messiestobjects

Mile High Status Update

    Before I get to the northern half of Ireland, I wanted to post a quick one with bad cellphone photos about a trip to Denver I took for work a week or so ago. I had been there back in January, just a week after marijuana was legalized recreationally. So it was cool to go back 6 months later to see how the whole thing was progressing. I was out in suburbia this time, so I checked out a different store named The Green Solution, pictured above in all its generic run-down shopping plaza glory.

    They don't seem comfortable quite yet with having their pictures taken while perusing or working in a legal weed shop despite the complete legality of it (too soon!), so to be a nice guy I had trippy fun with face blurring tech. The stores seem to be upgrading their appearances and offerings, and it seems like new rules are getting put into place as time goes by. Once gaining admittance after showing ID, you have to wait in line until a customer service rep can attend to you personally. Apparently no one is to wander around the pot shops all willy-nilly anymore.

    A more professional display than the wild west of January, but still very strange to see.

    There were plenty of options this time around too; I suppose their supply problems of the early weeks are a thing of the past. Edibles! Cookies, brownies, candy, rice crispy treats...

    And pain cremes, lotions and ointments! They are really embracing all of the exciting possibilities. They also had eCig marijuana cartridges, concentrated oils and waxes, and a plethora of weird shit I'd never heard of. But just in case you think they might've forgotten their core demographic:

    Another new rule since I was last there is that now any items purchased must be kept in a child proof safety bag. The keys are just for size comparison, because why not. The zipper has a tricky lever thing on it so that the kids don't "accidentally" smoke all of mom and dad's pot. I suppose it was only a matter of time before a paper bag law went into effect, but damn, that was quick.

    I can kind of understand it though, at least for the edibles. I mean, cookies and candies made with pot don't look terribly different from normal cookies and candies, and it is possible to get really sick from overdosing that way.

It Ain't Called The Mile High City For Nothing! And Other Obvious Puns.

    Sometimes, work just drops it in my lap, you know? One week after it became legal to sell recreational marijuana in Colorado, I was in Denver on a job. I'm not a pot smoker, but I am definitely against prohibition as I believe that the Drug War is not only a failure, but evil. Thankfully, I am hardly alone in that belief and it seems as though our insane drug policies are rapidly coming to an end. So of course, I had to go and see for myself and yes, I bought that joint up there just so that I could say that I did.

    That is the storefront of 3D Cannabis, the store that made the first legal sale of recreational Marijuana in the US. I had read about it when that awesome picture was lighting up reddit and going viral, and so of course it's the place I chose to visit first.

    There are of course some rules for recreational weed; it is not a free-for-all where people are getting high on every street corner... although having said that, I did smell the lovely odor on a couple of street corners in downtown Denver. Just not, you know, EVERY street corner. In any case, seeing legal pot stores and all of the attendant accoutrements was very, very weird. Here is what I assume is the preliminary governmental warning/official notice sign regarding rules of marijuana consumption.

        I had to wait in line for about 15 minutes—a much shorter waiting period than what people apparently had to deal with on January 1st—and it was a strange 15 minutes. I was most likely projecting, but it seemed like a quiet, subdued line where everyone was waiting for the boot to drop. "Am I really doing this? This can't be legal! I'm standing in a room with ATMs (recreational dispensaries are having bank troubles and can only take cash) that smells heavily of marijuana, waiting to buy marijuana, which I will then put in the glove box of my rental car where I apparently do not need to worry about cops finding it if I get pulled over. What." As I said to someone else, it's like one of those things that college stoners have been sitting around eating pizza and fantasizing about for 60 years, but startlingly real all of the sudden.

    Now, I've been to Amsterdam, Holland. There, the streets were lined with coffee shops and prostitutes in shop windows. You could go in a coffee shop, order a coffee and a joint or some hash and smoke it right there, and the smell was everywhere. Denver is not like Amsterdam, but, dam if it didn't feel like a step in the right direction. 3D's supply seemed to be a little low: understandable given the $5 million weed rush of the week before. But as I understand it, what they did have was still some... how do you say? Quality shit.

    Jars on a counter... love it. The place was janky and claptrap; I suspect that in a few months or years time, once the industry figures out it's banking problem and collects many more millions of the dollars, their storefronts will begin to reflect a fancier approach to retail sales. But for now, for this glorious moment in time, you've got clapped together wooden counters and jars. The real draw for 3D (which stands for Denver's Discreet Dispensary, by the way), however, is that the hallway that you exit through after making your purchase serves as a viewing area. There are windows looking into the grow rooms. I don't have much to say about the next few pictures except, "pretty!" so here they all are.

    Although, I'm reminded of a bit that David Cross does, where he rags on High Times magazine for fetishizing pictures of pot... well, as much as he's right, Colorado is winning the drug war! It's an historic occasion! So fetishistic pictures of pot are, I think, appropriate in this instance. I also went to check out another pot shop, Mile High Recreational Cannabis (because Denver is the Mile High City! And high is also the word used to describe the cognitive effects of marijuana!), and they had a handy whiteboard menu to help you with your ordering.

    Look, this is how wonderfully janky these shops are right now. Behind the counter, on the floor, spilling out of boxes and bags.

    Clearly, Mile High Recreational Cannabis does not currently have the supply problem that 3D does. Although, I was interested to see what their edibles looked like but both places had completely run out of them when I was there. I suppose the demand for edibles is fairly high, because tourists face the problem of having nowhere to smoke: you can't smoke anywhere in public, or in hotel rooms, or while driving. I mean, I'm sure with a little ingenuity most potsmokers could figure something out, but edibles solve that problem.

    With State-level decriminalizations in 20 or so States, and the first trickle of complete legalization just beginning, one has to wonder when the damn will burst entirely. Living in Pennsylvania, I don't imagine that we'll come around until pretty much last after everyone else, except for some southern states. Maybe once Colorado can show how much money they are able to put into school systems and keep out of the prison systems, some of us more conservative states will begin to wake up to the potential financial benefits naturally inherent in the Big Marijuana business.

It's All In The Interpretation

    I chose to write my final paper for American History about the first amendment. This is obvious if you know me at all. I thought it would be an easy topic to write about; it is a subject I feel strongly about and there is plenty of material available. And so it was... too easy. It was only supposed to be a six page paper and there is a plethora of material available, not to mention the superabundance of arguments to be made. Everytime I researched a facet or a tidbit, I came up with more and more material to pontificate about. Keeping it down to scale and deciding what should be focused on and what should be left out was the hardest part. My wife tells me that is what writing is always all about, or at least it is for someone such as myself who tends to overdescribe things. So I'll shut it and post it, with pictures from my visit to Mont Saint-Michel in France.

    The First Amendment guarantees that Congress will neither interfere with the free exercise nor make any laws respecting the establishment of religion. The wording of the Freedom of Religion clauses is perhaps a bit too concise, as its exact interpretation has been a constant source of dispute, even up to the modern day. The arguments surrounding any constitutional interpretation generally center on two talking points. What did the Founding Fathers intend? And given that the US Constitution was meant to be a malleable document subject to change as agreed upon by its constituents, why should it matter exactly what they intended? If the inherent and inalienable rights of modern people have been infringed upon by a devious interpretation of the Constitution, isn’t it our duty to clarify the wording to promote equality under the law? As Thomas Jefferson boldly states in the Declaration of Independence, “…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” (US Declaration of Independence)

    On one extreme of the argument about the religious clauses of the First Amendment, certain religious fundamentalists believe that the antiestablishment clause means that government cannot interfere with their own particular religion or church, but believe that they have the right to politically enforce their own individual moral code, or even to enforce religious practices in a public sphere such as school-led prayer. This is because the founders did not explicitly state that the freedom from religion is a part of the constitutional guarantee, and yet on the other extreme this is exactly the way that many people believe it should be interpreted. It doesn’t help their cause that for most of the life of the United States, the former extreme is how the First Amendment was generally understood. It has only been relatively recently that—as a part of the fastest-growing “religious” affiliation in America—non-believers have felt secure enough to begin the conversation without fear of reprisal and with some certainty of being taken seriously. In order to discover whether the founding fathers meant for the religion clauses to imply that we have the right to be free from religiously derived moral legislation, we need to begin by going back to the complex figure of Roger Williams.

    There is a legend in my family that my great-great grandfather took Williams’ surname as our own when he first came to America. He arrived as a stowaway on a ship, and the story goes that when he got here he stole a horse and was promptly caught. Judge Hawkins Hart presided over his case and gave him leniency, choosing not to hang him. My great-grandfather had seen a plaque or a statue bearing the name of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, so when he was released from jail he changed his name to Hawkins Hart Williams both to honor the man who let him live and in hopes of pinching off some of Williams’ prestige for himself. Despite the shady nature of my family history and our legend—or perhaps due to it—I have thus an inherent fondness for and interest in Roger Williams. He was decidedly ahead of his time regarding the relationship between religion and politics. He was also a brave man as he dared to defy the Puritan authority, risking his reputation, livelihood, and safety in the defense of his beliefs, which included the then heretical notion that Church and State must be completely separate.

    Williams was staunch in that particular conviction, even though he himself was a devout Puritan. Perhaps even because of it. As Williams stated anonymously (fearing retribution) in a tract to British Parliament, “Religion was local, not national; the church was spiritual, not political… when persons are forced to conform to a mode of worship that their ‘hearts embrace not,’ then they have been violated in the very depths of their being.” (Gaustad pp. 86-88) When he came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, fleeing persecution in England for his religious beliefs along with many other colonists, he found himself ironically at odds with the other Puritans there when he tried discussing his ideas. They exiled him from Massachusetts for challenging their own religious authority, and he survived thanks to Native Americans with whom he was friendly. He went on to found Rhode Island in the hopes that he could put his ideas into practice there.

    At first look, it doesn’t seem as though Williams was promoting freedom from religion so much as the freedom to practice religion without interference from the State; a subtle difference, but one that a religious totalitarian might exploit if not examined too closely. If you happen to be an atheist, an anti-theist, a non-believer, or simply unaffiliated, how else can one interpret such sentiments? If Roger Williams believed that the State had no right to tell him how to worship, what if one decides not to worship at all? Would Williams have then said to the unbeliever: you can worship in any way you choose, so long as you worship? And make it law that one must do so? In taking a stand against interference with the individual’s right to worship as he or she sees fit, it would be absurd to then turn around and tell non-believers that they have to believe in something. Luckily, we don’t need to speculate on this matter too heavily as Williams made his opinion about religious rights quite clear in a letter he wrote to the town of Providence, in which he made an analogy comparing the relationship between church and state to a ship at sea:

    The passengers aboard that ship had full liberty to worship as they pleased, or not to worship at all. ‘Papists, Protestants, Jews, Turks’—whoever—all were free to worship in their own fashion, and none could be compelled to attend anyone else’s worship. But on the other hand, the captain of the ship had his own characteristic liberty too: ‘to command the ship’s course; yea, and also to command that justice, peace, and sobriety be kept and practiced, both among the seamen and all the passengers.’… Citizens had to pay taxes, they had to fulfill their obligations to serve in the militia, they had to obey—but in civil matters only. In religion, their liberty was complete. (Gaustad pp. 104-105)

    Roger Williams may not have been a founding father, but he was certainly an early inspiration with regards to the forming of the US Constitution. In 1689, a few years after Williams’ death, the philosopher John Locke published A Letter Concerning Toleration revealing the influence of Roger Williams. “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other…care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate…it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion.” (Locke 1689) Locke was in turn to be a heavy influence upon James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the two greatest champions that religious liberty in the new world would ever have.

    I wish that I could simply quote Thomas Jefferson’s A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in full and be done with it. No argument that I am capable of making is more lucid or concise than that great document. But it shows the heavy influence of Locke in certain key points: “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers…who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men…hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.” (Jefferson) Williams, Locke, Jefferson and Madison—who championed Jefferson’s Bill until it was finally adopted in Virginia on January 16, 1786—all show a deep distrust that any man on Earth is wise enough to assume authority over another man’s conscience in religious matters. Further, the act of forcing someone to subscribe to the moral cause of another is itself morally wrong: “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical: that even forcing him to support [a] teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose moral he would make his pattern.” (Jefferson)

    There are several interesting things in that passage. One is that Jefferson makes it clear that a State Religion—enforced belief—harms not only the non-believer, but the believer as well. This is a fine point that is often lost on those who would impress their religion into law. When a believer is made to practice a set of morals, he has lost the dignity of taking a personal stand on his own merits. “A state-created orthodoxy puts at grave risk that freedom of belief and conscience which are the sole assurance that religious faith is real, not imposed.” (Lee v. Weisman 1992)

    Another fascinating point is how Jefferson uses the word ‘disbelieves’: “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves.” If only this particular statement had carried over into the US Constitution, many ambiguities and arguments would be resolved. It is of course possible that Jefferson meant ‘disbelieves’ to be an interfaith qualification only, as in the way that someone who is Jewish disbelieves in the divinity of Christ, or a Christian disbelieves that Mohammed was a prophet. However, he made no such distinction between types of disbelief and, being a very careful man, it seems likely that—rather than an oversight—he intended it in every sense of the word. We know that he did indeed have a deep distrust of all religion: “Jefferson was a child of the eighteenth century enlightenment. He emphasized reason and was skeptical of religious dogmas. While he championed personal freedom of conscience and religious belief, Jefferson was suspicious of institutional religion and was fearful that it might have a corrupting influence on the body politic.” (Barron and Dienes pp. 422) After all, a Christian may disbelieve in Allah, Zeus, or Odin, but a non-believer simply goes just one God further. If this particular statement of Jefferson’s had been a clause in the constitution, the very idea of legislating against a group of people who don’t believe in the validity of the legislator’s religiously-derived morals would be a far shorter conversation in this country. In any case, whether it made it into the Constitution or not, we can easily deduce that his intent as a founding father was indeed to allow for the freedom from religion and its edicts.

    One of the most odious ways in which certain religious groups try to force their will on the populace is through devious interpretations of the free exercise clause. Recently, certain corporations—who should never have been given the same rights as the individual, but that is an entirely different subject—have attempted to deny certain rights to their employees by asserting the right of a corporation to coerce its employees into abiding by the morals of the CEO’s religious beliefs. The CEO of Hobby Lobby, David Green, believes that he has the right to deny his employees access to government mandated healthcare in the form of contraceptives, because of his so-called “Biblical Principles:”

    A new government health care mandate says that our family business must provide what I believe are abortion-causing drugs as part of our health insurance. Being Christians, we don't pay for drugs that might cause abortions. Which means that we don't cover emergency contraception, the morning-after pill or the week-after pill. We believe doing so might end a life after the moment of conception, something that is contrary to our most important beliefs. It goes against the biblical principles on which we have run this company since day one. (Green)

    Forgetting for a moment the fact that the Bible actually says nothing about abortion—not to mention that contraception is not abortion, no matter what you believe—the fact is that the right to freely exercise your religious rights and beliefs does not give you the right to deny those rights to other people because they believe differently.

    It is true that judicial interpretation of the free exercise clause has changed over the course of its lifetime. On the one extreme, judges have ruled that exemptions from civil laws are allowed when they infringe on certain religious practices; allowing certain faiths to utilize otherwise illegal drugs in their religious ceremonies, for example. On the other extreme, they have ruled that only the beliefs and opinions of men are exempt from legal coercion, but not practices that are otherwise unlawful. A case which I find particularly interesting in this regard is from 1878, when a Utah Mormon named Reynolds was charged with violating a federal law prohibiting polygamy. I agree whole-heartedly that civil laws must be adhered to for the good of society whether they go against someone’s religious beliefs or not… when those beliefs might cause harm to society. It would be absurd, for example, to allow an adherent of an ancient Aztec religion to perform a human sacrifice to appease his volcano god. No matter how strenuously his court-appointed lawyer might argue his client’s right to freely exercise his religion, there is simply no chance that any judge would allow this particular religious observance to proceed unchallenged. Cases involving a consensual crime such as polygamy, however, require more deliberation.

    In the case of the Utah Mormon, “Chief Justice Waite… drew a sharp distinction between protected belief/opinion and the conduct of polygamy. Reynolds’ defense that his conduct was protected by the free exercise clause was rejected…‘Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices.” (Barron and Dienes pp. 505) I completely agree with the judge’s statement in principle, but disagree with his ruling, which was that Reynolds could not use religion as an excuse to break the law against polygamy. This may seem like a subject for another paper, but the law against polygamy is a morality-based law. It harms no one and picks no pockets so long as all parties in the marriage enter into it willingly and with full knowledge of the situation. Informed consent is a value that is too often ignored when writing such laws. I consider it ironic that the judge’s (and the federal law’s) distaste of polygamy is probably informed by the dictates of Judaic religious morality—whether he was aware of it or not—and yet he used civil authority as a shield with which to deny a member of an opposing religion the free expression of his beliefs, based on the prejudices of his own.

    This is getting into tricky territory, which shouldn’t be surprising given that the attempt to understand the First Amendment often leads to such places. As Peter McWilliams so eloquently puts it,

    In listening to the reasons why laws against consensual activities are enacted, or why laws against consensual activities should not be eliminated, one begins to peel away the layers of an onion, and at the core of that onion is almost invariably a religious belief. The progression usually goes something like this:

“It’s not right.”

“Why is it not right?”

“Because it’s not moral.”

“Why is it not moral?”

“Because God says so.”

And this is usually followed by some reference—sometimes specific but usually vague—to the Bible, a sermon, a televangelist, or a story remembered from Sunday School (or was it Cecil B. de Mille?)

    Knowing about that pesky separation of church and state rule… some politicians and commentators do the best they can to cloud the fact that criminalizing consensual activities is a religious issue. (McWilliams pp. 169)

    This is the danger of supposing that the First Amendment does not or should not guarantee freedom from religion. There is nothing intrinsically harmful to society about polygamy, homosexuality or the marriage thereof, personal drug use, prostitution, contraception, stem cell research, etc. and legislating against these activities or the groups that engage in them denies consenting adults the freedoms that the Constitution is meant to guarantee. As I have shown, it seems clear from the writings of Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson that their intention at least was for the citizens of the United States—ALL of its citizens—to enjoy those freedoms and that the religious clauses of the First Amendment are meant to be interpreted in exactly that way. Furthermore I have also attempted to show that whatever the rest of the founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution intended, it doesn’t change the fact that certain morality based laws—so often derived from religious beliefs—constitute a threat to free expression and whether the words of the First Amendment explicitly declare it or not, it is in the best interests of freedom-loving Americans to make it explicit that the freedom from religion is a self-evident truth, an inherent and inalienable right.

Works Cited

Barron, Jerome A. and C. Thomas Dienes. First Amendment Law, 4th Ed. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing CO., 1993.

Gaustad, Edwin S. Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Green, David. "Column: Christian companies can't bow to sinful mandate." 09 September 2012. USA Today. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-09-12/hhs-mandate-birth-control-sue-hobby-lobby/57759226/1. 30 April 2013.

Jefferson, Thomas. "A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom." 1777.

Lee v. Weisman. No. 505 U.S. 577. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. 1992.

Locke, John. "A Letter Concerning Toleration." 1689. http://www.constitution.org/jl/tolerati.htm. 24 April 2013.

McWilliams, Peter. Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do. Los Angeles: Prelude Press, 1993.

Reynolds v. United States. No. 98 U.S. 145. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. 1878.

US Declaration of Independence. 1776.

 

The Sheepdog Mentality

    Have you ever wondered what soldiers, cops, and other protectorly types really think of people who don't like guns? Several years ago, I found a transcript of a speech given by Dave Grossman at a military base while I was there for a job —I was not present for the speech itself. When I read it, my initial reaction was extreme indignation. I was going to post it then, but I decided to sit on it instead. The transcript fell behind my desk and escaped my memory for a few years until this past week when, during an intensive office spring cleaning, I rediscovered it. As I read it, I found that age hadn't changed my perspective very much. In it, he refers to the non-gun-toting 53% of Americans as "sheep," and tells any gun-owning citizen with a concealed weapons permit that if he leaves his home without his gun, he may as well say "baa."

    Now, by pulling that out of the context of his speech, I expect any non-gun-owner to be sufficiently outraged. It's insulting. But putting it into the context of his larger speech, it is slightly less insulting. Slightly. He actually makes some good points, and it's easy to see why he believes what he believes. But there are a couple of fundamental problems with his assertions, and there are some frightening implications, not least of which is that in my job I come into contact with a lot of people who are rabid gun-carriers, and who clearly have a sense of righteousness about the idea of carrying a concealed weapon. Many of those types of people that I talk to tend to be middle-aged overweight white men with average intelligence and an apparent sense of impotence. I don't mean sexual impotence; I'm talking about that feeling you get around someone who clearly thinks of himself as a hero, yet has never had the chance to be one. There are of course many heroes in the cop and soldier business, and I don't mean to denigrate noble action. But there are many, many more frustrated, unactualized, would-be John McClanes who yearn for the chance to use their weaponry and prove to everyone that they are worth something.

    At any rate, I get the feeling that Grossman and his views have had a large impact on the "responsible" gun-owning society that seems to exist largely behind the scenes to many people in America, particularly to liberals who don't have much contact with those types. So I'm going to post the transcript in full and discuss the issues I have with it in between in blue.

_______________________________________________________________

     Everyone has been given a gift in life. Some people have a gift for science and some have a flair for art. And warriors have been given the gift of aggression. They would no more misuse this gift than a doctor would misuse his healing arts, but they yearn for the opportunity to use their gift to help others. These people, the ones who have been blessed with the gift of aggression and a love for others, are our sheepdogs. These are our warriors.

     One career police officer wrote to me about this after attending one of my Bulletproof Mind training sessions:

     "I want to say thank you for finally shedding some light on why it is that I can do what I do. I always knew why I did it. I love my [citizens], even the bad ones, and had a talent that I could return to my community. I just couldn't put my finger on why I could wade through the chaos, the gore, the sadness, if given a chance try to make it all better, and walk right out the other side." -Even the bad ones. This is the first indicator that it is normal to label certain people as "bad." I'm not saying that there aren't bad people, I'm just saying that it's unwise to make such judgements without more qualification. What does he mean by "bad?" Gay? Muslim? Shoplifters? Welfare recipients? Or does he mean to suggest that he even loves terrorists? It's all very condescending.

     Let me expand on this old soldier's excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial; that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids' schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are dozens of times more likely to be killed, and thousands of times more likely to be seriously injured, by school violence than by school fires. -This is an interesting point, or would be if he compared school violence to something a bit less controlled than the school system's gigantic efforts related to fire prevention and emergency evacuation. How about prescription medication overdoses? I get that he's talking about just that, the need for preparedness in the case of school violence, but it's not clear that having armed guards in every school is actually a proven way to deter violence.

     But the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. -So then the sheepdog's only response to the possibility of violence is more violence? Hmm. Did he steal that idea from the Bible?- The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their children is just too hard, so they choose the path of denial. I'd like to see some evidence for this claim besides a bold assertion. As near as I can tell, most parents worry themselves to crow's feet and grey hairs about their kids' safety. Grossman chooses to interpret a distaste for armed security guards in schools as denial rather than as a healthy skepticism of the effectiveness of such methods. Homes with guns in them are associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home itself. There is no reason to suspect that it would be any different in schools with guards, what with them leaving their guns laying all about for any depressed or homicidal student to pick up.

