

Remember this gem?

The April 26, 2004, Washington Post reported that "Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday that Sen. John Kerry 'has given us ample grounds to doubt' his judgment on national security, but at the same time the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (Terry McAuliffe) in Washington urged the White House to stop such criticism."

Yea, well, not so much, it turns out:

On April 26, 2004, FactCheck.org addressed "More Bush Distortions of Kerry Defense Record" stating that the "Latest barrage of ads repeats misleading claims that Kerry 'repeatedly opposed' mainstream weapons."

FactCheck says that Bush's April 26 ads "recycle some distortions of Kerry's voting record on military hardware" and FactCheck has "de-bunked these half-truths before but the Bush campaign persists.

"The ads -- many targeted to specific states -- repeat the claim that Kerry opposed a list of mainstream weapons including Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Apache helicopters, and also repeat the claim that he voted against body armor for frontline troops in Iraq. In fact, Kerry voted against a few large Pentagon money bills, of which Bradleys, Apaches and body armor were small parts, but not against those items specifically."

What is good for the goose should be for the gander, of course, but that's not how Republican politics works. Republican politics works on the assumption that the average American is a NASCAR, beer-swilling moron who believes history began this week.

Sadly, for much of the electorate, and in many cases, just enough of the electorate, they are correct. What Panetta is doing is using that assumption against them. Is Panetta's case accurate? Is Cheney practically inviting an Al Qaeda attack?

I'm going to assume not. I don't think even a cold-blooded, literally heartless man like Dick Cheney would want to turn on his TeeVee to see DC smolder.

But I do think he is capable of wishful thinking, and by calling Cheney out in the extreme, Panetta is putting him on notice about Cheney's own record on terror (spotty, at best, as the strong case can be made that Al Qaeda didn't attack after 9/11 because they simply shot their wad, and other terrorists like the Anthrax killer stepped in, and Cheney and his kind did nothing to find those terrorists).

That presumable bluff should be enough to shut the old man down.

The Party Of Schizophrenia

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:32:19 PDT

On the one hand, the Republicans are doing their damndest to unleash the far right wing of the party, led by Rush Limbaugh, to weed out the infidels.

On the other, they're trying to be more inclusive?

In the two weeks since President Obama made Judge Sonia Sotomayor his pick for the Supreme Court, outnumbered Republicans on Capitol Hill and conservative activists have struggled mightily over how to mount a credible opposition.

Conservative efforts to frame a coherent case against the nation's first Hispanic nominee took on new urgency Tuesday, after Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) announced that Sotomayor's confirmation hearings will begin July 13, months earlier than many GOP leaders had wanted.

The GOP is still debating how to make that case against a nominee who, barring a disqualifying revelation, is expected to emerge from her Senate review as the newest justice. But consensus is emerging over how to use Sotomayor's confirmation process —and its three or four days of televised hearings — as a jumping-off point to appeal to the moderate and independent voters whom the party has been rapidly shedding.

Hm. Considering the point man for the Republicans on Sotomayor has been Jeff Sessions, one has to wonder how delusional they are?

The events of the past few weeks indicate to me a party that is not licking its wounds, trying to re-establish itself as a player on the national stage. Indeed, they seemed resigned to grabbinb power in whatever cheap and base form they can.

Not that there's anything wrong with stealing power where you can, especially if Democrats are going to be asleep at the wheel, but still...this was the party that had it all just three years ago.

It's sad to see.

Palin In Comparison

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:00:13 PDT

You know, when the Democrats shot themselves in the foot in 1994, things were never this chaotic:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Newt Gingrich was the keynote speaker at Monday night's fundraising dinner for the Senate and House Republican campaign committees, but it was Sarah Palin who stole the show.

The Alaska governor's last-minute appearance at the GOP's biggest fundraiser of the year ended 24 hours of speculation that the she might skip the event. A late attempt to have her speak at the dinner fell through when organizers feared she might upstage Gingrich, the onetime House speaker.