     The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog that intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours. Ugh. This metaphor is perhaps meant well, but if Grossman really believes that all types of people have a place in society, that everyone has something to offer and that "sheepdogs" are merely another such type, I find it disingenuous that he would choose to use such denigrating language.

     Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn’t tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. Or not search your adult diapers at the airport, nor make obnoxious comments about your private items, maybe even don't arrest journalists covering events that the government doesn't like, or not pepper spray students SITTING DURING A PEACEFUL PROTEST. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, "Baa." Yes, clearly our distrust for authoritative gun-toting security types is all about a sheep-like denial of the possibilty of violence. Grossman seems to be in denial about the fact that we are too often at the mercy of the idiocy of people given sheepdog-like authority.

     Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind one lonely sheepdog. As Kipling said in his poem about “Tommy" the British soldier:

While its Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall behind,”

But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir,” when there’s trouble in the wind,

There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,

O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir,” when there’s trouble in the wind.

     The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough high school students, and under ordinary circumstances they would not have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad kids; they just had nothing to say to a cop. When the school was under attack, however, and SWAT teams were clearing the rooms and hallways, the officers had to physically peel those clinging, sobbing kids off of them. This is how the little lambs feel about their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door. Look at w hat happened after September 11, 2001, when the wolf pounded hard on the door. Remember how America, more than ever before, felt differently about their law enforcement officers and military personnel? Remember how many times you heard the word hero? Here he makes his strongest point. Yes, absolutely, when bad things happen it is good to have a strong good-guy around. It is not denial, however, to recognize that the last time that Homeland Security created an entirely new nation-wide security team in response to a threat, we got the TSA, an amalgam of untrained security guards whose ineptitude has been a constant source of amusement, scandal, and ineffectiveness ever since. Yeah, let's do that again, but with children and inept guards with guns instead. I agree, it's a subject worth discussing, but I find it odd that the regulation of gun sales in a manner similar to the way we regulate driver's licensing is somehow more worthy of the sneering claim of "denial" than the idea that more guns won't solve the problem of violence.

     Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a sheepdog is a funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night, and yearning for a righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns when needed right along with the young ones. He's really stretching this metaphor. I wonder how he deals with the cognitive dissonance in stating that there is nothing morally superior about yearning for a righteous battle while the sheep go stick their heads in the sand. Perhaps he simply doesn't really mean what he says, and is just trying to downplay the aggravated sense of moral superiority that he actually seems to have a very difficult time hiding.

      Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, "Thank God I wasn’t on one of those planes." The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, "Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference." When you are truly transformed into a warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there. You want to be able to make a difference. Most of the Citizens of the US are sheep. Well, on that we can agree, though perhaps for different reasons. I'd like to know, though, why he thinks that most people pretend that the wolf will never come, or that bad things will never happen. I think he misunderstands the motivations of people who aren't crazy about guns and violence. For myself, I know that bad things will happen, that there are batshit lunatic jihadists out there who want to kill me for saying that Mohammed was a murderous pedophile, and more charlatan than prophet--as are all prophets. The difference is that I choose not to live my life in fear. I am glad that there are men out there who want to prevent crazy people from destroying the lives of normal people, but the problem is that they are not always the best types of people to perceive where the actual threats are. To hijack Grossman's metaphor, I once saw a sheepdog bark at a squirrell in a tree for ten minutes while a fox happily kept an ear on him from the safety of the henhouse.

     While there is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, he does have one real advantage. Only one. He is able to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98 percent of the population. Besides admitting that a sheepdog's only advantage doesn't necessarily have anything to do with critical thought, I think he again underestimates common people. I have been in some scary situations: I've had a gun pointed at me outside of Saddam's gigantic mosque, I was 100 yards away from an explosion in Iraq, and I walked weaponless down Karrada street, by myself, in Baghdad in broad daylight during the spring of 2004 to get some schwarma at a popular restaurant. I also used to drive a bus full of Iraqis every day down route Irish, the most dangerous road in the world at the time. I knew that something bad could happen, but I've always believed that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. If I had had a gun when that Iraqi security guard caught me taking pictures of the mosque, he probably would not have stopped me to ask questions.

     There was research conducted a few years ago with individuals convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious, predatory acts of violence: assaults, murders and killing law enforcement officers. The vast majority said that they specifically targeted victims by body language: slumped walk, passive behavior and lack of awareness.  They  chose their victims like big cats do in Africa, when  they select one out of the herd that is least able to protect itself.

     However, when there were cues given by potential victims that indicated they  would not go easily, the cons said that they would walk away. If the cons sensed that the target was a "counter-predator," that is, a sheepdog, they would leave him alone unless there was no other choice but to engage.

     One police officer told me that he rode a commuter train to work each day. One day, as was his usual, he was standing in the crowded car, dressed in blue jeans, T- shirt and jacket, holding onto a pole and reading a paperback. At one of the stops, two street toughs boarded, shouting and cursing and doing every obnoxious thing possible to intimidate the other riders. The officer continued to read  his book, though he kept  a watchful eye on the two punks as they strolled along the aisle making comments to female passengers, and banging shoulders with men as they passed.

     As they approached the officer, he lowered his novel and made eye contact with them. "You got a problem, man?" One of the IQ-challenged punks asked. "You think you're tough, or somethin'?" the other asked, obviously offended that this one was not shirking away from them.

     "As a matter of fact, I am tough," the officer said, calmly and with a steady gaze.

     The two looked at him for a long moment, and then without saying a word, turned and moved back down the aisle to continue their taunting of the other passengers, the sheep. I love this story. I've heard a hundred blowhards tell stories exactly like it. I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm just saying that 9 times out of 10, this is the way the guy imagines it will go down the next time, or if he had had his gun on him, or if New York street punks were still living in bad 1970's movies. I've also often noticed that stuffy authoritative types frequently mistake kids acting in a macho or overly confident manner--or who are simply having a noisy good time--as punks who are trying to throw their weight around. People who follow authority like sheep...dogs... don't like people who question and/or disrespect authority. Think I'm just making shit up? Hey, my anecdote is just as good as his.

     Some people may be destined to be sheep and others might be genetically primed to be wolves or sheepdogs. But I believe that most people can choose which one they want to be, and I'm proud to say that more and more Americans are choosing to become sheepdogs. Stats, please. Although, I don't disagree. There is a definite mindset in government offices that I see more and more of.

     Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was honored in his hometown of Cranbury, New Jersey. Todd, as you recall, was the man on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his cell phone to alert an operator from United Airline about the hijacking. When he learned of the other three passenger planes that had been used as weapons, Todd dropped his phone and uttered the words, "Let's roll," which authorities believe was a signal to the other passengers to confront the terrorist hijackers. In one hour, a transformation occurred among the passengers--athletes, business people and parents-- from sheep to sheepdogs and together they fought the wolves, ultimately saving an unknown number of lives on the ground. Grossman is kind of all over the place with his sheepdog stuff. But I want to draw attention to the way he claims Todd Beamer as a sheepdog here. Beamer was a Christian who graduated from Wheaton College. He was a field marketing rep for Oracle, and he was not in the military and as near as I can determine, he never carried a gun. Now, he does fit the sheepdog mold in that he was ready to go into action, but as we will see, he also fits the sheep mold according to Grossman.

 

"Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?"

"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men."

- Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France

     Here is the point I like to emphasize, especially to the thousands of police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the sheep, real sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that way, and so are wolves. They didn’t have a choice. But you are not a critter. As a human being, you can be whatever you want to be. It is a conscious, moral decision.

     If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay, but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you. If you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are going to hunt you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust or love. But if you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior 's path, then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.

     For example, many officers carry their weapons in church. They are well concealed in ankle holsters, shoulder holsters or inside-the-belt holsters tucked into the small of their backs. Anytime you go to some form of religious service, there is a very good chance that a police officer in your congregation is carrying. You will never know if there is such an individual in your place of worship, until the wolf appears to slaughter you and your loved ones. I wonder if Jesus wished that he and his disciples were packing that day in Gethsemane?

     I was training a group of police officers in Texas, and during the break, one officer asked his friend if he carried his weapon in church. The other cop replied, "I will never be caught without my gun in church." I asked why he felt so strongly about this, and he told me about a police officer he knew who was at a church massacre in Ft. Worth, Texas, in 1999. In that incident, a mentally deranged individual came into the church and opened fire, gunning down 14 people. He said that officer believed he could have saved every life that day if he had been carrying his gun. His own son was shot, and all he could do was throw him on the boy’s body and wait to die. That cop looked me in the eye and said, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?" Hey, that's a nice anecdote. I've got one too. One time this guy brought his gun to church, and he accidentally shot a young girl (the pastor's daughter, actually) in the head and killed her while showing it to a friend. He had a concealed weapons permit and everything, and being such a well-trained individual he was thus a guaranteed deterrent against church violence. I wonder how hard it was for him to live with himself after that?

     Some individuals would be horrified if they knew this police officer was carrying a weapon in church. They might call him paranoid and would probably scorn him. Weird. Yet these same individuals would be enraged and would call for "heads to roll" if they found out that the airbags in their cars were defective, or that the fire extinguisher and fire sprinklers in their kids' school did not work, or if some lunatic didn't have to pass a psych test before getting a concealed weapons permit. They can accept the fact that fires and traffic accidents can happen and that there must be safeguards against them. Their only response to the wolf, though, is denial, and all too often their response to the sheepdog is scorn and disdain. But the sheepdog quietly asks himself, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself if your loved ones were attacked and killed, and you had to stand there helplessly because you were unprepared for that day?" Or how hard it would be to live with yourself if, as a church pastor, you encouraged your "flock" to bring their concealed weapons to church and then some moron shot your daughter? "Shit," you'd say, "If only guns were better regulated."

     The warrior must cleanse denial from his thinking. Coach Bob Lindsey, a renowned law enforcement trainer, says that warriors must practice "when/then" thinking, not "if/when." Instead of saying, “If it happens then I will take action," the warrior says, "When it happens then I will be ready."

     It is denial that turns people into sheep. Sheep are psychologically destroyed by combat because their only defense is denial, which is counterproductive and destructive, resulting in fear, helplessness and horror when the wolf shows up. Yes but, there are many truths about life which one can deny. If you deny that more guns mean more death, period, are you really a sheepdog? This denial turns you into a sheep of another kind. If you deny that US policies have had a direct effect on the desire for terrorists to attack us in the first place, what kind of sheep are you then? (I don't like Ron Paul, but when even right wing nuts like him start accepting facts, gun nuts like Grossman ought to do some soul-searching.)

     Denial kills you twice. It kills you once, at your moment of truth when you are not physically prepared: You didn't bring your gun; you didn't train. Your only defense was wishful thinking. Hope is not a strategy. Denial kills you a second time because even if you do physically survive, you are psychologically shattered by fear, helplessness, horror and shame at your moment of truth. This is where he really begins equating sheepdog-ness with gun-carrying. If you don't know how to use a gun and you don't have it with you, you are a sheep. Granted, he appears to be addressing cops and soldiers and if he was talking only about cops and soldiers being prepared in the line of duty then he would be far more difficult to argue with. But Grossman goes on the circuit on a regular basis in favor of the second amendment and more guns more guns! Guns in schools! Guns in church! If everyone had a gun and was prepared to use it, what could go wrong?

     Chuck Yeager, the famous test pilot and first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, says that he knew he could die. There was no denial for him. He did not allow himself the luxury of denial. This acceptance of reality can cause fear, but it is a healthy, controlled fear that will keep you alive:

     "I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment_ and kept me flying respectful of my  machine and always alert in the cockpit."

-Brigadier General Chuck Yeager

Yeager, An Autobiography

     Gavin de Becker puts it like this in Fear Less, his superb post-9/11 book, which should be required reading for anyone trying to come to terms with our current world situation:

".. Denial can be seductive, but it has an insidious side effect. For all the peace of mind deniers think they get by saying it isn't so, the fall they take when faced with new violence is all the more unsettling. Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level."

     And so the warrior must strive to confront denial in all aspects of his life, and prepare himself for the day when evil comes. How about confronting the denial that the world is an extremely dangerous place in large part thanks to US policies? And that perhaps the best way to get terrorists to stop being terrorists is to stop terrorising them?

     If you are a warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep, pretending that the bad man will not come today. No one can be "on" 24/7 for a lifetime. Everyone needs down time. But if you are authorized to carry a weapon, and you walk outside without it, just take a deep breath, and say this to yourself... "Baa." Todd Beamer walked out without a gun, and so did Chuck Yeager, two men he held up as prime examples of sheepdogs. Apparently you don't need a gun in order to combat either fear or terrorists, after all. I get that he's making a larger point about readiness, which I actually agree with. But his point about weaponry is erratic and full of bullet holes, and he is trying to falsely equate the two things. Bad things will happen, yes. But be strong and face life with your chin up and your eyes open, not with your mind closed and hiding behind a gun. In any case, Grossman's attempt to claim every hero as a sheepdog and then to turn around and say that real sheepdogs all carry guns is schizophrenic.

     This business of being a sheep or a sheepdog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-grass sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people exist completely on one end or the other. Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in America took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep took a few steps toward accepting and appreciating their warriors and the warriors started taking their job more seriously. The degree to which you move up that continuum, away from sheephood and denial, is the degree to which you and your loved ones will survive, physically and psychologically at your moment of truth. Ah, the halcyon days of post 9-11. If only people lived in fear like that every day, and more easily allowed the eroding of civil liberties and the ascention of authoritative fascists bent on manipulating us through those fears. It's true, if I don't have a gun I might be less safe from terrorists or mass-murderers. But with a gun, I've surrendered my confidence to a piece of metal. I choose to carry my manhood somewhere else. Speaking in terms that Grossman would understand, I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. In any case, there are no easy answers to Dave Grossman's deep and disturbing fears, but he is in a denial just as debilitating as that he envisions the rest of us are in when it comes to the reasoning of "wolves" and the best options for solving our problems of violence. He clearly holds a simple view of good and evil, cannot conceive that his "side" is not the Light Brigade, and thus can abide only a simple, aggressive solution and will deny that anyone who thinks differently is anything other than a sheep.

On The Island State, Every Night is Great--Oh Every Night Is Date Night In Hawaii

    We finally got our power back after 9 days, and I have just got caught up on all my school work. Oy what a month. So the above photo is an overview of Honolulu from the top of Diamond Crater. Julie and I hiked up it on our first morning in town. It was really hot. The island of Oahu is amazing, except for all the people. It really illustrates how the tourist industry is adept at turning a beautiful place into an ugly mess. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of unsullied beaches and beautiful drives and amazing vistas, yadda yadda yadda. But the urban development and masses of crowds in inappropriate places is especially jarring because of it.

    That's the problem with being a critical tourist though. By definition there is a healthy dose of hypocrisy in such statements. If it weren't for the tourism industry, I'd be out of a hobby. I just wish that Americans could be less... crass and destructive about the whole thing. The below photo is of one of those secluded areas.

    It's the place where Scott and Sarah almost got eaten by that wave from my last post, and also apparently the crash site from LOST is around there somewhere. But we didn't go looking for it because jesus, what a crap show that turned out to be.

    Nice vista, baby! So mostly our trip to Oahu consisted of driving around and chatting with Scott and Sarah. But of course we also hit Pearl Harbor. Sarah's dad took us out there for the day. We went to see an airplane museum somewhere. I'm not really a fan of military museums, but airplanes are neat.

    I just find the fetishizing of weaponry to be... odd. Don't misunderstand, I find certain aspects of military history and technology to be fascinating, but people who think America is great because we're awesome at killing people is a strange consequence of our national identity.

    Pearl Harbor is odd that way all around. There was a lot of self-righteousness about our getting attacked there, and it was definitely a horrendously sneaky and duplicitous attack on the part of the Japanese. But we act as though it were totally unprovoked, as though we would never do the same, and as though we were totally innocent bystanders of WWII up until that point.

    The fact is, we were economically meddling in world affairs and the Japanese knew they had to take us out of the game if they were to solidify their hold on certain resources that they needed. There are other reasons that are wrapped up in various forms of Nationalism and Japanese Identity, but that was the economic reality. That doesn't make us right or wrong to be outraged, it simply means that it was a world war, and tactics demand certain actions.

    We ourselves bombed the shit out of civilian areas of Dresden, Germany later in the war with similarly vague justifications. I find it morally dubious to "never forget" Pearl Harbor and 9/11, apparently unjustified attacks against us, while there are no such sloagans in the US for Dresden or Nagasaki, apparently unjustified attacks in which we were the immoral aggressor. The above and below pictures are of the sunken USS Arizona.

    Bubbles of oil still percolate to the surface from the ship. I tried to photograph one but really, a zoom of a little black ball-bearing in green water is a bit dull. Here's the floating memorial for the Arizona that they boat you out to. As far as memorials go, it's a pretty nice one actually.

    So that was our day at Pearl Harbor. Tora! Tora! Tora!

    The other major event from our Oahu portion of the trip was scuba diving. Scott and Sarah are Dive Masters, I have my Open Water Diver and have scuba dived (dove?) in Germany, Croatia, Thailand, Florida, and Guantenemo Bay, Cuba. Julie, however, had never done it before and so scuba was a must on the bucket list. Sarah hooked us up with a dive shop in Waikiki.

    And oh what the hell: Not a very flattering shot of me, but look, we dove with Daniel Craig!

    The dive itself wasn't the most amazing dive I've ever been on, but it was still pretty sweet and it was fun to see Julie flop around under water during the very normal adjustment period. She attacked it with courage and aplomb however, and by the end of the day was pretty damn good at it.

    You Scuba! Nice wristbands, Olivia Newton John.

    Tandem Scuba. We saw sea turtles, but Sarah didn't have the camera down on that dive. It was cool though, it was a turtle cleaning station, where they go to hang out and let fish eat accumulated gunk off of their shells. It was pretty.

    Aww. I totally took a picture of them making out down there with her camera, but they didn't send me that one. I guess they were afraid I'd publish it on my world-renowned blog or something. As-if!

    The thing about posing for pictures whilst scuba-diving: don't exhale! Ah well. Live and learn. Scott's like a zen scuba master down there on the left. So that's all I really got on Oahau. It was a lot of fun and of course it was great to hang out with my friend after not seeing him for like, 5 years now. Hopefully it won't be another 5 years.

    It was Julie and my 2nd anniversary while we were there, and I had some spare miles still so we used them to take a quick 2 day trip over to another Hawaiian island before heading home. Next post: Maui!

"I Don’t Know Why People Are So Keen To Put The Details Of Their Private Life In Public. They Forget That Invisibility Is A Superpower." - Banksy.

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head" - Banksy

"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..." - Banksy

After checking out the aspens, I drove down into Park City, Utah. I almost decided not to even stop in town because from the road it sort of looked like a typical cutesy American main street chock-a-block full of quaint shops, which depresses me. So many American towns sell themselves as Historic or as a good tourist destination when in reality all that they have to offer is a short stroll past shop windows and Galleries full of crap. However, the Sundance Film Festival is held in Park City every year, so I figured there might be something worth seeing. I parked on a hill, walked down some steps that led to an alley which exited out onto Main Street Park City. And just as I was getting to the end of the alley, before I even really caught a glimpse of the town, I did a double, triple, quadruple take at the above work of graffiti on the wall. I recognized it immediately as a Banksy! Well, and not just because the locals framed it with a big BANKSY nameplate, neither.

"The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some people are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising some people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers." - Banksy

Needless to say, I stood around that corner for about a half hour taking shots, not even really noticing that my assessment of Park City as yet another whimsical trade street was otherwise entirely correct in my desire to use it as background.

"You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity." - Banksy

Although I love Banksy's work, embarrassingly it was a bit of time before I came down off of the high of discovery to actually think about the meaning of the piece very deeply. I mean, my initial assessment was that it was a sort of anti-film industry statement and I left it at that. Then when I'd gotten off a few shots and calmed down a bit, I started to feel a bit stupid as I began to suspect that the joke was on me and my need to photograph everything, and that's the type of mania that Banksy was lampooning. I got a little shy and surreptitiously looked around to make sure that the locals, who were probably in on the joke by now, weren't laughing at me. Nothing too overt, but a girl walked past and I swear that she snorked at me.

"We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves." - Banksy

Then I decided that I had better study it more closely. I slowly began to realize that maybe it was more of a comment on places like Park City; People find a beautiful bit of nature and WHAM! Ruin it by plunking down a town full of boutique shopping, ski slopes, spas, gigantic resort hotels that resemble Hogwarts and a million vacation houses which, due to the non-stop real estate frenzy, wind up all facing and contemplating each other, thus destroying the open natural beauty that had made the area a popular destination in the first place.

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly." - Banksy

Feeling satisfied that Banksy wasn't necessarily having a laugh at my expense and being happy with my pictures, I wandered through town for a bit casting internal aspersions on the stupid snorking girl and continuing to contemplate the piece. One thing that Banksy is right about for sure; seeing a work of art in context is much more thought provoking than seeing it on a wall in a highly secured building, or in a book. I imagined that there was a reason he chose to paint that particular piece in a town where the rich and famous gather in obnoxious droves every year to celebrate themselves. I eventually decided that perhaps it was a comment on art and celebrity in the media, how in the race to put something under the microscope and on film for exploitative purposes, you destroy what may or may not make it valuable. Then I saw some photographs of aspens in the shop window of a gallery. I "ooohhhed" and "ahhhed" in the privacy of my hypocritical head, and went in to see. Inside is where I learned about aspens, and also that the reason that Banksy had been in town was for the opening of his film "Exit Through The Gift Shop". He street arted the place up, and then later on the locals framed it with pride for him. I'm not exactly sure what Banksy's current stance on permanently framing his work and hanging his name on it is, but I suspect he has complicated emotions about it. The gallery attendant told me of another small piece that Banksy had left behind (and also locally framed), and where to find it.

"I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said "that's a clever anagram of art" and I had to pretend I'd known that all along." - Banksy

He's famous for his rats. They're a bit of a trademark; better than a tag, really. At any rate, by the time that I left town, I'd decided that the main piece could probably mean any or none or all of the things that I went through thinking it might, which is the great thing about seeing it live. Though the Banksy book that Julie has will always be one of my most treasured rat books, isolated on the page I got much less highly dignified contemplation out of his hundreds of great pieces than I did from seeing that one where it was meant to be seen.

"Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie" - Banksy

The only other thing in town that tickled my fancy was an advert for a certain beer in a bar window. Normally I wouldn't have cared much, but being in Utah, with the Mormons and all, I was compelled.

"I used to tell everyone I met to be an artist..... I don't do that any more." - Banksy

Roswell Does NOT In Fact End Very Well, Futurama.

"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble." - Ellen DeGeneres

Third trip to New Mexico is the charm! Roswell, baby. Actually it wasn't all that. I mean, it's cool to be able to say that I went, but other than the UFO Museum and Research center, there's not a lot going on there.

Not that, as a town, they don't embrace the hell out of their notoriety. Visitors are, after all, welcome.

The whole town has crap like that all over the place. Alien head lampposts and see the mailbox?

They need to take a little more pride in their place in history.

But what kills me is that the UFO crash didn't even happen at Roswell, rather 30 miles North closer to a town named Corona. But the military base where the investigation went out from was in Roswell, so there you go.

The museum was... well full of things like this. There is a LOT of reading material in the research room, but who has time for all of that when you're just using up some free time on a work assignment? Hell, who has time for that unless you're totally obsessed anyway?

Not that I'm not intensely curious. But I'm in the camp of people who don't really think that any information that is available to the public can point with any certainty to anything, well, for certain.

I've just finished reading that new book on Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, and nothing in it made me feel any differently. It's an excellent book, well written and full of information about Area 51 that I didn't know before, including the U2 and OXCART spy plane dramas, but her conclusion about what the Roswell incident was about is a bit... well all she's doing is telling us what some guy who used to work there told her what he was told it was.

Which, if you've read anything about the book online, you'll know is that it was a technologically advanced hover saucer piloted by surgically altered retarded children (altered by none other than Joseph Mengele himself) sent by Joseph Stalin as both a psy-op to induce panic in America and to send a message to Eisenhower that he had wack Nazi technology at his disposal too, so what up?

She calls this a simpler, more Occam's Razor-like explanation than an extra-terrestrial crash landing, but I'm not so sure about that. This explanation leaves a lot of other questions; if Stalin had such advanced hover technology back in '47, and was able to penetrate American airspace with such ease, why wasn't this technology used again or since? I'm not sure that we could have won the cold war if they were that far ahead of us in stealth technology.

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe it was an alien crash. More likely it was something we were working on, and every bit of cover and disinformation ever released about it is just that, including very probably Annie's findings. One disturbing thing she says in the book is that the real reason Area 51 has been kept so secret all these years is because atrocities in the name of National Security have been going on there since the 50's, including human experimentation. I suppose the people involved would rather the public speculated endlessly about Aliens and/or Joseph Mengele than consider for a moment that a US Government-sanctioned continuation of Nazi experiments might be going on. In fact, I much prefer to believe that it is Extraterrestrial in nature.

Knowing what we know about how the corporate-controlled military-industrial complex of a government that we have operates in public, however, I shudder to think what the reality is about how they operate in private.

They're not the Aliens man, we're the Aliens.

All Rallied Up For Sanity

For the first time ever, I posted my photos and comments on facebook before blogging here about it. So here are the bad jokes again. Suffer. My sister threw me the biggest birthday party ever, with 1/1228th of the US population in attendance!

Julie picked me up at the Baltimore airport on 10-29 and we drove down to College Park, Md and spent the night. Got up early, met my sister Katie, her boyfriend Drew, and a college friend of theirs named Patrick. Got on a sardine can Metro and headed to the rally.

It was packed! We squeezed our way forward as far as we could, but we only could make it to the first monitor section, and could barely see the monitor. But we could hear just fine.

I love this one. The cop car was beeping, booping, and edging people out of it's way, and I wanted to time the sign placement just right.

Most of the mass crowd experiments that the Mythbuster guys did were kind of tedious from where we were, but the wave one was pretty cool. So was the seismic stomping but that was harder to capture in a photo.

My back was getting sore from all the chickens-in-a-coop standing, so I had to kneel down for a break.

This is the crowd waving to Cat Stevens. Or rather Jusef Islam as he calls himself now. That's right, John Stewart had CAT STEVENS sing 'Peace Train'! It was actually beautiful, and the crowd was kind of mass touched, you could feel that. But Stephen Colbert interrupted the song for a gag involving Ozzy Osbourne, and I actually got really angry about it. Pissed, actually. And I'm sure I wasn't alone. Why on Earth would you get Cat Stevens to sing and then cut him off for a stupid gag?! Shameful. They let freaking Kid Rock sing his whole song, and that was pure torture.

I feel really happy that I went. It was no Woodstock or anything, but it was really, really refreshing to see that smart, sane, polite people will show up for an event like this, in 3 or 4 times the numbers of those who would show up for a Beck rally. It made me feel like maybe the US isn't totally unredeemable, which I'm sure was John Stewart's intention. I've been feeling quite down about the state of affairs for quite some time, angry and shocked that there are so damn many willfully ignorant, racist homophobic idiots both in postions of power and among the general populace of the US. It's great to see that people who are more intelligent than FOX NEWS viewers could actually be in the majority. Or at least, not as much in the minority as it usually feels. If you haven't yet listened to John's main speech, his moment of sincerity, I highly recommend it.

I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be the flying spaghetti monster. The clean-up crew guy just looks happy because he doesn't have much work to do, picking up after such an orderly crowd.

A Post rally we-were-there shot.

A parting shot.

The Scuba Diving Was Great, But I Didn't Get To Try The Water Boarding

So I lied about not using that joke again. Screw it, I needed a title.

Anyway I don't know if you knew this, but I spent ten days at Gitmo for work recently. :) This here is a painting of an American flag and a Cuban flag in friendship on Guantanamo Bay. I found this over by the Guantanamo Bay Windward Point lighthouse on Gitmo, a historical landmark. Boy times sure have changed.

Here is the lighthouse and what I presume are some of the boats which Cuban refugees made it to Gitmo in back in the day.

And here's the lighthouse barely seen from further down the coastline. There are big gangly cacti all over the place.

One of the guys who drives me back and forth from the airport whenever I leave home for a job was in the Navy in the 50s and was stationed at Gitmo for a little while. He told me they used to hop on a train into Havana when they had leave time. Damn. I would have loved to have hopped the fence and gone to Havana, but you know, we're not allowed to have any commercial business with Cuba any more. And there's this big fence, with landmines. Which makes the butt of this Cuban cigar I found on base quite mystifying.

Gitmo is not what I expected though. It's a small self-contained city, like most American bases I suppose, and could pass for any American suburb if you leave out the iguanas running around everywhere. The housing is very 50's suburb lookin', actually. They have a shopping center, a laundromat, a car rental, a hotel, a McDonald's, a Subway, a public library in which I overheard a conversation between the librarian and a little old lady librarian from the High School library about the dearth of quality books in the schools. They even have a Girl Scouts Camp!

They have a huge Gym Complex including a really nice weight room (embarrassing to go lift weights with a bunch of giant military men but I persevered), a football field and track, baseball diamond, batting cages, skate park, & bowling alley, they had an outdoor movie theater where they show first-run movies every night for free...

I watched 'Green Zone' and 'Hot Tub Time Machine' there. Both very interesting experiences. Hot Tub Time Machine was pretty dumb, but I found myself laughing and enjoying it quite a bit. It's hard to resist the enjoyment of a good fecal matter joke in a stadium full of raucous Navy guys. I'd forgotten what seeing a comedy in a crowded theater could be like. And Green Zone... well that night the theater was fairly quiet, but surprisingly there seemed to be quite a few people there who appreciated the message. I had seen it already of course, but I was very curious to see how people who lived on a base notorious for the controversial and legally shady detention of prisoners would take a film about the recent war built on lies. The more time I spend among the military, the more I get the sense that our government is at war with itself. There are factions and factions within factions. Watching that particular movie in that particular place probably has something to do with that sense, of course. But I'm not talking about partisan bickering or political sides. I tend to feel that the Republicans and the Democrats are actually on the same side, and everything else is just a show. I think it goes on on a deeper level, and that there are sides we don't even know about.

I just can't resist those big lizard shots. I loved watching them just lumber through the outdoor seating area at Starbuck's while people blithely ignored them. (Yes, they have a Starbuck's too.) I'd be all like, "Do you guys see that?! Huh? That's a big damn lizard, just walkin' here!" And they'd be all like, "Whatever." I was hoping that this guy would actually go in the ladies room so I could wait and get a shot of some poor woman running out and screaming. No such luck.

Gitmo also has wind power! There are four of these guys on top of the tallest hill on base, but apparently only one of them is working right now. I went and stood under the one that was working, and let me tell you I wasn't expecting to have an experience like that. There is nothing like having 100 foot tall metal fan blades of death whoooomp whoooomp whoooomping directly over your head.

But you know, there are a lot of places on Gitmo where you are not allowed to take pictures. Like this one.

I was told that I was welcome to take pictures anywhere on base unless I saw one of these signs. Hopefully, taking pictures of the sign won't get me in trouble. But they do a good job of helping the people who live and work there keep the darker side of Gitmo out of sight and out of mind with all these distractions. I couldn't even figure out where the prisons were until after I'd been there for like a week, although to be fair I suppose I wasn't going out of my way too much. But on my second Scuba dive, we went out to a beach where there was a prison up on the hill, and there weren't any signs posted there so... 

Yes, they have scuba diving there too. I got to go on a couple of dives in Guantanamo Bay. Boo-yah.

It was pretty nice diving but we didn't see too much that was very interesting. A moray eel, a stingray. Here's a Gitmo Starfish.

I also got to figure out what ever happened to the Scooby Gang. Guess they stuck their noses into one too many mysteries and got their vehicle confiscated.

Scuba dooba doo!

Anyway, forgive my bad joke. But that's about all I have from that trip. It was pretty cool to get to go and see it firsthand. Not an opportunity most people get and believe me I'm aware of how cool my job is. Hopefully I can get back there one day to get my Advanced Scuba Diver license.

An Inevitable Post, Given That You Know I Had To Have My Say About Green Zone

  So Green Zone. I can't really speak to the larger events which this movie tries to condense into a cohesive plot-line, although I have read the book it was based on and even did a blog post on it a while back. But politics aside for the moment, I think that this movie nails it in the details.

My favorite scene is when Matt Damon, after some intense action out in the chaotic streets of Baghdad, walks out behind the Republican Palace which we were using as the US "Embassy" to meet his CIA contact by the swimming pool. The look on his face and on his men's faces is perfect. Utter confusion, as though they were wondering, "did we pass out and wake up back in the US somewhere?" That disconnect was spot on and is something I not only experienced in the Green Zone but witnessed on not a few members of the armed forces' faces in that very spot. Not that I was really ever "in the shit", but it was a pretty unreal place and having spent some time out in downtown Baghdad, the Green Zone (officially called The International Zone; Green Zone was "local" slang and I myself always preferred to call it the Interzone) was undeniably a real-life study in stark contrast. Employees of the DoD hanging out and sunbathing in speedos and bikinis, drinking beer and carrying on as though they were trying to really be in Key West, while a half mile away on the other side of mortar walls was a city in pain and disaster at every turn. That to me was what the film captures best all around, and specifically so in this scene.

The other thing the film did really well was the set detail. The embassy pool looked exactly right, as did the Saddam International Airport. The flyover shot of the Green Zone was perfect, from the Hands of Victory monument and the Iraqi Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Republican Palace itself.

I even thought I saw my old camps in that shot, though I could have mentally added them in myself. I wonder if they used real footage there or if it was a digital recreation... either way, it looked excellent.

Another detail which I felt was right on was the sort of haphazard occupation of the Palaces in the Interzone. People would just sort of make their sleeping areas wherever there was a corner, their belongings strewn on the sides of hallways, working and living areas side by side, neo-cons in suits and soldiers in uniform, contractors and DoD employees in pocketed cargo pants and shirts all rubbing shoulders. Incidentally, on certain later occasions there were also three very out-of-place Stroudsburg rejects walking those halls wearing their rock-n-roll T-shirts (I think Jeff had a Lou Reed and Scott had a White Stripes. I may have had a ripped Pixies T-shirt at the time) and feeling like we were surrounded by pod people. Especially at lunch time when we'd sit together reading the Stars and Stripes and made fun of the daily propagandist idiocy in a dining hall otherwise full of neo-cons. We really didn't fit in there.

As for the politics of the film; a lot of critics are saying that the film has a heavy liberal bias, is anti-conservative and anti-war. Well, I don't really know when being anti-war became a bad thing, but the film anyway isn't really anti-war. The Matt Damon character is a soldier, and understands why the war was necessary... until it becomes clear that the reasons for the war were lies. He's assigned to a unit that is to search for Saddam's WMDs, which of course we all know by now never existed. It is an anti-conservative film, if by anti-conservative you mean that it's against being lied to by the Neo-cons so that we'd get behind their war like so many patriotic parrot heads. So then also it has a liberal bias, if by liberal you mean a person who dislikes having been tricked into committing murderous devastation upon a city for the sake of the Bush-Cheney agenda. It makes no claims per se on what their real agenda may have been, other than a closing shot of an Iraqi oil refinery. I myself don't really believe that this war was about Iraq's oil, or at least not only about their oil. I think what they wanted was probably a bit more far reaching than that, but until we can put those crooks on a stand, we may never really know.

One of the dumbest criticisms I've seen about the film is that it's not a new message. That we all know by now, even the Republicans, that we were lied to and that there never were any weapons of mass destruction to be found, and that this film doesn't add anything to the story and is really unnecessary. That's stupid. It's a movie, and as such all it needed to accomplish was to put the viewer inside the story it's trying to tell. If you can still make a movie about WWII, you can certainly make a movie about the invasion of Iraq without having to justify yourself beyond that criteria. As for whether or not it accomplishes that agenda, it's hard for me to say. I certainly feel like it's a complete success of a film, but that's because it only had to remind me of what it was like to be there, whereas I can't say that it succeeded for people who have never been to Baghdad or the Green Zone. Maybe it was too confusing and fast. But speaking as someone who lived there for a few years, it's the best movie I've seen yet depicting that time, that place.

The book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, does the job much better, factually and politically speaking. The film is supposedly based on this book, but I'd have to say only very loosely. The book spends a lot more time on the day to day life of the Green Zone's ruling class and their disastrously ignorant decision-making, whereas the movie is trying to condense everything that happened into a nice streamlined plot with a good guy and a bad guy. I feel like this really worked on a visceral level, but unfortunately left it open to the very valid criticism of "making it all up". We all know there was a great WMD lie, but it was probably not one single dickish neo-con general who hatched it up on his own, and I feel like the CIA was largely complicit in allowing the great lie to happen in the first place, even though the first major break in the ranks came from the CIA Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay when he announced that he'd seen no evidence of WMDs after being in theater for less than a year. If there were any good guys in the Green Zone attempting to expose the lie, (and the book does talk about a few of them) they were largely ignored, marginalized, and were not involved in many, if any, heroic action sequences. At least not that we're aware of. In fact, my favorite early whistle blower, Scott Ritter, was a UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq before the war who went on any news show that would have him in the run-up to the war and plead with America to listen to him because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! Unfortunately he dropped off the radar pretty quickly due to inappropriate sexual conduct on the internet, and that's what happens to people who dare to speak out. (Although apparently now there is some damning video of him out there, so perhaps it wasn't merely a politically motivated discrediting move after all. We'll see.)

In any case, If you're looking for a detailed description of the insanity of the Iraq Invasion and subsequent occupation, read the book. If you're looking for a good action flick with shaky-cam and more reality than a Bourne movie via a brief exposure to what it may have been like in the Green Zone in 2003, see the movie. It's very good.

My San Diego Mission Of Religious Decommission

San Diego. Eh. I don't see what all the fuss is about. I had a job there for 7 days the other week. Julie lived there for a short time after college, so I used some miles to bring her along to give me a tour of her old stomping grounds. The thing about San Diego that sucks is that it's ALL highway. Want to go a couple of blocks away for dinner? Get on the highway. Not because it's a shortcut, but because the only roads are highways. But one thing we found that was super cool in San Diego was the Geisel Library on the San Diego campus of the University of California.

Cool right? Because he once said that if he were to ever design a building that it would look like that, it is named in honor of this guy:

 

The human, not the cat. You know, that one there with the hat. We happened to be there on the good Dr.'s 106th Birthday, and they had a few of his sketches on Display.

Apparently they were also going to have their annual birthday party for him out in front of the library, with punch and pie, but they canceled that this year due to some racial incidents that have recently plagued the University. It apparently began with the Compton Cookout, a frat party where guests were supposed to come dressed as racial stereotypes, and then someone put a KKK hood over the Dr. Suess statue's head, and then someone hung a noose in the library. It's all very weird and I don't understand it. I thought that California was supposed to be a bastion of tolerance? For different types of people at least, as long as they drive a hybrid, are vegetarians, and recycle, etc etc... Well I guess I was myth-taken. Between their unusually deep economic troubles, their recent vote against equal rights for homosexuals, and now this, I'd have to say that things are going downhill over there, and that's a bad sign for the rest of us, shall we say, less plastic liberals in the country. (Not to mention what's happening to public education in Texas; not that it's a surprise as such, just that every day our once great nation gets weirder and weirder and more willfully ignorant, and it's happening at an alarming rate. Dollhouse.)

All I can say is, if you're going to cancel the birthday party of the man who wrote 'The Sneetches' and 'The Butter Battle Book', well, the terrorists win again. I mean the racists! The racists win again. Whatever. Same thing. Bad people scaring good people into reacting ineffectually. (Thanks for stealing my thunder by the way, Miss Luongo. :)

Well anyway. We took a drive up the Pacific highway, which is "one of the good ones"... highways, I mean. Obviously. We stopped on an oceanside cliff in La Jolla.

Paragliding is cool. My friend Dirk, when we lived in Germany, used to snowboard all day, then strap on his paraglider and fly down to the river where his VW Van (which he called his toybox) was waiting with his kayak, and he'd kayak down the river into town. One of his less insane friends of course usually had to help him out with the logistics of that of course.

The last adventure of ours of note, besides lunch on Laguna Beach and a corona in Tijuana, was our visit to San Juan Capistrano. There's some famous mission there. You know, a church built by missionaries back in the early days of westward expansion for the purpose of bringing God's word to those stupid heathen Native Americans.

And how best to make these savages understand that God means business?

 Why stand around and be all holier than they while making them do all the laundry, of course! And then make them build the building that honors your God through slave labor!

That will teach those stupid dumbbrain injuns to not have ever heard about Jesus. Everyone knows you can not teach an injun to be holy except by showing 'em how, with ancient European holy martial art; holy-shit-I'm-so-holy-stance!

I especially love how the present day mission museum was ashamed enough of these dioramas to shove them in a back corner that I was super lucky to find but not enough to, you know, get rid of them.

So what did I learn about the San Juan Capistrano Mission?

That priests love being in authority over children of ALL ethnicity. And are very holy fucking creepy about that fact. Isn't that right, Pope Friendly? Seriously! Look at this guy! He is the best Pope ever, because he gives the creepy shivers like no other! Hey Pope Child Molester! I have a funny religious joke for you: What do you call a pregnant virgin? A fucking liar!

"Officer! That Man Stole My Wallet!" "Don't Like It? Go Live In Cuba, Socialist!"

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
-William H. Borah

It's a lie, you know. Airport security. A shameless, bald-faced ridiculous lie. (What does it mean to say someone is a bald-faced liar? Does that phrase express a distrust of the beardless?) I travel a lot for work, as you may have noticed, and I've actually gotten to the point where I often momentarily forget what city I just arrived from when checking the baggage claim board. "Did I just come from Cleveland, or Los Angeles? Oh yeah, no, San Francisco, it was a direct flight this time."

My point only being that I'm pretty slow in the head when traveling, and it's taken me this long to catch on to the scam; I woke up thinking about it this morning. Part of my travel preparation ritual includes a few things, including wearing slip-on shoes, a plastic belt buckle, and bringing four packed bags; unfortunately I travel heavy due to all of the work items I have to bring, as well as a backpack for my camera and lenses... and my big tripod. I check two bags (don't worry, I'm a Silver Elite flier, no charge for check-ins) and carry on my camera bag and a small book bag with books to read, my mp3 player, my netbook, and sundry other items to keep myself occupied during the endless travel time. SO, my point being, I carry my camera bag on the plane with me, which has a large metal tri-pointy-ended-pod strapped to it, and the TSA security agents DON'T BAT AN EYE.

I've often wondered why that is, exactly. Especially considering that items you are not allowed to bring include, well, water. And you can bring liquids, but they have to be in 3oz bottles AND sealed up in a ziplock baggie. Why? What the hell difference does it make to ziplock them? If you are sneaking acid on a plane to dash in the face of an airline attendant, what the hell difference, security-wise, does it make to have to zip your liquids up in a baggie? A terrorist can train to hijack a plane and fly it into a building, but somehow a ziplocked baggie that he packed himself is going to give him trouble?

And then I realized; it's a smokescreen, a ziplockscreen. (I've often thought about how 90% of all security is mostly for appearance, especially after living in the IZ in Baghdad, to make you scared first and then to feel like you're being kept safe, not to actually make you safer) Anyway, in the aftermath of new and ridiculous airport "security" rules, they banned water. Water. To include all liquids, to make it look good. Then, when they realized that travelers were getting pissed because this meant they could no longer bring their toilet kits on board, especially now that they're charging all you non-elite fliers for baggage check in, they had to backtrack a little and allow toiletries with a few completely nonsensical security precautions, designed solely to save a little face and perpetuate the no water policy; I mean, you can bring 3oz of water on board, but that's not enough for a thirsty traveler. It's all about the water.

Because once I clear security, the first thing I do is head to a kiosk and buy a large bottle of water for my flight. For like $3.00 to $5.00. Because arriving for flights two hours early, layovers, and flight times can take all day, and you've got to have water. AND, airport water fountains are few and far between, and anyway the water always tastes rather rancid. And once you're on the plane, the flight attendants come by once, maybe twice if you're lucky or on a longer flight, with tiny little cups of water. Not enough. I wonder how much the rise in bottled water sales in airports has been since the implementation of, um, dangerous water rules at TSA checkpoints. I also wonder who is the biggest supplier of bottled water to airports across the country. I suspect Halliburton. But then, I suspect them for a lot of things, so take it with a grain of salt. Also, have you noticed lately how much tiny little travel bottles of liquid products cost lately? Sometimes, almost as much as the regular sized ones.

It seems unlikely, I know, to the untrained eye that TSA security is designed mostly to pick your pocket at the airport, especially when they're nominally there to protect you from terrorists. But little things like heavy pointed metal tripods Vs. bottles of water, the nectar of life, something everybody now has to BUY, make me suspicious. That, and everything in the news now is about the fight against greed in the health care industry. The more I read, the more obvious it is that corporate America is out there finding new and improved ways to pay off the US Government to legalize creative pickpocketing by targeting products which a human body can not live without. The fact that water and health care are now considered products is a God Damned tragedy, and disgusting. I honestly don't know which side Obama is really on, but in reality, it doesn't matter. Whether or not he wants to help, the cards are stacked against him, and he seems unable to break down the drug company lobbyists. Especially since, you know, he's dealing with them as though they were a legitimate part of the Government, and not tossing them out like the shills they are.

I Feel Like An American Again. Weird.

Now I know why guys do that whole ridiculous thing where they stand up and yell and cheer and clap their hands when someone scores a stupid touchdown. I get it at last. Of course, I'll still never do that for some homoerotic sports team in tights, but when the west coast electoral vote count came in last night, as I was watching it happen live, my body involuntarily cheered and yelled OBAMA! loud enough for the neighbors to hear. I stood up, I clapped my hands, I screamed YEAH! 300 Electoral votes! He kicked McCain's ASS!!! YEAH!

Then I Immediately sat down and shut up in embarrassment. Very unlike myself. I wasn't expecting that rush of emotion because, you know, I very strongly believe that it's the Military-industrial complex in charge, or whomever. But that rush came nonetheless. In two and a half very long months from now, that idiot monkey boy will leave the office, and I won't be forced to watch him laugh with his shoulders or listen to him ugh and ook any more. Just as importantly, I won't have to listen to those red candidates spout their party nonsense either. We'll have a President who is a real adult taking charge, at last. I loved his acceptance speech. I believe he's going to try to do great things. I hope he proves me right about this.

He won in a landslide. A landslide. Which also means that I won't have to hear FOX news complaining of vote fraud now. This was no 2000, not even close. I'm so glad it's over, I'm so grateful that sense prevailed this election.