Hours before the event was slated to begin, an aide to Palin would not confirm that she would be attending. But when Palin and her husband, Todd, sauntered across the stage with Gingrich and his wife, Callista, shortly before the program commenced, their appearance was met with cheers from the audience of 2,000 party loyalists.

OK, on the face of it, not so bad, right? Even digging just a little bit further and realizing that Gingrich was the febrile ground in which the so-called "Permanent Republican Majority" withered and died, so why in the hell should he be anywhere near a podium speaking to Congressional candidates, yields little to mock.

And yet...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin attended a monster Republican fundraiser after all, despite floating the possibility she wouldn't because she was uninvited to speak.

Which she didn't, it should be noted.

So you have the heir apparent to the conservative wing of the Republican party, Sarah Palin, who has enormous appeal in the more conservative and more economically predatory wing of the party, thrown under the bus to give a man who has no ideas, no vision, and no real power in the party.

You have the nominee presumptive for 2012, certainly the front runner, being pushed off the biggest fundraising stage in her brief national career for someone who is irrelevant and immaterial. Denied access to the networks that create a national candidacy, the ground troops and connections with local officials and fundraisers, she decided to show up anyway.

So the question is, is this her Scarlett O'Hara moment or her Donna Reed moment? That is, did she get all gussied up in her $1500 dress from Neiman-Marcus and make a spectacle of herself, or was this Palin getting back into the kitchen for the good of the patriarchy?

Given what we learned about her during the McCain campaign, my gut tells me she took Gingrich to the mess he left and stuffed his nose in it.

[Palin's] was the only table in the vast ballroom that had a crowd gathered around it -- and despite their distance from Palin's table, multiple television cameras kept their lenses trained on the governor for much of the night.

I think we have our answer.

Escape To Which Mountain?

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:20:44 PDT

When life throws a curve, or when the world weighs heavily, we all seek an escape clause.

There's nothing wrong with that. Our primitive ancestors had to deal with problems that were right in front of them: Hungry. Need food. Cold. Need fur. Horny. Need sex.

Modern man, and in this case, anybody born after 1950, does not have it so easy. You and I are aware of the larger world around us.

OK, so maybe that includes mostly just the progressive liberal side of American society unless cheap political points can be scored by conservatives whining about children, but I digress.

We have retirement accounts. We have paychecks that we live off. We have homes to pay for and cars to maintain and children to raise.

In short, the North Korean government has a nuclear sneeze, and you and I pick up a Kleenex.

Humans aren't made for that kind of stress. We fight or flight, which implies we have to have an immediate stressor, a confrontation. We don't have strong tools that allow us to be under major stresses constantly for a long term.

Enter the concept of stress-relief.

Much like the concept of Daylight Savings Time, stress relief is an attempt to alleviate a situation that shouldn't occur in the first place: the feeling of being trapped by circumstance, of seeing no way out, of not being able to fight or flee.

Some people drink. Some take drugs. Some turn to religion. Some find a hobby. But we all of us have some way to cut the tension down a bit to at least almost-manageable proportions.

I'm about to admit a vice...ok, two vices...vice, in that they are escapes from reality.

This all sort of hit home yesterday afternoon. It was about 2:30 and I was sitting at home, restless and bored, and took a walk. As I strolled through a local park, I found myself suddenly very depressed and sad. I couldn't shake the feeling, nor could I very easily understand what was going on in me.

In fact, just after I took that picture, I had this feeling of doom as I glanced at the sunbathers gathered on the small lawn under that bridge tower. And it hit me: I had to go back to work today.

And it pissed me off.

Why did it bug me so much? As I walked, the stiffness in my legs and the soreness of my back whispered loudly to me.

You see, I had ridden my bike for about 50 miles over this weekend. The weather was nice, and I had the energy, so for roughly four hours, I was free.