But before we get too carried away, lest we all forget in our tears of joy and sobs of relief, there is one SOB that will still try and screw us before January 20th. It is our duty as concerned citizens to be aware of the following bad news.

Ok that's all I got. Carry on.

Barock The Votebama!

Nothin'. I got nothin'. I just wanted to put my little play on words out there. You know, for happy election day. Which, by the way, is today if you're voting for Obama, and next Tuesday if you're voting for McCain. Yeah, it's a new rule. Like early voting and superdelegates. It's a new rule that's going to be used by the losing side to accuse the winning side of vote fraud. If Obama wins, you watch; FOX News will be making innuendos, (In your endos) if not outright accusations of electoral fraud related to early voting or perhaps, ironically, some sort of shady business at the polls in Ohio & Florida. That would be awesome. And if McCain wins, FOX News will be all like what? That was fair.

On the other hand, if McCain wins, that's exactly what me and Oliver Stone will be saying. Or perhaps not... I did go see W. last week, and it's disappointingly short of conspiracy theories. He didn't even try to cover the shady business in Ohio or Florida back in 2000, Ted Kennedy's accusations of fraud in 2004, or that day with those flying tin can thingies and the buildings that fell down and went boom. Maybe he's saving those subjects once the not-as-crazy-as-they-once-seemed conspiracy theorists get a chance to self-publish their investigative material.

But what was great about W. was the Rorschach Test that is Dubya. On the surface of the movie, Dubya came across as a pretty normal guy who constantly has more food in his mouth than a person normally should. Interesting depiction, by the way. Even while he was making the worst Presidential decisions imaginable, he seems pretty well meaning, even affable, if misguided perhaps. But hardly the demon he seems like from a distance. But if you look closer, after the credits roll and you've thought about it a bit, it's a more damning portrait than you might at first glance think.

I'm not going to say much about it though, because like I said, it's a Rorschach Test and the important thing is what you take away from it, if you ever see it, not what I think. I'm sure you can guess what my opinion of the man is. The one thing I do want to say though, is that even though it's a cliché, the road to hell is, in fact, paved with good intentions; Even Hitler believed he was doing what was right, all the while using his feelings and his guts as his guides, ignoring the evidence that was all around him that what he believed so strongly was only what he wanted to believe.

Of course, the movie is still merely an interpretation of the events. My gut tells me we shouldn't be so kind to ickle Georgie in the history books. I strongly believe, in the absence of any real evidence available to me, that he purposefully misled the nation and probably has nonconsensual sex with goats while feeding on aborted baby fetuses. But that's just an opinion, you know, don't take my word for it.

I guess the real point of this post is how different types of people interpret things, and how this election seems to have polarized people into two major groups of different interpretive capabilities. Is this an election which has polarized the Good from the Evil? The intelligent from the deeply stupid? The authoritative from the nonauthoritative? The butter side up from the butter side down? None of the above or all of the above? Humanity confuses me, and while I strongly believe that Obama is the right choice and that the McCain camp is only preying on one type of humanity's inability to deal with their inner conflict of Mind Vs. Fear, that's just my interpretation. I've been wrong before. Besides, it's also entirely possible that by even participating in this election, I have also succumbed to the fear by way of the terror that Palin inspires in me. I mean come on, do I really believe that she's Satan's goat-whore bride? That's just silly.

The brave thing to do might really be to sit it out, since what my actual leftist beliefs tell me is happening is that Obama and McCain are the left and right hands of the Military-industrial complex which murdered JFK, RFK, & MLK. After beating us with the stick in their right hand for eight years, they might let us rest up with a nice carrot from their left hand for a bit.

I know, I know, it's all a bit radical. But I'm feeling quite philosophical this morning, this election day. All my life I've been told that voting is the most sacred duty of every American, and to be fair I've never really believed that so my opinions are already coming out of left field. But I am voting today, for Obama, and it's not because I think Obama is going to save us, and it's mostly not because I think McCain and Palin are going to be another 4 to 8 years of happy-go-lucky skipping to Gomorrah, but because I'm simply tired of being beaten with a stick. Time for some Beta Carotene in my diet.

McCain Is A Liar Er Misspeaker!

I know, I know. You're sick of my political ranting already. But after seeing this YouTube video of a short clip of John McCain mentioning JFK and Goldwater on his way to criticizing Obama for not meeting with him anyplace anytime as previously agreed, I couldn't help myself. Partway through the video, McCain refers back to the Kennedy assassination as "The intervention er the tragedy in Dallas". Now.

As the word 'intervention' is escaping his lips, his hand is coming up to his mouth, his eyes widen, and then his hand takes a miss on his mouth and rubs his nose as he says "er tragedy". This gesture, the hand to mouth/nose and wide eyes, is a classic tell among those who read body language as a sign of someone who is lying. More specifically, to break it down, what happens with this gesture is that something has escaped your lips which you didn't mean to say, were trying to keep hidden. The hand coming up to the mouth is the involuntary and unconscious act of trying to keep your mouth closed; trying to force the words back in your mouth, and the wide eyes are the realization that you messed up. The quick switch from a mouth cover to a nose rub is the more conscious grown-up gesture of realizing that if you clap your hand over your mouth, it's a dead giveaway that you're lying, and so it turns into the nose rub in order to try and obscure the fact that you were just trying to clamp your mouth shut.

It's classic. Classic. There's no getting around it. That gesture means what it means. Many times when people are lying, we've trained ourselves not to give ourselves away by not being all shifty-eyed, not stuttering, not being all nervy with your hands, trying not to sweat. So that tell doesn't often happen. But when you've said something without thinking about it, without having thought in the seconds beforehand that you needed to not say what you're really thinking, that involuntary tell can happen before you've realized you've done it. When John McCain thinks of the Kennedy assassination, he considers it to be an intervention. Period. I have no doubt in my mind.

Now, is it possible he was just scratching his nose? Yes, of course. People get itchy noses all the time while they're speaking. But taken in combination with such an egregious misstatement... well, someone who studies body language would say that the odds are thin. Very thin. But I'll go further away from certainty and mention how McCain is prone to such unfortunate misstatements though. And his eyes are often all wide, blinky and twitchy anyway. Everybody slips up, right? But McCain's slips are painful. He's caught flack for saying he desires to be a dictator, calling citizens "prisoners," and saying how he wants the US to be energy independent so we won't have to go to war for oil anymore. [John, supporters of the war aren't calling it that.] So you know, he's already prone to saying the wrong thing. We shouldn't judge him too harshly since he does it often. The more a person makes the same mistake, the less it means anything, right? Right guys?

Does he personally know something about the Kennedy assassination? Who knows, but probably not. Paranoid as I am about McCain now, even I'm not prepared to go that far. McCain wasn't really anybody back then; he was busy being a young naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers at the time. Regardless, someone who likely thinks of one of the most tragic moments in American history, our loss of innocence, as an intervention, is to be handled with care. The fact of the matter is, I think a lot of people fear that the reason Kennedy was killed was because he was being made an example of by some powerful people who did not like his liberal policies, and a Republican Presidential hopeful putting a word to that fear over 45 years later is chilling.

EDIT: Just had to add in the "My fellow Prisoners" YouTube that Gary linked me to (the silence at the end of the video when he pauses for applause, seemingly unaware of his gaffe, is deafening) and then I saw the Colin Powell interview where he endorses Obama and I had to post that too. Clear, rational thinking turns me on, what can I say?

The Fact Of These People's Existence Makes Me Want To Be A Cutter

So okay, GoDrex posted this YouTube, and then Julie did, and I commented on it, and now I have to post the video, because I can't stop thinking about it and it inspires a constant state of weird otherworldly incredulity in me, because I think it accurately represents the thought processes of most people who actually think another Republican administration is a good idea, and because this was a convention in Bethlehem, PA, near where we live, and it's embarrassing and I can't wrap my head around the fact of these people's existence.

I'm re-posting my commentary from Julie's page on it here and expanding on it, because I need to get it off my brain before it freezes in this expression forever.

Does that first guy know that 25 out of the 43 American Presidents were lawyers? And that it's actually sort of an advantage to understand law if you're going to be in a political field? Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James Polk and Millard Fillmore. Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley. William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and William Clinton. (I know that's only 23, I can't find the other 2.)

European socialist is a buzzword with these people. (Instead of buzzwords, I’m going to start calling them FOXwords) Like Terrorist. Why is European Socialism bad, exactly? Because of all the free health care? I particularly find the “I think you’re stupid” guy quite illuminating.

Why am I stupid?
“… uh… because… that guy gets elected, he hangs around with terrorists.”

Who’re the terrorists?
“Obama”

So… Obama hangs out with himself?
No just kidding, I get it. I know what he means, it’s just that he doesn’t know how to speak properly, or form a logical or coherent thought. What he means is, Obama is a terrorist because some guy he sort of knows did some crazy shit when Obama was 8. And that's a more accurate understanding of the situation than even FOX news was able to tell him to think.

As cogent and insightful a point as this guy makes, I have to wonder, with all of the black men in prison, and all of the “suspected terrorists” at Guantanamo Bay, is it very likely that had any politician or policeman or spook at any time throughout Obama’s life even had the tiniest shred of real proof that Obama might have actual terror affiliations, isn’t it likely that he would never ever ever ever nerver never nev been allowed anywhere near any sort of elected office in the USA ever?

Or maybe FOX news and every dumb piece of crap that believes this Rhepublican Rhetoric has proof in a shoebox under their beds that Obama really is a terrorist that the guys over at the CIA doing his background check somehow missed.

“Get a Job!”

What does that even mean?! How do you know they don’t have jobs? Because they’re exercising their political right to protest? If you’re basing the fact that someone is at a political rally because they don’t have a job, then what are you doing there? Maybe you should get a job yourself? But oh wait, you can’t because Bush screwed up the economy so badly that the jobless rate is skyrocketing and competition for work is heavier, and you’re about to attend a rally for the guy who wants to continue the same policies.

“Go to Russia!”

Go to Russia? Because… people aren’t allowed to politically dissent in Russia (which isn’t exactly true anymore, but we’ll let that one slide because you obviously haven’t thought out your statement anyway) and you think that people who dare to dissent with your Republican knee-jerk non-views deserve to get shipped off to Siberia… which would kind of make you more like a Communist than an Obama supporter/McCain protester could ever dream to be? And as far as the whole "Commie/Faggott!" slur goes, I think we all know which political party has had more of those types outed from it. Plus, Joe McCarthy was a Republican Commie hunter, and I think it's probably widely agreed now that he was the biggest Commie of them all. I mean sure, not technically, but his tactics certainly were not American nor were they Democratic.

I think that by telling someone who disagrees with you at an American political rally to go to Russia, you’ve officially chased your own tail and deserve to be impounded for being dumb as a dog and not on a leash.

And ACORN? How the FRICK is ACORN, a community-based organization that advocates for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, health care and other social issues, responsible for our current economic crisis? Hey check out this picture and story of McCain with... that's right. ACORN.

And for God's sake people! Obama is NOT a Muslim, (not that being a Muslim is automatically terror-worthy) nor is he a terrorist, or affiliated with terrorists! Again, CIA background checks! They're pretty thorough. They'd have caught it by now, and Obama would be in Guantanamo. Palin, on the other hand, had the hands of a Witch hunter laid on her. Now, Olbermann is a tad histrionic, but if you're not one of those finger-in-your-ears Republicans, singing "God Bless America" to block out opposing viewpoints and spouting party FOXwords as substitutes for logical argument using fact and proof, this is something you need to watch. I mean, those types need to watch and understand it more than anybody, but they've got their fingers in their ears, you see.

 And I could go on and on, but the fact of the matter is, people like those in the YouTube video believe what they believe because they want FOX news to tell them what to think and say so that they don't have to hurt their little brains trying too hard to think about it themselves. No amount of logical argument or fact checking or proof is going to sway them. God, I hope America is smarter than I give it credit for this election day.

Ghouls & Goblins & Palin Oh My! It's Going To Be The Scariest Halloween Yet!

I haven't been around much lately, I know. My question is, have any of us? For myself, I've been consumed with fear and paranoia over the state of the economy. My 401k has less money in it now than what was put into it out of my original paychecks. My stocks... well, as I've said before; when in 2050 they are teaching schoolchildren in the most powerful Nation in the world (my prediction: Eurasia) about the great world stock market crash of '08, my picture will be in the book as the poster child for those who bought in at exactly the worst moment in history. Maybe. I'm sticking it out in case my fears are incorrect.

Also, I've been consumed with the fear that no matter how many nonsensical utterings of bullshit come out of Sarah Palin's mouth, we still might be forced to look at her pasty vapid psycho doll eyed face for the next four years. If that happens, it'll be the final nail in the coffin of our country. She's deeply stupid (yet thinks she's smarter than everyone and that no one can see through to her motivations) and masks it poorly with down-home stylings meant to fool the common man into thinking she's like one of them. She's playing on the irrational blue collar disdain of elitists, which is scary because apparently the present down-home version of an elitist is someone with an education who speaks with knowledge and authority on a given subject. Apparently, the people with whom Palin is trying to connect would rather the officials in charge of their government not understand how to answer basic questions and mask their ignorance with folksy exclamations which make no sense. I CAN NOT believe that people are being taken in by her and McCain, especially after realizing finally that they've been taken in by Bush for the last 8 years.

It's embarrassing to have these people on the world stage representing us, and if you're voting for Palin (to hell with McCain; he's irrelevant and will keel over soon) shame on you, dupe. Well, the polls do currently favor Obama of course, but not by a wide enough margin to quell my disbelief.

Another thing I'm afraid of lately is this Creation Museum in Kentucky. It's a museum. Dedicated to Creationism. And people are visiting it in droves. Creationism is the belief that the world was created by God around this time of the year on a Monday morning in 4004 BC. Dinosaur bones and all. Now, the belief in God, the Bible, and its literal truth, is a Faith. Faith, not Science. The line between the two concepts is under attack. Science is the search for truth, based on verifiable fact. Faith is the belief in something for which you have no proof. I have no problem with people of Faith going to Church and learning about what they believe in. I just wish they'd stop trying to force their beliefs into the schoolroom. It's dangerous and useless. Education in America is already severely limited these days. I met a Gas Station attendant in Germany who studied math for fun and spoke four languages. Most European students can talk intelligently and at great length about world politics, and know where Eritrea is on a map. There are people like that in the States, to be sure, but they get made fun of and called geeks. Something that modern day religious Americans seem to forget is that part of the reason why America is such a great place to live is that we once valued a secular education, and our prosperity comes from the application of our knowledge AND hard work. And on Sundays and at mealtimes, God was valued and thanked in many homes, sure, but at the end of the work day, God helps those who help themselves. Deceiving ourselves into thinking that faith needs to compete with science is not going to help anybody, because it's false. When it comes to science, religion tends to breed rather a hostile attitude of indifference because what difference does science make when Jesus is coming back to turn the Earth into blood soup and all the people who are looking forward to this disaster get to skip it and go to Heaven for candy and unicorns? They tend to forget that, even according to the Bible, we are Stewards of the Earth, and as such will be held responsible for it one day, one way or another.

Granted, science has caused a lot of problems on this Earth. Next to all the good things like medicine and movie theaters. But at this point, Science is also the only tool we have to save ourselves, and subverting it with Bible stories is NOT the way to go.

So now I come to the thing I'm actually afraid of this morning, the real reason behind this post. I get up and begin my routine as usual; perform the daily miracle of turning tap water into coffee. Eat breakfast. Drink some pre-miracled water, gulp down my daily plethora of vitamins with a big glass of more tap water, brush my teeth with tap water from the bathroom sink. I go sit down at my computer for my daily stock torture, notice I have a message on my phone. It's my landlord, Frank, telling me they put out a warning last night not to drink the tap water, not even after boiling it, and that it might not be safe to even bathe in until further notice; I listen to this as I'm taking another long sip of coffee. SO, I call Frank back to see if I need to go to the hospital, and he says he doesn't know; he's on his way up to the borough office to find out what's going on. Meanwhile, I wait here, typing out my ranty fears in this post, wondering how sick I can expect to be at any moment. I continue drinking my coffee because, what the hell, what's done is done.

I finally get a call back from Frank. Apparently, someone who lives next to the town Water Tower saw three guys hanging around the tower. Climbing it and other shady behavior. Neighbors called it in, water's being checked to see if terrorists poisoned it. I live in a very small town; that water tower probably supplies about 5 or 6 hundred people.

I make more coffee and drink a big fat glass of tap water. Laugh and shake my head. More disbelief, more wonderment at how afraid people are, and how much America is being ruled by their fears. I laugh as my stocks tumble. Screw it. It's only money. President Palin? Ha! Good joke! She'll only hasten the downfall of this abominable government we're stuck with! The terrorists have already won anyway. They've shown us how weak and vulnerable we've become, all on our own. Thank God I got to see Stereolab at the Fillmore in NYC before I died. Miss Luongo and I went up to see them last week with my friends Jeff and Steph. Pure aural pleasure.

Mount Rainier Is Often Much Rainier. And Don't Tell Me That Rainier Isn't A Word.

I spent a few more days in Seattle this past week. Sorry Jordan and Alison, for not calling this time around... I was stuck on Bainbridge Island for the whole two days I was there; no real free time this round. I did get to spend a morning in the town of Poulsbo... very proud of their supposed Viking heritage there. Cute town though. Bought some tea and used books. That's the thing about America... traveling and history here often don't really stand up very well next to other parts of the world. I mean sure, America has some exciting history, but it's rather few and far between. For instance in almost any small po-dink European town you go to, something cool happened there. Mozart was born there, or Franz Ferdinand was shot there, or a King was dethroned there, or the world's most famous physicist studied there, or dangerous idealistic crusades were crushed there, or fire was discovered there... well you know. But in the States... well okay, there is some cool stuff. We have loads of cool landscapes. The Devil's Tower, The Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls. There are some wicked cool landscapes in Europe, yet we've got them beat overall in that department. However, comparatively our sense of history is definitely a bit lacking; Whenever I'm in Paris, I visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. When I'm in Munich I visit the Glockenspiel and the Hofbrauhaus. When I'm in Venice, I hang out in San Marco Piazza or visit Murano, the glass blower's island. And whenever I'm in Seattle, I visit the very first Starbucks shop.

And you know, I'm not the only one. Both times I've been there, that little place was packed with people taking photos and oohing and ahhing. It would be really sad except that I'm one of those people. I even picked up three bags of the exclusive Pike Place special reserve blend, a blend only sold at the Pike Place original location. Wait, maybe it's still pretty sad. Heeey guys, look over here, it's another shot of Mount Rainier!

Yes, well. See? Landscapes. That's what we have in America. We may not have a political, economic, or health care system that anyone anywhere in the universe respects right now, and not much history to speak of, but we've got landscapes.

Speaking of our poor economy, today was a weird day. In a way I'm happy that the bailout package did not go through. It's not right that the crooks on Wall Street should be allowed to get away with all their dirty dealings, and then have the taxpayers give them 750 billion bucks when they hit a rough patch. But, you know, the fact that the bailout didn't happen is bad bad bad for our economy, it's true. We are approaching the Great Depression II, and I think that if that happens, we are all going to find out first hand why your Grandparents and Great-Grandparents were such bitter, cautious people when it came to money. (Not my Grandparents though. They're great. I'm talking about your Grandparents.) I myself have lost a ton of money in the market. A TON. But I kind of had a bad feeling today so I cashed most of my stocks out this morning before the really big crash hit. Should've done that weeks ago. I guess what I'm trying to say is, now is a good time to listen to your tight-fisted elder relatives. Because really, I feel that the only hope we have of avoiding breadlines and 100 dollar cans of peaches is that this is all some sort of master plan to initiate the New World Order. Either way, you know, bad bad bad. Of course this could be the bottom, as bad as it gets. Maybe they're really trying to fix things after they, you know, screwed it up so abominably. Maybe they'll come up with a bailout, and it will fix things. But they're either utterly incompetent or evil, and neither scenario bodes well for us. Aw hell, when you get depressed and think that the people on the following YouTube might possibly represent the subconscious of America, you realize that we're all doomed anyway, and maybe we deserve to be.

Anyway, sorry. I digress. Here's a nice photo taken of some photo takers with a fishmonger on Pike Place. I added some other Mt. Rainier and Pike Place photos from this trip over at the smugmug gallery.

I Haven't Done This In A While, But I Really Enjoyed This Special Comment

PART ONE

PART TWO

Back To School: My Book Report & How I Spent Four Summers

Hey guess what? I'm having my Groundhog day. I'm in Virginia again, for the third week-long assignment in a row. Ick. If anybody ever wants to travel to Vienna, VA, I know all the good restaurants. I forgot my camera, so even if I wind up doing something interesting, I won't be able to share any images. I'm probably not going to do much though. I might go see another concert on Saturday; there's a band I really like named Louis XIV playing.

But I finally got around to reading a book which I'd touted here waaaay back in October aught 6. I'd been wanting to read it for a very long time, but I think I felt like I was still too close to my own experiences in Iraq, so I kept putting it off. I don't know exactly why I finally decided to pick it up, other than that I just needed something to bring to Virginia with me. At any rate, after I finished reading it, I went to the author's website and dropped him the following note:

I just finished your book... I lived in Baghdad (successively in a hotel in the Karradah district, the VVIP airport terminal, and in the Green Zone) for three years, from August 2003 through October 2006. Since I left, the level of both stupidity and insanity which I witnessed there slowly seeped away from my daily consciousness, until I was almost fit for normal human company again. Reading your book was an extremely engaging experience for me as it not only brought all of those old emotions back, but additionally shed some new light on the chaotic events that went on around me which I did not fully understand at the time.

Uh... thanks?

Which about sums it up. It's an excellent book in that I believe he really went out of his way to be as impartial and as nice as possible to the people he was writing about, which in the end only made their grand stupidities even more painful to read. Having lived there during the period about which he wrote, (The CPA's tenure in control of the reconstruction of Iraq led by Paul Bremer from 2003 to 2004) it added another layer of emotion which I find to be inexplicable. For instance, there was an incident near my company's compound in the Green Zone one time while I was covering for Rodney there while he was on his vacation. Rodney was the Irish scalawag friend of mine who'd had a friend working in Iraq who got us all jobs there in the first place back in August aught 3.

Anyway, one night the Green Zone incoming alarm went off, followed by a warning to all CPA employees to stay out of the streets of the Zone. Word came down to us that an American had been stabbed right out in the open inside the Green Zone and that the army was searching for the terrorist that had somehow snuck in and done it. We never heard anything else about it and, with so many other crazy things going on all the time, it was quickly forgotten about. Well, Rajiv wrote about that incident in his book. Apparently it had been quickly discovered that the stabbing was done by a fellow American; the two men had been having a drunken brawl or something. This news was hushed up, and that was that. It seems that the powers that be would rather have had us believe that an insurgent was loose in the Green Zone than admit the truth, and I'm not even really sure why. But I'll tell you one thing, when I read that, I laughed my ass off. I'd always kind of wondered about that stabbing, and it was an unexpected release of, something, when I read what had really happened, over four years later now.