Free, as in free to deal with my situation as it occured. No thoughts about tomorrow. No insurance worries. No bank accounts. No work. Just me, my bike, and some small amounts of traffic and the occasional hill.

Life, the way it's supposed to be lived.

To give you an idea of what I was dealing with, here are some photos I shot this weekend. I made myself carry a point-and-shoot camera:

Kinda sweet, huh? It would be fun to get on my bike and keep riding, carrying my camera and just shooting pictures.

But...

Yeah. It's the "but." A big "but."

We all need escapes. We all need the kind of vice that for a few moments, or hours, allows us to deal with life on our terms. Something that stops us from thinking, and starts us dealing with who we are and what we want to do.

Something that reminds us of our humanity. We are human beings, not human doings...

Nobody Asked Me, But...

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 06:04:00 PDT

1) The march of the penguins apparently includes rest area breaks.

2) Twitter is for twits, Episode 4,359

3) Finally, he snatched the pebble from sensei's hand.

4) SLB has a small readership, but it's a very well-informed one. So someone remind me, when was the last time a white man was mistaken for a criminal and killed?

5) No disrespect intended to police officers anywhere, I should start with, but this has to stop. Oh, but I forgot! There's no racism anymore!

6) Really! No one hates anyone anymore! The right wing is perfectly comfortable with a black centrist president!

7) One can only hope that these series of incidents revolving around race...the Sweeten case, this assassination threat, and the Edwards killing...will cause some of our more rational brethren on the right to finally....FINALLLY...denounce the hate the way they insisted moderate Muslims stand up to extremism.

8) It seems there's a condition that strikes white male-- FUCK ME, MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!!!! --ales more than any other demographic.

9) It never rains in California, but girl, don't they warn you, it pours, man it pours!

10) BEHOLD THE POWER OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY!

Obama's Defining Moment

noreply@blogger.com (Actor212) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 06:24:33 PDT

While you should read the entire text for yourselves, I believe history will judge this paragraph as the time when America truly rejoined the world community as a leader and a beacon:

So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.

Leading up to this paragraph, President Obama spoke of how the continual Muslim violence towards not only westerners but fellow Muslims, has bred a suspicion and, indeed, terror among the partisan right wing of the western world.

After this paragraph, he acknowledges civilization's debt to the Muslim world and to Islam in particular: math, sciences, philosophy, commerce, art, even history...all these were advanced by Muslims when the rest of the world suffered the Dark Ages.

And then he challenged the Muslim world to change with the times. He invited them to view America differently, and if anyone could do that, if anyone could truthfully say those words and mean them in Egypt, it is Barack Obama: America's first African-American President. Indeed, the quintessence of change resides within him.

The intriguing bit came when he began to talk about Palestine. I expect he will get a large helping of grief over this part, where he seems to hint at a division of territory between Israel and the Palestinians (the "two state" solution he has talked about before).

But there's a surprise hinted at in the speech as well when he speaks about Al Qaeda:

And that's why we're partnering with a coalition of 46 countries. And despite the costs involved, America's commitment will not weaken. Indeed, none of us should tolerate these extremists. They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths but, more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam.

The Holy Quran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as it if has killed all mankind.

And the Holy Quran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.

The enduring faith of over a billion people is so much bigger than the narrow hatred of a few. Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism; it is an important part of promoting peace.

I interpret this to mean he's offering the Muslim world a chance for a show of good faith: turn over Al Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups, turn over Osama bin Laden. Show us that you mean business.

Wow. I mean, wow. He invokes among the most holy of passages written in the Koran and challenges the Muslim world to live up to it.

Think about that for a moment: the President of the Great Satan has asked Muslims to turn their back on what amounts to the Religious Right of the Muslim world, the Jerry Falwells of Fatwas, and asked the entire Muslim world to join us in the 21st Century, to shun those who would take the world back to the Dark Ages.

And you know what? He's got a good chance of succeeding.