That was one of just a few incidents that I was around for which he writes about from an insider's perspective. He wrote about the bombing of the United Nations building, which had happened just a week after my arrival in Baghdad. One funny incident that he wrote about was when the Iraqi Soccer team won an important match against Saudi Arabia. That night, the Americans inside the Green Zone freaked out when they heard an insane amount of gunfire coming from the city just outside their 12 foot high protective barriers; they all ran for bunkers and basements thinking that this was it, the Iraqis were storming the Green Zone. It was my second night in Baghdad and we were staying in a hotel downtown, NOT protected by the concrete blast walls of the Emerald City. We were inside, probably playing cards or eating strange and greasy local food or who knows what, when a CRAPLOAD of gunfire began right outside on our street. Dave, Scott and I were kind of like, aw hell, we're going to die on our second night here? Rip off. Ironically, my future boss-who-is-now-in-prison was there too; it's where I first met him. Dave tried to lock himself in the bathroom, Scott was standing in the hallway trying to figure out what good hiding was going to do, and I was under me bed. Phil (my future boss) was in his room, gesticulating at all of us urgently (and creepily) to come into his room while holding out a bottle of Jim Beam; I think that he was thinking that hell, if we're going to die we might as well party first. (That, incidentally, should have tipped me off about him right away.) We heard someone walking through the courtyard of our hotel, bullet shells dropping onto the tiles. Oh God oh God oh God, this is it. Phil's security guard walked in with a big grin, because he'd just been outside joining in with the celebratory gunfire over Iraq's victory in the soccer match. I wrote about that in less detail at the time here.

One that really got me was the bombing of the Green Zone Cafe and then the Market on October 14th 2004. I knew that date off the top of my head, and could have told anyone who asked when that happened without having to look it up. I'd quit my first job in Iraq and began working for Phil on October 12th, 2004. Rajiv called the market and cafe bombings the beginning of the end of the CPA staff's illusions in the Green Zone (I'm paraphrasing). I'd been to the cafe with Scott a few times, and we'd frequented the market during that summer. I think I also wrote about that in a mass email at the time, here. (This other page that I keep linking to by the way is a companion blogpage where I posted a bunch of mass emails I'd sent to friends and family from my early days in Iraq, before I had a blog) I was two blocks away from the market when a suicide bomber blew himself up, along with one of my favorite shops there; A tent where a nice old Iraqi man and a young Iraqi John Lennon lookalike sold songbirds and various other bric-a-brac.

It was a sobering omen of what was to come, and it certainly saddened me in ways that few other bombings which I was around for did. For the remaining two years that I was there, every time I drove by the area where the market used to be, I shook my head like an old man, and even indulged in a tut-tut occasionally.

But these are some of the moments I felt while reading his book because of how I experienced them, not what the book is really about. It's really about how the Bush Administration not only did NOT have a real plan for Iraq after his wrong-headed war, but how even more egregiously they sent people over to fix the country they'd just demolished who were chosen for their jobs because of their affiliation and loyalty to the Republican party. People who actually understood Iraq and what needed to be done were short-shrifted, shunted aside, even fired and removed in favor of Bush loyalists, most notably Jay Garner for Paul Bremer but also hundreds of others. Quoting from the book jacket:

...the case of the 24 year old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad's stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe [other] Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons specialists from defecting to Iran! (that's my favorite one, by the way); Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe vs. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer's ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule.

Of course I wasn't even close to being directly involved in any of that stuff, but I was around for it and witnessed a lot of the side effects. I heard all the talk... the Green Zone was a small community in those days. I highly recommend 'Imperial Life In The Emerald City'  by Rajiv Chandrasekaran as a clear minded journal of one of the most embarrassing moments in American history. And yes, I was a part of it in my own small way. Yay.

On a final note, I want to say that one of my proudest moments in Iraq was when I got to be rude to Paul Bremer. Dave, George, Scott and I were eating dinner in the CPA building when who should walk right by our table, but Paul Bremer and Dan Rather, followed by a gaggle of reporters and suck-ups on their way to a quiet corner of the Republican Palace for an interview. As I saw him coming, I loudly whistled Darth Vader's theme. For my trouble I was rewarded with a sharp look from Bremer and some very frightening glares from his body guards. In retrospect, especially after reading this book, I realize that he was not so much a Dark Lord as an opportunistic incompetent, and it would have been more apropos to whistle the Animaniacs' theme.

I've Stolen This Post From Attytood Because It's Awesome

"Worse than Watergate: Bush scores lowest presidential approval rating EVER!

Worse than Richard Nixon in the days before he resigned in disgrace during Watergate, worse than Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis, much worse than Bill Clinton when he was impeached. Just as Roger Bannister raced through what once seemed the unreachable 4-minute mile, Bush has burst through a barrier once also thought impossible, below the 20-percent mark.

Check this out:

George W. Bush's overall job approval rating has dropped to a new low in American Research Group polling as 78% of Americans say that the national economy is getting worse according to the latest survey from the American Research Group.

Among all Americans, 19% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 77% disapprove. When it comes to Bush's handling of the economy, 14% approve and 79% disapprove.

Among Americans registered to vote, 18% approve of the way Bush is handling his job as president and 78% disapprove."

Read the rest of this article here.

Am I Alone In My Visceral Reaction To Bush's Monkeyface?

"Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?"
-Tom Hanks

I've recently lost about ten pounds. I've been going to the gym since September, not exactly regularly due to work travel, but whenever I'm home at least every other day if not every day. The first three months or so were kind of slow going... my stamina on the treadmill got incrementally better, but I maybe lost a pound or three during that time. Then, in the last month and a half or so, it began to drop rapidly. One time I weighed myself, right before I went to Fort Lauderdale, and I was at 204 lbs. When I got back from being down there for a week and not getting any real exercise, after my first workout I weighed myself again, and I was at 198. Then, once more due to work and other unforeseen drama in my life, it was two weeks before I was able to hit the gym again. So this past Monday I weighed myself and I was still at 198, and yesterday at 197 & ¾! It seems as though I've hit a certain mark in my exercise where my body has finally started to believe that I'm really serious about the whole thing, and has decided to pay attention. Sweet!

My diet probably also has something to do with it. I've been %90 faithful to my 2007 New Year's resolution to give up fast food, and I buy lots of whole wheat products and vegetables at the grocery nowadays. I still indulge in the occasional pizza of course, but I never buy chips or other junk food any more except for Tostitos (which they now have a whole wheat variety of!) and salsa. I use Olivio instead of butter, and buy organic milk. I've cut waaay back on my cheese intake also, mostly because I was paranoid about my cholesterol levels. I haven't eaten more than a pint or two of ice cream in the last six months. I take a bevy of vitamins in the morning and I drink Metamucil with dinner every night. And then I take some more vitamins.

This probably sounds annoying to you. I sincerely apologize. Before I got all health conscious, I hated people that exhibited this sort of behavior and then that's all they would talk about. But what I want to say about it is that I've learned some extremely valuable things by doing the gym thing, and they're not even all fitness related. But this first one is: Exercise and diet are mutually reinforcing.

When I first started going to the gym, I didn't really care too much to change my eating habits. I just wanted to get on the treadmill and work off those extra calories I'd eat the night before. I mean, I cared a little, because I'd just been told that my cholesterol was too high, but overall I still ate what I wanted. But once I'd been doing it for a few weeks, I found that when I went to the store, I'd pay more attention to those food content labels. I found that I actually wanted, for the most part, to avoid junk and high fat foods that I loved, because I'd been so good about working out that I wanted to control my calorie count in order not to undervalue all that hard work. The diet thing actually came very naturally... at no time did I ever feel that I was giving up food that I couldn't bear to give up. I never had to plan to diet... it just happened rather organically. Except for my Fast Food resolution. But even that made sense at the time because I'd just come back to the States and was indulging in all the bad stuff I'd missed while I'd been away, and I knew that if I didn't put the kibosh on it quick I'd be looking like the inbred lovechild of Mayor McCheese and the Grimace in no time.

I've learned loads of other things at the gym, but I'm sure they're all clichéd... More energy, better moods, blah blah blah. I mean, it's all true, but everybody's heard all that before. The only surprises in the whole enterprise for me have been that whole unforced desire to diet thing I just said and also the fact that losing weight happens quicker and more abruptly than one might have thought. Granted, it took me five months to get to that point, but once I finally did, cool. But there's one more thing, fairly unrelated to health but very interesting.

My gym has about 12 big TVs up on the wall in front of the cardio machines so that you can walk, run, bike, or do your elliptics while watching whatever mind-numbing crap is on whichever TV station. Each of the machines has a little channel box which you can plug your headphones into so that you can listen to whichever one you choose. Anyway, I always listen to my mp3 player, but I'll watch the TVs without sound anyway as it helps to distract from the pain of jogging. But yesterday they had CNN, FOX, and MSNBC news on at the same time, and I noticed that all three of them were running the same story at the same time; the one about Bush's latest bribe to us. You remember; he bribed us with a tax rebate when he first got into office, in the hopes we'd like him and not make too much noise when he later unveiled his diabolical plans to destroy the world, and now he's doing it again in the hopes that we'll all go "Oh see? He's not so bad." Jerk-off.

Anyway, that's not my point. My point was that I was watching these three major news networks broadcasting this story simultaneously, and not only the same story, but the same news blurbs under the talking heads, the same exact camera angles, and the same commercial breaks. Different commercials, though. At first I was kind of not too freaked out by it, because it's a big enough story that sure, they're all going to be there at the same time. But I'm on the treadmill for 35 minutes, and the stories continued to triplet each other, even the less important ones. Some news from Iraq, the Roger Clemens on steroids thing. For my entire 35 minutes on the treadmill, all three of those news networks parroted each other exactly, I swear to God. It was very upsetting. It's like they are so confident in their ability to slop feed us whatever nonsense someone is telling them to without anybody noticing or caring that they weren't even attempting to keep up the appearance of being different news sources anymore. They were all using the same camera guy, for God's sake! The guy typing up the word blurbs at the bottom of the screen is working for all three major news networks! I wonder how long before they convince everybody that they may as well conglomerate into one big news agency since their news is identical in importance, content, and spin, anyway. And how long before it's just el Presidente giving us his daily benediction, because if he doesn't say it, it's not worth knowing.

I do have to say though that seeing Bush's monkey face on the TV while jogging is really good for the heart rate. I instantly get angry and that adrenaline rush of hate really gets me going.

Oh, Happy Valentines day! I love you.

First I Steal From GoDrex, And Then I Steal From Mr. Altemeyer. Huh. Knowledge IS Like A Virus!

"In my experience, the worst enemy and corrupter of man is the tendency - resulting from mental laziness and the desire for peace of mind - to join groups and organizations with set dogmas, be they religious or political."
- Hermann Hesse

GoDrex, in a recent post, linked to a very interesting online book about a human phenomenon as old as time: The Authoritarian Follower. In other words, a book about the sheep, the army ants, that infest humanity and allow incredibly evil things to happen through their passive/aggressive stupidity.

There is a section at the end of the third chapter in which he uses his theory to explain the inexplicable events surrounding our invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. I've copied and pasted it here, because it's the best rundown of the key events I've come across yet. 

A Little Application
That said, let’s take what we have learned in this chapter about how
authoritarian followers think and see if it explains what otherwise might seem quite baffling. Beginning in late 2001, the Bush administration stated that Saddam Hussein was a source of terrorist activities around the world, and frequently implied he was involved in the attacks of September 11th, even though nearly all the attackers had come from Saudi Arabia, and none had come from Iraq. The administration also said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even though United Nations inspectors had never found any, so an invasion of Iraq was necessary. A choir of “theocons” seconded this “neocon” outlook with the argument, however implausible, that it was highly moral to start a war with Iraq. In fact, it was God’s will.

The polls showed most Americas supported the president, although a significant minority did not. Besides observing that no terrorist connections had been demonstrated, and no “WMDs” or facilities for making them had been discovered, critics said an invasion would make it easier for Muslim fanatics to launch suicide attacks on Americans, and would probably tie down America’s mobile armed forces for years to come because civil war was likely to develop after Saddam’s removal.

They also observed that the war would seem not only unjustified to most Muslims, but totally unfair given America’s greatly superior military forces. An American/British slam-dunk victory would probably create so much hatred for those countries in Islam that the number of zealots plotting terrorist attacks against them would probably increase rather than decrease as a result of the war. It would prove a monumental step in the war against terror--but backwards.

The critics were castigated by administration officials and their backers with a vehemence not seen since the anti-Vietnam war protests. Those who urged caution were denounced, even as late as the fall of 2006, as traitors, fools, and idiots by officials and supporters who will likely never admit that the critics were proved right. For after the successful military invasion of Iraq, no pre-existing ties to al-Qaida were discovered and no weapons of mass destruction were found. Some Americans then realized their country had invaded another country on false premises--which would seem to be very wrong morally, and which would have outraged many supporters of the war had certain other countries done such a thing. But several months after the administration itself conceded that no weapons of mass destruction had been discovered, pollsters found a lot of Americans believed such weapons had been found. And for these believers and others the new justification for the invasion, viz., to remove Saddam and bring freedom to Iraq, to make it a shining example in the Middle East of what democracy will bring, was good enough anyway.

But as American casualties steadily mounted after the war was declared over, and as chaos descended upon Iraq, and as the Bush administration had no response other than, “We know this is the right thing to do, no matter what,” and as the war helped drive the national debt to such unprecedented heights that the United States became the world’s largest debtor, most Americans finally saw the war had become a national disaster.

Still, nationwide polls for Newsweek, CNN, and USA Today revealed that in
October 2006, as the mid-term election drew near, 40 percent of the American people did not think the United States made a mistake in invading Iraq, 30 to 34 percent approved of President Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq, 30 percent said the administration did not misinterpret or misanalyze the intelligence reports they said indicated Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and 36 percent said the administration had not purposely misled the public about this evidence to build support for the war.

Thirty-seven percent even thought the U.S. military effort was going “well” (either “fairly” or “very”) And 35 to 37 percent approved of how Bush was doing his job in general, while 35 percent also were satisfied with the way things were going in the country. In all cases, the solid majority of Americans saw it otherwise. But you have to wonder, who were all those people who thought everything was fine?

Well, what’s not to understand, if that hard-core of supporters mainly consists of authoritarian followers, given what the experiments described in this chapter show us about them? The justification for the war in the first place was largely irrelevant to high RWAs. [Right Wing Authoritarians] They liked the conclusion; the reasoning didn’t matter. If the United Nations refused to sanction the war, so what? There’s no contradiction, in a highly compartmentalized mind, between believing that America stands for international cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict on the one hand, while on the other hand insisting it has the “right” to attack whomever it wants, no matter how weak they are, whenever it wants for whatever reasons it decides are good enough. Those who protested were trouble-makers; everyone should support the government.

If no connections to al-Qaida and no weapons of mass destruction turned up after the invasion, just believe they had turned up. An aluminum tube that could have been designed to help enrich uranium was used to enrich uranium, proving Saddam was making atomic bombs! Trailers that could have been used to make biological weapons were used to make them. Besides, people whom the followers look to, such as the evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) said they still believed Saddam had such weapons, even if there was no evidence he had. And anyway, if the first reason for the war comes up lame, just invent a new one. Everybody knows Saddam is our biggest problem! And when later the president insisted he never said America would “stay the course” in Iraq, when actually he had said it over and over again, most people knew that was an outright, almost pathological lie. But it would not make much of a dent on an authoritarian follower’s mind, which is quite capable of believing white is black when his authority says so.

Authoritarian followers aren’t going to question, they’re going to parrot. After all, in the ethnocentric mind “We are the Good Guys and our opponents are abominations”--which is precisely the thinking of the Islamic authoritarian followers who become suicide bombers in Iraq. And if we turn out not to be such good guys, as news of massacres and the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, by the CIA, and by the arms-length “companies” set up to torture prisoners becomes known, authoritarian followers simply don’t want to know. It was just a few, lower level “bad apples.” Didn’t the president say he was sickened by the revelations of torture, and all American wrong-doers would be punished?

However the policy came from the top, and the administration scrambled to make sure it could not be punished. When the White House said it would veto a bill because it prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, you had to be nearly blind not to realize what was going on. When the White House also insisted, successfully, that Congress pass a bill allowing it to use torture, you had to be completely blind. But high RWAs are quite capable of such blindness.

And while most Americans came to realize what a mistake the war in Iraq has turned out to be, high RWAs lagged far behind. They listen to the news they want to hear. They surround themselves with people who think like they do. They believe the leaders who tell them what they want to be told. They make about as much effort to get both sides of an issue as the Bush administration does to foster different points of view within the White House. And if six high RWAs are sitting in a room talking about the war, and all six now have misgivings, it will still be hard for any of them to say so because the ethic of group solidarity is so strong in the authoritarian mind.

Is there any conceivable evidence or revelation that will lead them to admit the war was a mistake? I suspect some of them will eventually, begrudgingly reach that point, and others will rewrite their personal histories and say they had their doubts from the start. But others, petrified by their dogmatism, will never admit the undeniable. Did they ever about Viet-Nam? No. “We just didn’t use enough force!”-- which is exactly the argument those who proposed the invasion of Iraq are using now as they tried to shift the blame for the failure of their incredibly unsound policy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the phenomenon, although I suspect that the people who need to read it the most, the authoritarian followers, will never even touch it and even if they do, they'll misinterpret it. It's a book that is preaching to the converted, for sure, but it's still eye-opening. It's called The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. It's completely online, and completely free, and not even very long. So you have no excuse. Unless you're one of them, in which case I suggest you turn a blind eye, because we wouldn't want you to hurt yourself with self-recrimination, after all.

Thanks To Wolfboy

I'm really excited to see what's going to happen with the West Memphis 3 now that there has been some new DNA evidence introduced. These kids, now men, have been in prison for nearly 15 years, and everybody in the world who has read anything about the case, except for the arresting officer, prosecutor, and judge, are %100 convinced that they were innocent. Anyone that has seen the "evidence" which they used to convict them, has shaken their heads in utter disbelief that such a Salem Witch Trial could happen in this day and age. They've made 2 documentaries on this matter (click on the picture to go to the first one, I highly recommend it) and I can't think about it without getting really angry, and really sad. Anyway, go here to read a good background summary of the case, and here is what's going on with it currently.

The Synchroni-City Of Atlanta

So remember that picture of the Dalai Lama that I found in that Rudy Rucker book from a few posts back? Well, I found out where the photo was taken! Sort of. Yesterday was my first real free day since coming to Atlanta, and they claim to have the largest aquarium in the world here so I decided that I'd go check it out. I love aquariums. I've been using that picture of the Dalai Lama as a bookmark, naturally enough, and I brought my latest Rudy Rucker book with me to read when I stopped for coffee or some such after I got tired of looking at big fish tanks. 

Incidentally, I was talking to one of the guys in the class earlier, asking him about stuff to do in Atlanta, and he got real excited telling me all about the Coca-Cola museum. Yeah, that's right. He was nearly frothing as he told me that they let you try every coke flavor ever made, and that they had this display of coke cans from around the world! The Korean one was particularly sublime, apparently. The highest artistic commercial expression of design and functionality.

And people wonder why I think most of America is such a wasteland of consumerism.

Atlanta's other big attractions according to the hotel's brochure rack were the UPS museum and a grand tour of CNN's offices, and something called The Underground which is a historical area of the city with lots of "unique shopping". Also, a guided city tour... on Segways. Urgh. So, suffice it to say, I wasn't really expecting much out of my day there, other than the aquarium.

The aquarium was pretty sweet. Although, it made me finally realize that no aquarium is ever going to hold up to my childhood memories of going to the aquarium in Boston with my family. Whenever I remember it, it seems gigantic, bigger than any aquarium could possibly be, with a huge 6 level cylindrical tank which you walked up a spiral ramp around, looking at thousands of fish, sharks, and a blue whale inside. I know I know, very unlikely, but I said it was a childhood memory. Those kind of memories tend to grow up along with you. Anyway, the one in Atlanta has four whale-sharks, and they're fairly large. And hammerhead sharks, and those ones with a long saw for a nose. So I was happy. Oh! And Manta-Rays. I love Manta-Rays. They're my favorite aquatic animal.

Anyway, I finished up in the aquarium at around 2:00, and decided I would head over to the Underground, which sounded mildly more interesting than the UPS museum. The coke museum was right next door to the aquarium, but I couldn't bring myself to do it, I just couldn't. I thought about it for a minute, and started walking towards it, but when I saw the ticket line I realized that my soul would truly be damned to hell if I actually paid to go in the ... coca-cola... museum... So I backed away slowly and made for the Underground.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Underground... I saw a sign, a very interesting sign, that said 'Dalai Lama. Free event. 3:00 - 6:00'. I saw some hippie-looking people standing around, so I asked one of them half-jokingly if that meant that the Dalai Lama was really going to be there. And you know, he was. So, I went and saw the Dalai Lama. He was making an acceptance speech in the Olympic Park there, because Emory University had made him a Distinguished Visiting Professor, or some such. On the way in, just before going through park security, there were some fundies hanging around across the street screaming at people that they were going to hell if they listened to the Dalai Lama, and trying to hide the Dalai Lama signs by standing in front of them. Fundies are soooo cute and adorable, with their childish ways and grammar, I just had to snap a photo.

So it seemed like there were thousands of people in the park, waiting to see the Dalai Lama Show. Being bored, and having a camera in my hand, I took a few gratuitous crowd shots.

The girls holding the flag there kept shouting "Free Tibet! Stop killing the monks!" And I kept thinking, "Nobody here is killing any monks, nor are we enslaving Tibet. What are they getting so agitated about? They should go to the Chinese embassy. Or if it's Americans they want to shout at, they can go to Washington and chant about leaving Iraq and to stop murdering innocent Iraqi people. That at least is something worth yelling at a large gathering of Americans about. Oh wait, I get it, we're on TV." Oh, and did I mention that it was pouring rain all day, right up until around noon? Atlanta was having a pretty serious drought until yesterday. So people kept being all smug all day and saying that the Dalai Lama brought the rain with him, but that it stopped long enough for him to speak, because the rain started up again at around 7pm. True enough as far as it goes, although all that really concerned me about it was how the buildings kept disappearing into the clouds. Atlanta is kind of pretty with low clouds.

Anyway, after a bunch of Tibetans playing music, a three piece Atlanta jazz band, then more Tibetans wearing those yellow half-moon hat things and doing that deep OM chant, the Dalai Lama finally took the stage. He's such a nice old man. He thanked Emory University for making him a professor, although he did say that they shouldn't expect him to be around teaching classes much because he's very lazy. Much laughter and applause.

Then he spoke for an hour or so, in his charming broken English, often stopping mid-sentence to ask his translator "Whatssa Name?", about world peace and all that. Since he's the supposed reincarnation of the Buddha of compassion, he had some nice things to say about that. He said that compassion is not a religious idea, that he did not learn these important values from Buddhism, but from his mother. Compassion is born into every human being because after you are born, your survival depends upon the care of another human being. Turtles, who are abandoned on the beach by their mothers, Salmon, whose mothers die after spawning, and some animals whose mothers eat them, insects and so on, they are likely not capable of compassion. Compassion is therefore a human instinct, not a religious idea. He made a very clear point to say that religion is really not so very important, but that compassion is. If you believe in God, that is wonderful, but it is more important to have love and compassion. I think I can get behind that.

After the Dalai Lama Show was over, I saw a bunch of Tibetan monks hanging out so I walked over to them and did the little bow thing that everybody does when those guys are around. Very friendly guys. I pulled out my Rudy Rucker book, and showed them my bookmark and asked them if they knew where the photo had been taken. They smiled and one of them said "Oh, very good picture of His Holiness. This look like when he was in Mambamaramamabakok India."

So there you have it. Some things that I learned today: People holding signs and chanting slogans generally ought to be mistrusted, but people holding children are beautiful, (The Dalai Lama also said that "It is everyone's duty to give maximum affection to their children. It is not my duty though, because I'm a monk. Ha ha.") and that the Photo of His Holiness that fell out of Rudy Rucker's book was probably taken in Mambamaramamabakok, India. And I thought my trip was going to be boring. Sheesh. So the moral of this story is, if you avoid going to the easy, obvious things which commercialism would have you do such as cola museums, you get to see the Dalai Lama, have certain pressing photo-origin questions answered, and be condemned to hell for it by people who claim to follow Jesus, who, by the way, also preached a message of love and compassion. I flipped them the bird. A really fun day, as far as I'm concerned.

My Adjective-Heavy, Overlong Version Of The Emperor's New Clothes.

One of my favorite stories of all time is The Emperor's New Clothes. It's a popular one, and technically it's a fable I think, but it's been in the back of my head for years and years. I think about it so much because it works on so many levels and also it’s another piece in the puzzle of human nature. For a short Fable, it explains so much about human behavior that it feels like an epic. I don’t remember how old I was when it clicked in my head what that story was really about, but ever since then it’s behaved rather fractal-like in my head (Although most things are behaving that way to me right now, because I’m an official Frack addict) as I’ve consistently seen more complicated patterns of human behavior within it every time I think about it.

An Emperor, who is very vain about his fashion sense, spends a lot of his country's money on his vanity, yet he feels that most of the people around him are too stupid to appreciate what is in reality his extremely gaudy taste. So he searches for a Tailor who will make him something so "beautiful" that only those with the "highest" fashion sense can appreciate it. It doesn't take him long to find his Karl Rove, his Ahmed Chalabi, his St. Paul. A clever Tailor has heard about his quest and responds with a devious plan.

He takes the measure of the Emperor, and declares that he will make him the finest suit imaginable, with the caveat that it will be so unimaginably fine that only those who are truly capable of sensing the greatest beauty will be able to see it, so ineffable will this creation be. The Emperor, of course, is very pleased by this and is looking forward to the day when he can prove to the world that he is not a vain idiot, but that he has the very keenest of aesthetic appreciation.

The Tailor takes his down payment and goes off to the pub and has a merry time. He plays some golf, takes a long weekend off in the hills with an easy lass from down the street, and sleeps off the hangover. He meanwhile sends messages to the Emperor that he's been hard at work, along with descriptions of the suit and how lovely it will be, relating his progress on how difficult and rewarding the work is. How the color is beyond the glamour of gold. How he searched far and wide to find the mythical thread of the gods in ancient and little traveled lands. How he imported the finest lace from ancient Babylon. How he is using only adamantine needles gathered from the secret merchants of Atlantis to do the thread work painstakingly by hand, being so careful that a well turned stitch may take him an hour per knot. The Emperor is beside himself with impatience, and daily his imaginings of the suit grow greater until the blinding beauty of what this suit will be has formed an unshakable picture in his mind.

At long last, the clever Tailor wakes one morning and decides that it is time. He opens up a closet door and grabs a dusty old clothing box from the back of it, cleans it up and proceeds to turn it into the finest dressed box in all the land using old ribbons and bits of cast off cloth from his cutting room floor, causing an absurd amount of envy in all of the other clothing boxes' tiny black hearts.

He then cleans himself up, and dresses himself in what are actually very fine and tasteful clothes, because he really is a fantastic Tailor and truly knows what a nicely cut suit is all about. In fact, looking at the Tailor that morning, you'd be forgiven for thinking that he was the lord of a wealthy fief with an old family and refined sensibilities. Further, he might have been happy to cut the Emperor as fine a suit as this one, but the Tailor knew that his tastes did not run in that direction and would demand something far showier than was truly tasteful.

Getting himself into his role, he grabs some air and arranges it fussily inside the handsomest box ever created. He then sends word to the Emperor that the suit is finished at last. Beside himself with joy, the Emperor sends an escort of his personal guard to bring the Tailor and his suit to the palace.

When the Tailor arrives at the palace, Box of Adonis tucked safely under his arm, the Emperor greedily demands to see the suit, so eager is he to present himself to his subjects as a man of the greatest sensibilities. The Tailor first admonishes the Emperor to remember his caveat, and before taking out the suit, begins to remind him of how sacred and beautiful this suit is, and that he must prepare his eyes to see it lest he be blinded by the beauty etc etc etc...

So after much ado about nothing, they retire to the Emperor’s chambers along with several choice Imperial Attendants and there, apart from prying eyes the Tailor opens the box and... Well what happens here is a matter of much debate. Some people believe that the Emperor, so fixated on the ideas carefully planted by the Tailor of the amazing technicolor suit, in fact actually saw the suit exactly as he imagined it, his fantasies becoming a mirage before his eyes. Others believe that, seeing nothing there he was loath to admit to himself (but even more importantly, would be loath to admit to his courtiers and advisers) that he could not see it, especially in front of his attendants and more so after talking it up for so long that only those with fine aesthetic discernment would be able to look at it, and so proceeded to convince himself that it was there, lest he be laughed at by those with more acumen for not apprehending it. Still others believe that the Emperor knew very well that there was in fact nothing there, but again for the same reasons as stated above and further chose to go along with the Tailor's clever ruse so that he could proclaim himself the only one in the world with the ability to see it; God's chosen fashion sensor.

In any case, whatever was going through the Emperor's mind at the time, the outcome was the same. It will be up to him to face the reality he hid himself from, or the reality he created, on judgment day. For the rest of us, it is what comes next that is important.

The Tailor made a great show of lifting the invisible clothes out of the box and draping them ‘round the foolish ruler. His Attendants, after an initial moment of confusion, began to help the Tailor and made various sounds of approval, exclaiming that the Tailor had done a wonderful job and that the Emperor looked simply incomparable. One of the Attendants quietly slipped out of the room to warn… I mean, to announce of course! To announce to the Lords and Ladies of the court that the Emperor was now dressed in his eldritch suit of appreciative eyes only, and would be attending them shortly.

The Emperor presented himself to his court, beaming happily in his amazing new outfit which everyone saw to be his bright pink polka-dotted underwear, yet none of them would be the first to say other than that his robes were splendorous (lick spittle cowards that people of such station invariably are). There was a tense moment for the Tailor when a poor ignorant chambermaid came in to tend the fire and gasped upon seeing him holding court before hundreds of his courtiers, wearing nothing but his Imperial Knickers! She turned a truly amazing shade of white which possibly had never been specified on the royal color charts before that day, and began to stammer an apology for walking in on the Emperor in such a state. Having gone over every eventuality in his head many times over, the Tailor smoothly explained to the Emperor and his Attendants in a voice loud enough to be heard by all, but especially by the poor white-faced chambermaid that it only proved his point that those without class or fashion sense would not be able to comprehend the world’s finest fabric creation.

Chambermaids, poor creatures that they are with little in their lives other than the drudgery of cleaning up after other folk’s dirty messes, are resultantly prone to gossip. So naturally word of this exchange spread quickly, although the story which the chambermaid told changed from her simply having seen the Emperor in his knickers to having been temporarily blinded by the Emperor’s au courant hauteur, and was now in fact one of the lucky first to have seen the new wonder which could only be seen, according to the greatest Tailor of the land, (For he was the Emperor’s personal Tailor, was he not?) by people of taste and education! An article of clothing which only those of a complete doltish nature would fail to behold, and of course all of the Lords, Ladies and residents of the palace, who with their position, wealth, and refinement were the envy of those of the working class, had perceived it and therefore proven that the rumors of the Members-of-Refinement only suit were in fact true.

And so of course it was not long before everyone in town determined that they would not be one of the unfortunates to expose their ignorance by failing to see the new outfit, having a great desire to prove themselves every bit as refined as their social superiors.

As it so happened, the Imperial Scheduler had on his calendar for this day an Imperial inspection of the Empire’s Cavalry. As the bent, near-blind old Scheduler informed the Emperor of this duty, the Tailor listened closely, and worried a little. He asked the Imperial Scheduler what he thought of the Emperor’s attire, and whether it was appropriate garb for an official public inspection. The Scheduler, having heard the talk of the eldritch suit of appreciative eyes only, and near blind though he was, exclaimed how fine the Emperor looked and declared that the Cavalry would likely be honored by his well-dressed inspection.

And so the Tailor, deeming the public ready as evinced by the fact of word having spread to the servants, was sure that by the time the Emperor’s retinue arrived outside word would have spread even further, and felt confident that he was safe. He then approached the Emperor and asked for the remainder of his fee, having delivered the new clothes as promised, before taking his leave. The Emperor, being always in the public eye, paid the Tailor his due with a healthy bonus thrown in for having far surpassed his greatest expectations. The Tailor then bowed his way out of the palace, thanking the Emperor for his magnanimity, and telling him that should he have any problems or need any further work done not to hesitate to summon him. The Tailor left in a very jubilant mood indeed, having more gold in his pockets now than ever another tailor may receive in a lifetime, and all for such toil free deception!

The Emperor ordered his retinue be made ready, and, dressed impeccably in naught but his undergarments, proceeded out onto the streets for a much anticipated inspection of his cavalry, for now all of the people would see and understand how wonderful their Emperor’s taste in clothing really was!

Strutting down the avenue outside of his palace, surrounded by his slavering suck-ups, The Emperor began to preen. Never before did such a preening take place as this one. In fact, were the Emperor even a small touch more smug and self-loving, this story may have come down to us through the ages known as The Emperor’s New Preen.

But of course, we all know what it’s really all about. It’s about a grown man publicly walking about in his skivvy, pretending that he looks simply fabulous. And as he walked down the main street of his city in this manner, the people were trying not to snigger, because while they all saw him, um, very clearly shall we say, none of them wished to be the first to admit it and invite possible ridicule in case there was any truth to the idea that he was actually very finely dressed, and so laughing would only expose their own lowness.

People are generally pretty stupid and have overlarge egos, and the Emperor was, well, their Emperor.

A young child, too young and intelligent to have paid any mind to the nonsense talk of the adults but not so young that he didn’t know what was truly important, was therefore looking around the street for interesting things to pick up from the ground and chasing pigeons. As he was running after a particularly energetic pigeon, he found himself quite inadvertently out in the middle of the street… directly in front of the nearly naked Emperor.

As the child’s clear eyes scanned up from the Emperor’s feet to meet his royally clouded eyes, widening in surprise along the way, I like to imagine that a chill of doom shivered up the Emperor’s regally ambivalent spine. I think that deep down, everyone knows you can’t fool children, not about the important things anyway, even when you’ve managed to fool yourself.

The child, not understanding the silly adult complexities of the situation, shouted up to the Emperor (who, leaning back with one leg crooked and arms going bent as he was, looked as if he was ready to flee from this harmless little urchin):

“Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

Those nearest the unfolding drama gasped, and the silence thundered like a wave. The complete ridiculousness of the situation had been apparent to all, but after being too cowardly to state their convictions on the matter, the child’s innocent question was as a needle to a balloon for the people on the street. And then: laughter. Unable to hold on to their imagined dignity any longer, the throng bellowed until the tears came.

Now, in the old telling of this story, the Emperor, looking quite like a scared little monkey, became ashamed as he realized that the jig was up and high-tailed it back to his palace in order to become decent and to find that louse of a tailor and hang him by his fingers. However, times being what they are, our story does not end nearly as tidily. Instead, our Emperor, looking more like a smug, semi-intelligent nose-picking little monkey, chose to ignore the laughter, loudly pronounce that all of those who were full of mirth were in fact scoundrels, and that he very well was wearing very fine cloth which they obviously were too uneducated and unpatriotic to see, until some of the people came around again to believing in the ruse and began to accuse each other of being on the wrong side of things until no one knew anymore what was naked and what was not. And rather than hanging the insipidly deceitful Tailor, the Emperor made him his top fashion adviser and gave him a big raise.

And that is The End of all things, children.

The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein

Found this over on 3 Quarks Daily... Very thought provoking.

Alfonso Cuarón, by the by, is the director of Y tu mamá también, the third Harry Potter movie, and Children of Men. He's relatively mainstream, is what I'm saying.

He's Fishing For Your Soul

Is it just me, or is President Shithead beginning to sound a lot like Baghdad Bob?

An Impassioned Argument Using Not Only Logic, But Mixed Metaphors And Guts, Too.

I think I've got it aalllll figgered out, man.  I know why stupid people always seem to win out in this world, why logic has left the building. It's really quite simple. Say two people are having an argument about something. Anything. For instance, who can run faster, Superman or the Flash? Or who would win in a fight, a Caveman or an Astronaut? Or whether Ann Coulter is a mutant or not. Anything. Say one of the people involved in the argument is an intelligent, logical being. A Rational, as a sop to Miss Luongo's personality theory obsession. Convinced that conclusions ought to be reached with actual facts taken into consideration, each step of the argument followed by the next logical step, based on actual evidence. Say the other debator is... well, less rational. A Guardian type. Convinced that little niceties such as good conclusions based on logical thought are less important than following what your gut says is right, because we all know that following your gut is always such a good idea. Passionate argument is proof enough for them.
In the immortal words of Howard W. Campbell Jr.:

"The truth of your leader August Craptower, and those like him, will be with mankind forever, as long as there are men and women who listen to their guts instead of their minds."
                    -From Mother Night

August Craptower was a leader in the neo-nazi community in Kurt Vonnegut's little morality play there. August Craptower, George Bush, same thing.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that say these two are having an argument. The logical one states his case. He won't usually be all impassioned and heartfelt and all up in people's guts because he feels that the logic of his case, the obvious rightness of what he's saying based on rational thought, will shine through and people will get it, and as long as the people listening aren't totally evil they'll agree with him because he's right. I'm not saying that the logical person is infallible here, only that when he's thought things through clearly, he tends to firmly believe he's on the side of right, and based on fact and evidence, or lack of actual evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq thereof, feels that any other course of action is insane. The Flash can run faster than Superman, because DC comics has made a point of that many times. The Flash can go so fast he vibrates through walls. Superman can fly faster than the Flash can run, but that wasn't the question. Ok maybe there is no logic there, really, but you get where I'm coming from.

So, the logical guy makes his case, and steps back, knowing that after the evidence he's presented, there can be no argument, unless new facts are brought to light which he then will have to deal with. Then the less logical, yet more impassioned Guardian type steps up. He is also convinced of his rightness, but not because of any facts or evidence, excepting perhaps the tidbit that of course God created the world because look at the banana! (It was made to fit a Man's hand (or a monkey's...) and has a natural pull-tab, like a soda can! You can't evolve something like that! (Except that actually, man has cultivated the banana for centuries, making it what it is today, somewhat showing how evolution can work at an accelerated pace, but never mind that bit of fact.))

No, he's convinced of his rightness because he feels it can't be any other way. Of course Saddam is evil and has Weapons of Mass Destruction. He's all dark skin toned and has an evil laugh, and besides, G.W.B. wouldn't lie to us, not the President! He's more than a man, he's God's chosen leader for the greatest nation on Earth! Of course God is on America's side, otherwise we wouldn't be so powerful! He's on our side, just like he was on the side of history's other greatest empires, like Rome, and Egypt... oh wait, they don't usually take the logic that far, you know, because then they'd have to change their opinion. No, the illogical side of this argument will do whatever it takes to win the argument, because he feels right. He'll use facts that are perceived, he'll even make shit up, take things out of context and use them to prove his view of things. And the other guy, the logical one, will tend to sit back and laugh at the other guy's antics, because obviously he's an idiot, and nobody's going to buy that junk... Except of course, that they do.

Why? Well, my rather simple theory is that, since the greater part of the human population are these so-called Guardian types, sheep in other words, they will believe whoever talks longer and louder. Look at that guy, they say, he is so heartfelt and he won't shut up. Obviously he believes what he's saying. That whistleblower over there, who used to be a weapons inspector in Iraq, only offered a cold assesment that he found no WMD. But this guy, he knows that there are weapons over there, if only we keep looking! And he's never even been over there, so that shows you the strength of his conviction!

Logical people don't seem to believe what they're saying, because they offer things as cold fact and then stop talking once they've reached their conclusion, because once an actual case has been reached based on facts, there's really not much left to say. Illogical people seem to believe what they're saying because they never shut up and get louder and louder and more O'Reilly about it, and because they never seem to reach an actual logical conclusion, feel the need to make up for it with volume and heart. And the sucker that is the human race eats it up.

It's all very sad, but based on this fact alone, I'd say that the human race doesn't have a whole lot of time left. As races go, that is. The inevitable conclusion to a race gone with the Pied Piper is extinction. Unless lemmings learn to actually use their minds and not only their guts.

Time Wounds All Heals, And I May Be It This Time, So This Round To You But The Game Is Far From Over

I watched The US vs. John Lennon last night. Good flick. I admit I don't know that much about him, never having dove headfirst into Beatlemania, but it seems he had a bit of a Messiah Complex. Which, hey, good job, I say. If more people had Messiah Complexes, and weren't, you know, sociopathic, but went around getting millions of people to chant things like "All we are saying, is give peace a chance", I might have more hope for humanity. Anyway, the movie focused on the part of John's life where he evolves from a moptop into a political activist, and the US government's attempts, under Nixon and Hoover, to intimidate and have him deported.

As an aside, one thing that struck me in this movie were the bits of Government propaganda used to support the Vietnam War in those days, and how similar... no, how identical they were to our present day Nixonish regime's propaganda. Lord, we need another Messiah!

One thing that troubled me about the whole incident was something G. Gordon Liddy said in the film. John Lennon was a British citizen, living in New York under a visitor's visa. It galled G. that a foreigner, who loved living in the US and enjoying the freedoms that our National forefathers provided would dare to criticize the US war policy. "If you don't like it, go back to Britain", was the sentiment. And, as anti-US policy as I am, it sounds like a good point. As a US citizen, it would be supremely galling of me to go hang out in London and criticize the Blair administration for it's part in the Iraq war, wouldn't you agree?

Where it breaks down is here. The favorite Republican slogan, said off-camera, of "Shut up, or get out" is so twisted and unAmerican that anyone who says it and believes it, and even worse uses it as a policy making idea, ought to be the ones that get bitchslapped. I feel that, something that is often not thought about in those circles is that America was not a nation founded on religion, or borders, or policy. It was founded on ideas of equality and human rights, regardless of where you come from or who you worship or what kind of hat you hang on your coatrack in the evenings, and as such should be able to stand up to the critical eye of truth, or survive the attacks of lies, whichever Nation the mouthpiece hails from. Obviously, America failed that test in Vietnam, and we are woefully failing it again in Iraq. When the powers that be try to silence people, regardless of their citizenship, it means that they're scared. George Bush isn't scared, which means that Peace & Love and all that hippie malarky has no champion this time around.

Okay, getting off my high horse now, whom I've named Lennon.

Well, I've been "tagged" by Miss Luongo, and when such an august persona as she tells you to write something, you do not decline. I have been told that I must blog about my answers to the questions in the following category: Things I Know By Heart. Before I continue, I feel I must offer the disclaimer that although this rather feels like one of those emails you get with a list of half-questions such as: Favorite Color? Most Embarassing Moment? Second Favorite Movie? etc... and you answer them and reply to everyone on the mailing list, additionally sending it to five new friends, who in turn have to answer, it is not. One of those emails, I mean. First off, it's not an email. It's a "tag you're it!" blog game. Secondly, I was tagged under the geas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer metaphors, and seeing as I'm such a starstruck fanboy when it comes to Buffy, I must oblige. It's like when religious people invoke their deity. God told me to do it, amen! Well, Buffy has commanded me, via her latest acolyte Miss Luongo, and the power of the Slayer compels me.

Man, sometimes when I write things, I realize how lost a cause I really am. Anyway, moving on.

Things I Know By Heart:
Two Novels/Poems/Plays: What am I, Abraham Lincoln? When I was in the sixth grade I was in a play called Snow White and the Six Dwarves. There were only six because Smiley went to Hollywood to do toothpaste commercials. It was a stupid play. But I knew my lines by heart, does that count? I hate poetry. It seems to me that poetry is a cheap economical affected way of saying things in a misleading manner. Say what you mean, dammit! I understand that it's all supposed to be pretty, and in the old days a good way to make chicks weak in the knees. But, give me a good novel any day. I don't know any novels by heart though, that's ridiculous. So...

Love guppy

			You mean all the world to me.
			Without you I can't be free.
			You make me pant considerably.
			You're my love guppy.

			You have the finest rosebud's taste.
			Without you my life is waste,
			I'll stick to you like Elmer's paste.
			You're my love guppy.

			I'd break through a citadel.
			I'd fight with a raging bull, 
			Though winning would seem improbable.
			You're my love guppy.

			My love's as strong as the mid-ocean ridge.
			You shine like the rainbow bridge
			or like that light inside my fridge.
			You're my love guppy.

			For you I'd consume haggis,
			or lose the joys of Bacchus,
			or live in sin with Mike Dukakis.
			You're my love guppy.

			No time's too long for me to wait.
			For you, I'd fight against Fate,
			though maybe you could lose some weight,
			You're my love guppy.

			Without you, I'd be not whole,
			I would have to sell my soul,
			or gulp a quart of Tide-E-Bowl.
			You're my love guppy.

			My passion is always mounting.
			I'm like a geyser founting.
			Well, maybe not, but who's counting?
			You're my love guppy.

			The love that is the more intense
			always has the most silence,
			like quiet bursts of flatulence.
			You're my love guppy.

			I know that my love is true.
			I know that you'll love me too,
			or I'll hold my breath 'till I turn blue
			You're my love guppy.

			I'd not forget you if I tried.
			You make me all warm inside.
			My love's as pure as Naugahyde.
			You're my love guppy.

			Then I hear the words let slip
			From betwixt impatient lips,
			"I want to have a relationship.
			You're my love guppy."

So I don't actually have it memorized, but that's poetry!

Two Films/Television Shows You Can Quote From:  Well that's easy. The Kids in the Hall. The funniest show ever made, and I quote from it on a daily basis. If not out loud, then at least in my head, because if there isn't someone else around who knows the show as well as I do, it's not funny. For instance: "Well I think the great leader is some sort of twisted ass freak!" Or, "I'm crushing your head!" Or, "I'm not being sarcastic." And, not to be too obvious or anything, but you had to see it coming. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cordelia: "So, does looking at guns really want to make you have sex?" Xander: "I'm 17. Looking at linoleum makes me want to have sex."

Two Songs To Which You Know Every Word: Actually, I have a real problem with this. I don't know any words to any songs... at least, you know, not if the song is not playing at the moment so I can kind of stumble along with it, and that's only if I am extremely familiar with the music already. It's a serious mental block. I'm sure it has something to do with my disdain of poetry. When there's music on, I don't actually really ever pay attention to the words, which shocks my friends to no end. But, like I tell them, it's the music I care about, not the wooing of women by post-pubescent songwriters. Even when I really like the lyrics to something, I never commit them to memory. But having said all that, Scott, being so distressed over my handicap, saw his solemn duty as my best friend to teach me a song, and after days of practicing, (I'm not joking. Days.) I got this one down:

Show me the way to go home. I'm tired and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went straight to my head! -From JAWS.

Two Dishes You Can Make Without A Recipe: My Mom's special cheesecake, and tacos. If I buy the kind that come in that little yellow box.

Two Cities You Can Navigate Without A Map: I'm going to take this opportunity to be snotty about how well-travelled I am. Munich, Germany. Because I lived within an hour of it for six years and it's actually one of my top 2 favorite cities in the world. I spent alot of time there. The Hauptbahnhof (main train station) is one of my favorite parts of the city and makes a great starting point.
And while it may seem boastful considering what a maze the place is, but Venice. Because it's also one of my top 2 favorite cities and I've been there about 7 times, and because I know all of the major points and I don't mind wandering around it's back alleys lost for a few hours until stumbling upon a place I know. Actually, that's one of the most pleasurable activities in Venice. The other is riding the vaporetti (boat buses) around all day. San Marco piazza is sublime, too.

By the way, if anybody needs a personal tour guide, you know, I am totally for hire. For those two cities, or any other place I've been. Or not been. I'm really good at travelling.

And An Extra Question–What’s A Date You Always Remember, and What’s A Date You Always Forget?: This is the silliest question and reminds me more of those emails I was talking about than the other questions. But, the power of the Slayer compels me regardless, so, I always remember Christmas, because even if for some reason I didn't want to, the retail community makes sure that I don't. And I don't know of any dates I've forgotten, otherwise they wouldn't count as answers to this question, would they then? That was a very British answer in honor of John Lennon. Peace out.

Here's a picture of me in Prague which I thought of posting here because of the inherent personality-typing implicit in the tag questions. It's supposed to be mildly snarky. Probably it's narcissitic. Damn you, Myers-Briggs!

See? I Can't Be That Depressed.

Ok I never do this. But, this is the best header on a news aricle I've EVER seen. Attention attention! Read all about it! SWISS ACCIDENTALLY INVADE LIECHTENSTEIN!!!
That is the Best. Thing. Ever.

An Open Letter To The Guys That Helped Steal My Country

Dear Religious Right,
The separation of Church and State is not a satanic anti-religious idea. It is a brilliant idea which protects the integrity of both institutions. Don't you see? Allow the recent Foley scandel to grant you the temporary stillness needed for reflective thought on the matter. It is a very good illustration. So is that whole deal where our "Christian values" government is actually trying to justify torture, while downplaying the actual severity of pain involved in their definition of what torture we should be allowed to practice. You see, the biggest flaw in current right-wing religious philosophy is the idea that you have the calling from above to take your moral values and make (your) God's law into man's law. I will ignore the obvious flaw for the moment, that you don't have the right to impose your belief system on others. Everybody knows that that is what is actually un-American, and is the reason why you never get invited to the cool kid's parties. The real problem is this: those people in the government who you've allied yourselves with are there because of power. If they truly valued God and a spiritual life, they would not be where they are. All you've done, by getting buddy buddy with the politicians, is given them a powerful tool with which to advance their own interests. They are not your friends! You thought that by using them to advance your interests in the government, that you could get what you wanted. But you are horribly wrong. They are using you, also, and what they want is power, and when they get that power, they do not truly advance a more spiritual country. They use religion to scare people and advance policies that will make them richer and more powerful. There are people pretending to be religious leaders to get you to follow them down this road. The separation of Church and State not only protects the people from having other's religious values shoved down their throats, but it also protects your religion from being warped and abused by power mad politicians. That separation protects the integrity of both institutions equally. Protect yourselves and get out of politics! Do not allow these twisted individuals to be false prophets! Do not allow them to claim that they are serving your agenda with one side of their face, and perverting it with the other! Give to Ceasar what belongs to Ceasar, and give to God what belongs to God; and in case Jesus didn't state that clearly enough, allow me to clarify further: DO NOT give to Bush what belongs to God, and DO NOT give to God what belongs to Bush!!!
God has spoken to me and said that it is so! Boo kids.
Sincerely,
The Guy That Had His Country Stolen While He Was Out Fishin'

I Hereby Dub Yah; President "Comical Criminal Half-Wit Jr."

I mean, duh. Seriously. Not to assist our culture in dumbing the language down or anything, but freaking duh. Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat. Do they really? Wow. Ok see, a McDonald's manager or Walt Disney's CEO can be removed from their positions based on crappy performance, miscalculations, ineptitude, etc etc. Forget actual criminal behaviour for the moment. A McDonald's manager doesn't have to lie to his staff or steal from the till to make a poor decision about something which can result in his termination. I don't think that Michael Eisner was ever accused of illegal activity, but man he fell hard in the end. The funny thing is, at least when Mr. Eisner realized the tide was overwhelmingly against him, he had enough sense of dignity to step down himself, one year before his contract was up! Maybe he made that decision on his own, maybe it was forced on him; I don't really know. But what I do know is that not only is President "El Diablo" Bush and his administration a bunch of liars and crooks, warmongering half-wits and advocates of torture, but now they have been proven to be inept by this report assembled from research conducted by National Intelligence, and represents the consensus view of 16 different spy agencies in the US government! His war in Iraq has made Terrorism a bigger problem, a worse threat, than ever before! And this is the consensus view of all of the REAL experts in the field! I mean, any dope could see this as truth as clear as day, if they were paying attention for the last three years. But now it's backed up by hard fact, more irrefutable than the "intelligence" which brought us here in the first place, and it is time to act on it. It doesn't matter any more whether he lied, or covered stuff up... he started a war which has not only failed miserably in it's stated objective, but his major platform, his self-proclaimed raison d'être known as the so-called 'War on Terror', rather than being fought and won by him and Rummy and Cheney, is categorically being fueled by his retardation! And so we must fire him for making such a costly misjudgement. The morality of his actions can be pursued separately, but for the moment it's enough that we know enough to remove him from office based soley on Job Performance. Incidentally, does the administration's behaviour over the last several weeks remind anyone of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who was given the silly nicknames of "Baghdad Bob" and "Comical Ali" when Saddam's regime was being bombed into the Sand Ages during the last invasion of Iraq? Bush is less composed and likeable, but the denial of everything going up in flames around him is quite similar. "Baghdad George". Dan Savage should start a campaign to have all Americans not only ITMFA, but to hereafter only refer to him as "Baghdad George". Or maybe George "al-Saha-ha-ha-Ha HAHAHAHA!-haf-wit" Bush.
Well, ok then. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. Anyway, I'm sure Keith Olbermann will come out with a special comment quite soon which will really knock the issue out of the park.

Prisoners Imprisoned By Misunderestimation

Well, I finished my book, and after much feeling of impotent anger at Gitchell and Judge Burnette, I've decided to make a contribution to wm3.org's defence fund for the falsely accused. Now perhaps I can get on with my life and learn to love and laugh again. Because about every 2 seconds of reading in that book, I got up and shook my fist in rage at heaven. After the first 3 or 400 times I did this, I kind of settled into the position where one hand was holding the book open in two places; where the main storyline was and a pinkie hooked around into the endnotes section, and my other hand keeping up with the fist in rage at heaven shaking. It made drinking my coffee difficult at points, but sometimes I was able to channel it into furiously taking a sip 'o joe at heaven in rage.
According to this post, a movement is taking place among members of the Arab Nations which is not being reported in Western media, and that is that they are attempting to pressure the U.S. into re-instating Saddam's regime to control of the Iraqi government, in light of a US Senate report that says that Saddam had no links to al-Qaeda. Which of course we all knew. But it doesn't matter... someone must have introduced these guys to crack if they think that's ever going to happen. Not that they don't have a point... Saddam probably is the only one at this juncture that could end this mess over here, but just because we entered this war completely illegally to depose him and have royally f***ed this place up doesn't make him into a really nice guy who should be put back into a position where he can be a mad mad dictator again. But the concern is valid; This country needs someone as strong and ruthless as he was, an Iraqi, not a white guy or an Uncle Tom, to slap these crazy fundies down and put a stop to death squads, insurgents, (who, technically, wouldn't actually be insurgents any more) Iranian troublemakers, and whatever other mad freaks are stirring up the pot. Most Iraqis have been saying this for a long time now. The Iraqis that I know personally, who were originally very happy that Saddam was taken out, and sang and danced when they found him in that hole, now say that they would prefer it if he was still in charge. But that is actually old news. Now, most Iraqis just dream about leaving Iraq. Me too.

Um. I Get A Little Unbalanced In This One. Sorry. I Think I've Revealed Too Much, Maybe.

That's it, we're dead. Bush won't be happy until he breaks every law and rule against ethics, morality, and reason. Run for your lives, the sky is falling! I don't know anymore what is propaganda, what is real, what is paranoid, or what is purposefully intended to scare us. All I know is, whatever they're trying to do to me, it's probably working. Iwlwpmbhjsd... excuse me, that was me wiping the blood off of my keyboard. The blood that's been dripping from my mouth ever since I started looking for little Men In Black installing satellite receivers in my teeth last night. Which is weird because teeth don't bleed, they're like bone or something. Maybe I got a few of the little buggers without noticing, and they're bleeding.
Ok, enough crazy talk, Mike. You're upsetting the children. Sure boss no problem.
Anyway, I've been reading 'The Devil's Knot' by Mara Leveritt. Which is another reason I'm in this weird mood, probably. If righteous rage were a valid legal defence for killing people, this guy Gitchell would also go down, man. I'd seen the documentaries 'Paradise Lost' 1 & 2 before, which are horrific enough, but one of the things you always hear the police say is that the movies show a one-sided opinion of the case, and that if you look at the facts, there's more to it. Well, that's what Mara did, and it actually makes the law enforcement look worse than even the film makers could have. She's a journalist, and went into the case cold, with no emotional attachments either way. She then reports more exhaustively on the actual police reports and court transcripts than the movies had time for. It doesn't look good, man. It actually looks exactly like a book on the Salem Witch Trials I read a long time ago.
On a side note, yet not entirely unrelated, something about the Superman franchise really bothers me. I mean, this guy is about the closest thing to a God that pop culture has. Why is he always flying around saving cats from trees and people from the same arch villian over and over again? I mean, he's a reasonably intelligent guy. And he has an exquisite moral belief system. I think that, if he were a real thing (which I know that he is not) he would be in Iraq, defending the helpless. Or in Darfur. Or Lebanon. Fat white rich America would probably get about a nanosecond of his time... I say this because if I was him, that's about what I'd be thinking. Not that there aren't people in America that need saving, but people in poorer, more dangerous parts of the world need it vastly more. Actually, in the deepest recesses of my wrathful little black heart, I rather believe he'd be spending alot of his time conquering armies involved in immoral actions. Al Qaeda, Those African Junta thingies you always hear about, the Bush administration. Had I his power, the rich, soulless powerful would be trembling in their boots. I'd be Castle Stomping their secret germ-warfare laboratories. I'd tear up secret CIA prisons. I'd show 'em what wire tapping really meant. And I'd have a sweet ass jacuzzi with Lois Lane waiting in it for me every day after work. I mean, I wouldn't really be made of steel, just righteous wrath and skin tights that I would take off every once in a while. Isn't that enough?
Well, it certainly is enough of my infantile fantasy. I just think that that would make a better Superman story than the usual fare. I mean, are our Gods not there to dispense justice to the evil? It's not hard to find where the real evil is, these days.

P.S. I don't actually advocate the killing of anyone, even Gitchell. It's a purile vengeance fantasy, is all. Just wanted to clear that up, in case I had my family worried.

In Which I Natter On About Things I Have Only A Passing Knowledge Of, And Even Coin A New Word!

Hooray! Finally, an in-depth article about corruption in Iraq that doesn't mention my company or the owner. It's titled 'The Ten Most Brazen War Profiteers', and we didn't make the list! I don't know whether to be relieved or feel slighted. Anyway, it's a really good article. I really like the bit about the company Custer Battles, because I've been laughing at their name since my first year in Iraq; They used to do security for the Baghdad International Airport, and there it was, lettered on all of their trucks proudly, Custer Battles. Didn't they get it? Didn't they realize that that was like, the worst name in the world for a security company in Baghdad to have? Haven't we dared God to do his worst enough already? I mean, I know that the two founders of the companies' family names are one Custer and one Battles, but still. Change the name. Or make one up. Be creative, not a southern idiot.
But it's all very informative. Apparently Stuart Bowen of SIGIR has in fact fried bigger fish than my old boss, so I have to eat crow again for that thing I said a few posts back. See, this is why I should stick to Space and funny cultural differences and anecdotes. I have no head for the titanic amount of information spilling out all over the internet about the big Bushoglio over here. That's right, I'm coining it. A Bushoglio is an imbroglio, a crisis, a pandemonius riot, an unholy mess of such titanic proportions that it's like has not been seen in the known history of man, nor has there ever been a word created previously which can hope to describe how chaotic that man has made this place. It is a whirlwind which has made a storm that is growing big enough to gobble the world. If you don't think it's really that bad, read this post and then be so calm about it. I can't, of course, vouch for the total veracity of it, but alot of what is talked about there is stuff I've been hearing about for a long time.
And how about those secret CIA prisons, huh? Bush is all like "What? Yeah we got 'em. No big deal. We gotta screw some people outta their human rights to save them for real people like us, God told me so." Yikes. There have of course been rumours of those things for years... it's actually somewhat of an Interzone worst-kept secret. But damn. I shudder to think what things like that mean for the future of us.

A Long Overdue Tea Kettle Whistle

Well, Rumsfeld is right about one thing; I am certainly morally and intellectually confused. Just not about him or the administration. About them, I am certain. They SUCK. Read Keith Olbermann's post responding to Rummy's blatant self-serving bile. Anyway, I'd like to ask him exactly what does he think people are confused about? The great job FEMA did on Katrina? How splendidly the war in Iraq is going, and how we found those WMD under Saddam's shoe in that dirty hole in the ground? (You'd think that if Saddam was such a grand, evil threat to world security, he'd have had a more blinged out secret bunker than that! You know, like Hitler's or Cheney's) Also, on a more personal note, I've read a lot about how SIGIR is hard at work fighting corruption in Iraq, proving that the US is on top of it... I'd like to know why my former employer is the biggest fish they fried?! Really, he defrauded the US Gov and the Iraqi people of $8 million?! Wow! Yeah, that's bad and all, but I think what they don't want people to realize is that over here, $8 million is like a short weekend's bribing money for companies like KBR and Bechtel. But those are large corporations and can afford to tie things up for years and even if wrongdoing is determined, no single person will be held responsible. I think that back when Phil was arrested last November, the director of SIGIR, Stuart Bowen, said something like "Boo Yah! We're gonna get 'em, this is just the first of MANY! Them crooks oughtta start shakin' in their boots now!" ... In going over their site, it looks like they've got two or three other guys even more small-time than Phil was, still leaving billions of dollars of suspect destination unaccounted for. So, the lesson seems to be, if you're not a big enough crook to hide behind a US Government crony with power, watch out!
How does it go? A whole buncha sound and fury signifying nothing? Yeah, that's what.
Alright, I'm done. There are much more well-informed sites out there about this whole imbroglio, I'm sure. I'm just a morally confused putz in the wrong place at the wrong time, anyway.

The "May You Live In Interesting Times" Curse

At the risk of perhaps speaking too soon... well, it's the 29th, and nobody has yet showed up to forcibly escort us away from this junky beat writer's paranoid idea of heaven known as Interzone... I think that means that our lawyers and their lawyers are yukking it up back in the States and so all of this will be handled in a more lawyerly, and therefore slower, manner. So, barring any more wackiness, it looks like once again we've managed to buy ourselves more time. I feel that I should offer a clearer explanation of our situation here than I have in the past at this point. The reason I haven't until now is that it's really just a bunch of minutia, and I didn't want to bore anybody's computer into standby mode. So, please feel free to skip to the end; I'll understand. But if you're at all worried that, despite all of my protests, I have in fact been involved in illegal activities by remaining in the Interzone employed by a known (and jailed, I might add) criminal, and wish to set your mind at rest, well, read on until you find yourself waking from a stupor with drool on your keyboard.
Anyway, I'll try to make it as painless as possible. The gist of the matter is that the property upon which GBG built it's 100 Man Camp was given to us by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) back in the wild wild east days of American Occupation in Baghdad. The problem with this is that the CPA of course didn't have the right to give out any properties, as all property in the Interzone belongs to the Iraqi people. Now the Iraqis didn't have a government at the time; we were still trying to set one up for them after demolishing their original one, so the CPA took a lot of such liberties, assuming that there was no one to tell them they couldn't. When the CPA left town, replaced by the Office of the US Embassy (Once again, The Castle) after the Iraqi government we created had begun to function, (well, sort of function) there were quite a few such imperialistic messes to clean up. In the case of property issues, all American squatters such as us were given new contracts. These contracts said that we could remain on the land until the Iraqi government issued eviction notices asking for their land back, which was likely to take a while as property issues in the Interzone were hardly their primary concern at the time. Well, the day of reckoning did eventually come, as it always does. The thing is, our eviction notice didn't come from the Iraqi Municipality; it came from the Joint Area Support Group's (JASG) property management office, which is a US military office inside The Castle. They said that they were going to officially turn the property over to the Iraqi government, and before they could do that, we had to leave and take all of our things with us. So when we got the initial eviction letter, we contacted an Iraqi company, who hired an Iraqi lawyer to look into leasing the property from the Iraqi government once it was handed over, and our arrangement is hopefully to then sublease it from the Iraqi company. So that is why we think we'll be able to stay. If some of you are confused as to why exactly we want to stay here, well, so am I, but a company is as a company does, and ours is schizophrenic, and so is ours, I think.
Anyway, the problem is, we are fairly certain that the JASG is lying and does not, in fact, wish to turn the property over to the Iraqis. The only way they can make us leave is by turning it over to them, and that's why they're saying that, but there are a lot of other people in the Interzone having the same problem. One company in particular that I know of actually did the exact same thing that we are doing, except they actually physically left their property with the understanding that once it was actually turned over to the Iraqi municipality, with whom they had a pre-arranged sublease agreement like we're doing, they'd move back in. But once they left, their property was not in fact given to the Iraqis as stated, but signed over to some people from the Japanese government (or a Japanese company... I'm not clear on that exactly) for an undisclosed "donation." Now these poor guys are screwed; they physically left their property because their company had current contracts with the government, and didn't want to rock the boat, and so they lost their property. Incidentally, the Iraqi municipality is also extremely peeved with the JASG over the affair, as they thought they were getting their land back, but were instead subjected to the peacup con as well. 
So, we are not playing it so easily. We have kept ourselves and our assets on the property in defiance of The Castle, as we have nothing to lose, really, and our lawyers in both Iraq and the States are working the case. And at the moment, it seems to be working... after we issued a legal letter on the 24th stating our case, and our intent to sublease the property and therefore not pack up and leave, we have had only silence in return. Which of course could be a bad sign or a good one, but they didn't apparently feel that they could forcibly remove us on their stated eviction date as threatened, so that's hopeful.
  So that's where I'm at now. I apologize for the keyboard-shaped imprint on your cheek. If drool has in fact ruined it, please feel free to send me the bill.
No, not really. You could've stopped reading at any time, you know.
Anyway, as you've probably already noticed, I recently added a little mp3 player to my website...* if you don't want to hear it, just hit the pause button once the music starts. There's no stop button, which is annoying, especially as I have a very slow internet connection and it takes like ten minutes to load a song, so it starts and stops, starts and stops. For those of you with much faster connections, you'll have to let me know if it plays smoothly and is worth me keeping it. If it's too annoying to bear even for the best connections, I'll remove it. Also, for those of you with sensitive natures, a few of the songs have rather explicit subject matter. For instance, if there are children around whose ears will shrivel up and fall off upon hearing some foul language, avoid the following tracks: 'Nuclear War' by Yo La Tengo, 'I'm An American' by Dennis Leary, (But that's not even actually the name of the song. I committed some minor censorship there for the sake of a spot of clean humor; so spank my *** and call me Tipper Gore) and while 'Heterosexual Man' by The Odds has no explicit words per se, it does deal with some humorous adult situations.
And so there, now you've been explicitly warned, and it's time for me to go as it's the busiest part of my day: Lunch.

*The mp3 player widget has since been removed because the website that had offered it as a widget has ceased.

Questions In A World Of Blue

There was an incident two days ago where one of my Iraqi employees was caught unescorted in the Interzone. For anyone unfamiliar with Interzone escorting policy, I'll spare you a migraine and give you the basic idea: Everybody in the Interzone must have an approved ID badge. If you don't have one, especially if you're an Iraqi, you must be escorted everywhere you go inside the Interzone by someone who has escorting privileges on their badge. Now please take the time to pray and give thanks that I did not give you more details, as Interzone policies on any matter would give Byzantium a run for their money, and the Interzone badging policy is the worst of the worst causes of spontaneous aneurisms around here.
Anyway, my employee Abu Anwar, (Which actually means 'Father of Anwar... it's the local version of a nickname) actually had a badge, but it had recently expired and some busybody from some office of the Embassy (hereafter referred to as "The Castle", re: Kafka) saw him and I received a phone call asking me to make an appearance. When I arrived on the side of the road where they had snagged him, that same busybody (who wasn't a part of the Interzone police force, although the gentlemen from the Interzone police were there also) began asking me alot of questions and it quickly became apparent that he didn't actually care about the escorting violation as much as he cared about giving a GBG employee a hard time. That's been happening more frequently lately as it seems that someone in The Castle has a personal vendetta against GBG, and they are getting panicked as apparently we are getting closer to saving our property and remaining in operation.
Well the point of all this is that this agent of The Castle was a real colostomy bag and was trying to accuse me of something, although I'm not sure what. He apparently was happy being pugnacious and insinuating, hoping I would crack and tell him where all Phil's Gold was or something. While unjustly acting as though I was a criminal, he accusingly asked me if I felt comfortable working for a criminal. I have to say, as sensitive a subject as my former boss is with me, it was all I could do not to laugh in his face. And I mean one of those laughs where spit comes out of your mouth all accidental like, and you and the guy the spit landed on try to pretend it didn't happen. I asked him if he or his colleagues had found any Weapons of Mass Destruction yet. I asked where the billions of dollars of Iraqi money formerly in the care of The Castle went to. Luckily he wasn't smart enough to retort, because such questions really are unpatriotic, and as this gentleman from The Castle was kind enough to remind me, there still exist those people who unquestioningly believe in America's moral superiority, and he could have possibly given me a much harder time. We are all working for criminals.
Speaking of which, I received a phone call last week from Phil. I was sleeping the deep sleep of the mid-afternoon nap, and I answered the phone before I was really awake. When I heard Phil's voice on the phone, I think I lost 5 years of my life before I realized it was just a dream. When I realized that in fact it wasn't a dream, I lost two more, but I have to say that a phone call from your boss in jail who you haven't spoken to since he was arrested nine months ago is a more effective wake-up than Turkish Coffee.
Anyway, he was calling to thank me for not abandoning him... at this point I'm actually the only American left working for him. Everybody else has left or found other jobs. I must admit that, if I hadn't remained, his company here would be a total lost cause at this point. As it is, I've probably only delayed the inevitable for a few months, but I'm proud of having been able to hold things together somewhat. HOWEVER... as I voiced empty responses to Phil, I was thinking that the reason I didn't "abandon" him had nothing to do with him... at all. I owed Phil some loyalty, it's true. He hired me on at a salary that is more than usual for someone of my experience level, even here in Baghdad, and gave me a chance to prove myself. It's been a great opportunity all around and even apart from the money I've set aside, the experience is invaluable and my resumé looks great. But as far as I'm concerned, after our 600 Man Camp contract went down in flames, my debt to him is repaid and concluded. Now it's all about salvaging what's left, and hoping that when I do leave, I can leave things better for my Iraqi friends than they were when I arrived.

A Treatise On The Origins Of Religion And Political Movements

About ten or fifteen years ago... I'm not sure exactly when, but my brother and sister were very young; maybe 8 and 6 respectively, or somewhere around there. Anyway, at the time I was sitting in our living room, probably reading, anti-social bookworm that I was in those days, and my sister Katie was sitting by the entryway playing with one of those mid-size inflatable beach balls. My brother Peter came around the corner through the entryway and inadvertently kicked the ball out of Katie's hands, sending it soaring down the hallway. They both went after it at the same time, and as they were running down the hallway it quite accidentally became a race and they began laughing hysterically because they both realized it had been an accident, and they'd reacted the same way to it... I don't remember who got to the ball first, or maybe I didn't see, but by the time they got there they were laughing so hard with the shared experience that it didn't seem to matter who "won". They had just invented the greatest game ever for the two of them to play together.
So the next step of course was to re-create it. Once they finished falling all over themselves laughing, they gleefully ran back to the main entryway where Katie sat down with the ball and Peter went back around the corner. He "stealthily" came back and "accidentally" kicked the ball down the hallway again, and they both ran after it laughing. By the third or fourth time they played this marvelous new game, they began taking more serious note of who got to the ball first, which of course led to rules about what position Katie would be in when the ball was kicked, so that they had an equal chance of reaching the ball on time. By the fifth time they were no longer laughing, but still having fun, and another rule was added about no pushing or tripping, and perhaps another stating that once the ball was kicked, they had to each count to 3 seconds before running, and then the ball had to be thrown rather than kicked to better control the distance and final destination of the ball as kicking it could unfairly send it closer to one participant's side than the other's, or worse yet, break a lamp and get Mom angry.
By the tenth time they did this, they were arguing about a questionable rule, and whether it had really even been broken, and it seemed that the fun had gone out of it, yet the competition to see who the ultimate beachball-chasing champion was drove them to keep playing. At some point around the fifteenth game, a real fight broke out as one participant had committed an illegal offsides and wouldn't admit it, at least according to one witness, but the ref had unfortunately had his head turned at that moment. When they realized they didn't actually have a referee, they asked me to settle their dispute, but I told them I was reading a very important treatise on 20th century literature and could not be bothered, although of course I was watching closely and was quite secretly amused.
By the twentieth game, it became not so much a game, or even competition, as a full-out ice hockey-style brawl in the middle of the living room floor, at which time Mom came out, did a little yelling of her own, and sent them to their respective rooms.
This is a true story, with little to no embellishment, and it is an event which has been stuck in my mind for most of my adult life. I don't mean to embarass my younger siblings, who were of course very young at the time and behaved in a manner identical to that of children all over the world... but it illustrates something about human nature which I've never forgotten.

The Title Of This Post Is [That Song Bill Murray Woke Up To Every Morning In Groundhog Day]

Well, remember how I said it was going to be nice to finally know whether or not I'll be staying or going from here by the end of this month? And that one post where I said it was funny how I always seemed to be saying that I'll be leaving Iraq any time now, but somehow it never seems to happen? Well guess what? It happened again. sigh. We got an extension until July 27th on our eviction notice, due to some legal questions about GBG property... a technicality. So I'm here for at least one more month. How many times have I said that now? Anyway, it's actually a good thing because it gives us more time to try and work with the Iraqi Government to secure this property for long term use, so all this means is that we actually have a better chance of staying much more long-term now. Or I could be on a plane to Thailand on July 28th. Is it Groundhog Day? Actually I'm psyched, because it means I'm that much closer to being able to say "I lived in Baghdad for 3 years." No, don't try to understand, no one can but me.
Ok, just because I just came across it, and it's about as horrible as anything else I've come across relating to US Military behaviour in Iraq, I'm going to link you to a video about some illegal warfare tactics our fine military used while attacking Fallujah. My favorite parts are when the US soldier kills an unarmed injured civilian, and the whole thing where we bombed the city with White Phosphorous... an illegal chemical weapon which we had once upon a time signed international treaties not to ever use, and which, by the way, our government vehemently denied using. But watch the video for yourself, and then tell me that we're still the good guys.

I Rant and I Rant, But I Know It's Not Helping Anything

So something you don't see in the news a whole lot about Iraq is the new fundamentalist trend. There is some really scary crap going on out in the streets of Baghdad, and I think the Bush Reich is trying to keep it on the down-low. There are roving gangs of fundamentalist Muslim bullies passing out fliers to Iraqis which state that any women wearing pants or men wearing shorts will be killed. All women must wear Haijab (those headcover things, so women's shameful hair remains covered). Men have to keep their shirts buttoned all the way to the top and must either shave their face completely or wear one of those Muslim-type beards, no mustaches or goatees or whatever. In other words, they are trying to impose strict muslim law, similar to what they have in Iran, upon a populace which has many secular muslims who don't believe in that strict an interpretation of muslim law, not to mention many smaller non-muslim populations such as the Christians, Jews, or Yezidis. I think it made the news last week about a team of Iraqi tennis players who were killed for wearing shorts, but one in particular that I know of has been kept silent. I only know about it because it happened in the neighborhood of one of my Iraqi friends; a 5 year old boy was gunned down in his front yard because he had on shorts and a tank top. This is so horrendous in so many ways that I think I'd be willing to murder the people that did it if I had the chance. There are many cases of women wearing pants being kidnapped off of the streets and being raped and killed. This doesn't lessen my desire to break one of the ten commandments at all. The hypocrisy involved in killing a 5 year old boy for something he can't possibly understand, or raping and killing a woman because she is so shameless a whore as to wear pants and let the world see her hair is... astounding, apalling, unbelievable, confounding, heart-rending, insane, incomprehensible, moronic, RETARDED! And I can't come up with enough other adjectives to make it clear how awful that is.
According to my friends, the people commiting these atrocities are largely not even Iraqi: They are Iranian fundamentalist nutjobs taking advantage of the situation here. The situation being that the Iraqi government now in place has neither the resources nor, to all appearances, the drive to take back the streets. And where, ultimately, does the blame for this all lie? George effin' Bush and his warmongering cronies, that's what. Man, I really hate those people. Here is a quote from an artcle I pulled off of Yahoo news from Stephen Elliott's blog:

"I got a note from a friend today. An American who works in Baghdad and does not want his identity revealed. He says women are being kidnapped and killed for the clothes they wear. He says women are being hunted. The country is in chaos. People are mourning the loss of Saddam Hussein, convinced things were better before.

It's an awful thing to think, that things might have been better under a murderous dictator. But it seems to be accepted wisdom among the diplomats. And even if it isn't true, still, if it is close enough that a sizable percentage could think it, then we have failed miserably.

We have failed miserably in Iraq. We have tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, murdered civilians in Haditha. We turned our backs on the Geneva Accords and American values, promising to build democracy in the Middle East, and received only a failed state in return."

I stand behind what he's said here %100, based on what I've seen happen here in the last 3 years, from the American side of things and through my Iraqi friend's eyes. I am ashamed to be an American. Not because I hate my country, which I don't. I am ashamed of my government, and what it has accomplished toward making the world a lesser place to live in.
I apologize if I seem to be soapboxing an awful lot in my last several posts, but the situation is deteriorating so fast over here it breaks my heart. There are so many things that America and Americans have done here in Iraq that, when the patriot blinders are lifted, can be called evil, it makes me crazy. PSD mercenaries and marines killing innocent Iraqi civilians who happen to be standing there is nothing new, I'm afraid. It's been going on all along, but only now, with Bush's approval rating at %29, are people daring to put it in the news. These cowboy-types over here tend to lump all Arabs together in the terrorist category, regardless of the option God gave them at birth to use their brains to make rational distinctions, and their regard for life can at times equal a Nazi's regard for life in a concentration camp. Sure, that's an extreme thing to say, and when out in a danger zone you have to make quick decisions... I can't speak to that, anyway. I've never been in that situation. But I've seen how good Iraqi people are treated by cowboys in a safe place like the IZ, and more times than not it leaves the Iraqis with an impression of Americans as cruel masters, which they understandably resent.
I wish I had a constructive solution to offer along with all of my bilious criticism, but I don't. Just saying it's time for America to leave Iraq is not enough; we'd just be leaving them to the awful fate which we put in place for them. But staying only means a continuation of what we've been doing here all along: Nothing save serving our own interests and making their home worse for it.

One Prima Donna Whingeing About Another

Something that makes me absolutely crazy about IZ culture is the whole PSD situation. Personal Security Detail teams are essentially patriotic mercenaries. They will whine and complain like little girls and possibly threaten you physically if you dare to call them by that name, but that's because none of them know how to open a dictionary.
            mercenary / adj. & n.
            adj. primarily concerned with money or other reward (mercenary motives).
             n. (pl. -ies)
            1 a hired soldier in foreign service.
            2 a person available for paid hire
Okay you can argue the 'in foreign service' bit, but not really. PSD teams guard mainly Americans, it's true, but there are also several American companies contracted as PSDs for Iraqi officials as well, and it's supposedly ALL in the service of making Iraq more secure, anyway. And most of the money is coming from Iraqi Reconstruction funds, so it's to no one's benefit to get all semantic about it... actually you could reasonably call me a mercenary based on definition 2, but I'll play the semantic card for myself in that it could mean anybody that's got a job then, is a mercenary. But that's ridiculous. And mercenary generally connotates fighting for money, which I am not. So now that that log is out of my eye, let me address the splinter that is mercenary culture in the IZ.
The camp I used to be in charge of life support for had 600 of these pampered prima donnas living in it, so I am uniquely qualified to comment on them. They are generally big pumped up rednecks. When I leave Iraq and enter normal society for vacation, I feel alot bigger than I used to because here everybody is built like a superhero. They get their own caravan room and bathroom, and are given power and water 24/7, and are usually provided with TVs and DVD players, cable and internet. Their assignments are usually not more than 3 to 4 hours long, a couple of days a week, if that. They may or may not venture out into dangerous parts of Baghdad on those assignments. They drive like maniacs, shoot to kill with little provocation, and act like the gods of Iraq. In fact, they seem to be stuck on the very silly highschool-like self appointed moniker of 'Baghdaddy', as in "Who's your Baghdaddy?!", to be seen on T-shirts worn by retarded Americans all over the country. To be fair, anybody can buy these T-shirts at the PX, but mostly the big monkey mercenaries seem to like them. Incidentally, the front of these T-shirts say this in English, but just in case they wanted to actually cross the line from stupid to offensive, they have it translated into Arabic on the back side, just to let their subjects know who's boss. Anyway, I've been told by my translator that it doesn't really make sense in Arabic anyway, so mostly it's just stupid. But it's the thought that counts.
When they're not on assignment, they're lounging about their secured and pampered compounds (which always have Gym facilities, various other recreation options, and excellent dining facilities) and complain about how their showers leak water onto their floor, the food sucks, not enough decent gym equipment, blah blah blah. Their salaries are almost never less than $20,000 per month.
Meanwhile, the American soldier gets paid substantially less (maybe a grand or 2 a month? I'm not actually up on the current salary for soldier danger pay, which they get for being assigned here) and spend a significantly more amount of time in the red zone, risking their lives. Their living situation, when they are on long term assignment here, is to bunk up with the rest of their unit and no personal space.(like in the movies!) PSDs usually get 2 weeks paid vacation every 3 months. Soldiers don't really get vacations per se, but their leave time is significantly less.
Now, a lot of PSDs are ex-military, (also ex-cops, ex-firemen, ex-security guards etc...) and feel they've paid their dues, but that's sort of beside the point for me. Why is so much of the reconstruction money being spent on security? They're paying mercenaries 10 times the money a soldier makes to do a tenth of a soldier's job! Not only is the money being spent on their salaries, but those huge plush secure compounds they insist on living in don't come cheap either, let me tell you. Just building one can cost tens of millions of dollars, and ongoing life support costs can also be in the tens of millions per year. It's so wastefull, it's almost too big to comprehend. Why not just offer a 4 or 5 times increase in soldiers pay to get people to enlist and come over here that way? If that's not feasible, there must be other options less insane than what's actually going on.
It puts me in a difficult position morally, because I've made alot of money myself by building and maintaining one of the biggest of those camps. So don't get me wrong, I am definately somewhat of a hypocrite. It doesn't make me any less outraged at the whole thing, though, even having admitted that. Plus I just really dislike these people, and have only received these impressions by having actually been in the middle of it; before I came to work for my current employers, I really wasn't completely aware of how messed up it was. It's one thing to read about it in a blurb in the New York Times, it's another thing to see it firsthand.
In my own personal news, we found a treadmill buried under lots of construction materials while cleaning out our warehouse the other day. We've plugged it in in one of the rooms in our office building and I've begun burning some calories... a much needed activity for me. If I'm this sore from walking for an hour a day on the treadmill, it would really have put a crimp in my travelling for whenever I'm freed from this prison.

Colbert Electrifies the Blogosphere, and I Get All Political 'n Stuff

I don't normally blog too much about politics or politically-related things, because essentially there are millions of people out there who are much smarter and more research-oriented, and doing it better than I could anyway. The extent of my political feeling is that I dislike politicians intensly, and am probablly an anarchist at heart; Although I realize that Anarchy is hardly a feasible form of governance in reality. I think that Anarchy might be more organized than the the current political reality of crazed bush-whacking, however.
Anyway, regardless of my unpolitical proclivities, no Bush-hating blogger out there can resist making a comment about the recent Stephen Colbert bit at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and I laughed so hard and am so in awe of the man, that I have to post a transcript of his genius here. It's not that any of the things he said are any wittier than things which other people have had to say, although Colbert is certainly telling the despairingly comedic truth. It's that he is saying it without the slightest trace of embarassment or fear 10 feet away from the most powerful and evil man in America, and he doesn't back off. The man has stones, no doubt. Speaking truth to power, indeed.
I wish that people like him had been saying this kind of stuff to Bush's face since before the last election. I pray that the Dems win the upcoming Congressional elections so that there is the remote possibilty of seeing the great ape get his comeuppance... even if that might only mean that Evil Cheney is the fill-in president. There should be a provision in impeachment trials that allow for wholesale Administration impeachments, sort of like a White House Virus-Sweep, Disc-Clean & DeFrag program... the whole Bush Cronystration needs to go, not just it's mouthpiece. It's sad that it's likely too late for such a thing to make much difference in saving America's extremely damaged reputation with the rest of the world, not to mention any thought of reversal of actual death, damage and destruction which they've caused.
Anyway, on a side note and not entirely unrelated, I noticed something the other day while driving through the International Zone: America has been in Baghdad for over 3 years now, and Iraqis still have extremely unreliable electricity. My Iraqi friends tell me that they are currently getting 2 hours of electricity per day. The summer is starting up again, when temperatures typically will rise to between 110 and 130 degrees farenheit daily, and with no power for their Air Conditioners, Iraqis suffer through some long hot days and nights and it is really not fun... just because they are from here and have had these temperatures to deal with all their life does not make it easy for them. They were used to things being infinitely better when Saddam was the boss. Also, I'd like to mention that here in the IZ, we are almost never without power, so what's up with that?
So it's been 3 years and little to nothing has been done about the electricity situation, and I'm sorry, but the line that "Terrorists keep blowing stuff up" is just weak. It's simply not good enough when the brand new US Embassy, which construction began on about 2 months ago, is already extremely well underway. It is being built pretty much right on the Tigris river, with a clear view of the so-called Red Zone, which is military-speak for the part of Baghdad where the unimportant residents of the city are; Iraqis. It will be very easy for someone to shoot something over the river at them, and yet, construction continues at a brisk pace; I bet that barring any RPG attacks, it'll be finished more or less on schedule in 2007. Fixing up the Baghdad power station should not take nearly as much effort, and yet, it's been over 3 years. Every time I drive by the new embassy, there is a noticable difference in the amount of construction completed, and I get rather a sick feeling in my stomach because it makes me think about how obvious my government's priorities are, and how little they have anything to do with what they would have the world believe they are. ITMFA!!!!
It also makes me think about the company I work for, and how, as it turns out, I came to work for a corrupt individual doing shady deals to defraud a corrupt government of it's shady money... and how I really can't untangle my own choices from any of it, regardless of my relative innocence in all of this. I'm just a guy with a job, you know? And I'm really attached to good people here, Iraqi friends who just want to work with us so they can make some decent money for a change, because the alternative Iraqi jobs in the city can be comparatively grim. But I still feel dirty and conflicted about the whole thing. And my stomach just keeps getting more turbulent.
Anyway, I'll leave you with a nice parting shot of Mr. Colbert skewering Bush as he looks on, rather thundercloud-like you might say. It's the most inspiring event I've come across in a very long time.

Colbert for President, anyone?

Franks and Beans! or, Too much Bush makes everyone jaded

You know what I don't hear enough of anymore? "What do you think of George Bush?" There was this game that Europeans, Australians, and all other non-American profligate travellers used to play; Every American traveller you come accross, ask him what he thinks of George Bush. I think they even had a point system, but it changed part-way through Bush's first term. At first it was that they got more points when they got an American Traveller who did not approve of Bush. Then they began to realize that %95 percent of all Americans who had the stones to leave the country and see how the more civilized parts of the world behaved knew that Bush was no good, and they changed it to more points for an American that actually had anything remotely positive to say about him.
Now, they don't even ask anymore... It's been ages since I had that conversation. I think the last time I was asked was on my trip to Morocco, while Christy and I were in that cafe, waiting for the bus to Marrakesh... there was a Kiwi couple in there that we spoke with for a few minutes before that creepy guy asked us if we were Ahmed's marks... (for THAT whole sordid story, click here) and they only showed a passing interest.
I think that the world has their answer about what we think about George Bush. Either that, or it's even worse and they simply don't care about what any American has to say about anything any more... Seeing as how we gave up our voices when we re-elected the great dicktator, I can't say I blame them. At any rate, the world has certainly formed  their own opinion of him, and no longer needs an insider's perspective, anyway.
Anyway... just an observation.
So Paris was fun today. I went to the Catacombs under Denfert Rochereau... It's this place where they took a billion bones from an overflowing cemetary somewhere else in Paris and made the biggest Death Metal band music video set EVER.  It's about 20 meters underground, and it's just creepy as all get out. Blocks and blocks of walls of bones. I got pictures. I also went up the Eiffel Tower... something I didn't actually do the last time I was here. Yup. It's a big tall tower. After going up in the Mig-25, I found it difficult to produce the proper squeals of terrified delight that everybody else in the little tiny elevator did, but it was neat. Killed the afternoon, anyway.
I like Paris... that whole thing that everybody says about the French making an art out of living... joi de vivre and all that... I get  that. I think that's a true stereotype. The restaraunt was invented in France. Everything the French do, from building design to napkin holders to lampshades, is usually all artistic and pretty, for no particular reason. Very cool. The other stereotype about French people, especially Parisians, being snobby, is untrue. I have not, this time or last time, met a snobby Frank. I'm sure they exist, and I'm sure that the  majority of A****le Americans that come here pretty much ask for the snobby treatment, but I myself have yet to experience it. Actually, the Jews I ran across in Jerusalem were 50 times snobbier... in fact I didn't meet a friendly Jew. Being God's chosen people might have that effect... just a thought.
I guess I'm rambling.

Better Red Than Dead, and other ironic circumstances.

Moscow. Is. Unbelievably. Cool. And. The. Women. Are. All. Amazingly. Beautiful. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. You know somebody is serious when they have to put a period at the end of each word, emphasizing the importance of each thought. That's why I did that like that. 'Cause I'm trying to emphasize that I'm serious. Not just messing around here, no sir-ee. I might just want to become Russian. Mail-Order American Husbands, anyone? Nyet? Ah well.
I had an official tour guide today, (she taught Greg Olsen, the 3rd Space Adventures client to go to the space station, how to speak Russian!) and she took me to the Kremlin's Armory and Diamond Fund, which were wicked cool. I saw a girl that looked almost exactly like my friend Jen there! (3!) We were supposed to do the Actual Kremlin and Red Square, but they were all closed off for the day because November 7th is a big important Russian Patriotic holiday; On Nov. 7th, 1917, Lenin took power from the Czars and Communism was born. On the same day in 1941, there was a secret rally and whatever happened at this rally caused The Soviet Union to enter World War II. So in 2005, there were protests, parades, and speeches in the area all day. It was awesome. I found myself in the middle of a big Red flag-waving fist-pumping rally for 3 hours this evening... people were waving the hammer and sickle all over the place and I saw alot of old U.S.S.R. flags (CCCP) ... Speaking of old, %95 percent of the protesters/ marchers/ whatever the heck they were were at least 60 years old... I think that the youth of Russia likes their cellphones and their shopping better than communism.
Apparently, this November 7th was particularly significant because it was supposed to have been cancelled this year...  Putin created a new holiday called the People's Day of Union or something like that and held it on November 4th, and made a speech in Red Square and everything, and it was meant to replace the other, older more controversial holiday of the 7th... only the people didn't seem to get into the 4th too much, and they all showed up as usual in front of Marx's statue on the 7th and did their thing, even excercising a bit of Democracy by calling shame on Putin for trying to cancel such an important Communist holiday. (Kind of the opposite of what we're doing in the States, which is our Government using Communist tactics to promote Democracy... interesting times, yes indeedy.) Got some great pictures; we're talking Time magazine stuff here. But that's probably because, since my camera was on for 2 out of the 3 hours I was there, I was bound to catch a few good ones... I deleted quite a few superfluous photos already.
Anyway, don't worry, Space Adventures has kindly re-scheduled my official Red Square, Kremlin, and St. Basil's tour for tomorrow afternoon. Which will be cool, but I don't know if it can top all the good commie stuff I got to do today.
And I fly in the Mig-25 on the 9th. EEEEEEE.

it's a messy casserole, after all

So that friend I mentioned a few posts back got back to me! Very nice e-running into old friends. Anyway, he gave me a good topic for this one; "So, like, what the hell you doing in Baghdad? That is quite a place to be at this moment in time. what do you think of the war? what kind of work is it you're doing? You probably guessed I'm against it like the majority of people on earth are, I only hope you are there trying to do some good...?" ... erm. I get this alot... and it's really bothersome for me. I am on the Bush Bashing Bandwagon, no doubt about it. Every time I see his picture on CNN or FOX or some other entertainment network like those, I want to vomit. Well, okay, not REALLY, but the man makes me sick. And yet...
And yet. Here I am, livin' large offa the cash flow tricklin' down from the blindfolded lady of justice's now-covered nipple. Alot of people here feel pretty much the same way... Love my country, Hate my Government, but money's cool, too.
So the burden of guilt is on me, and now I hafta explain myself. See, this is why I shouldn't be blogging. I've got too much to answer for, and I'm a terrible liar.
Anyway. I'll tell you what I told him. (But with alot more words, 'cause I've had time to think about it...) I am a migrant worker. I'm a migrant worker because for as long as I can remember, I've always wanted to travel. I've travelled lots of places simply by finding a job in some far off place and tramped around on my time off. It's awesome! I can't imagine my life up to this point having gone any other way. Baghdad was simply the next logical step in that series of steps that  I was already, well, you know. Stepping...on. Or something. I try not to say things like 'Path' or 'Life's Journey', because even though Bush won't make me actually vomit, gay cliches like those just might.
Well. Baghdad. Next logical step. And believe me, I've seen some things and changed in ways I never thought I'd be lucky enough to experience. Or unlucky. Your choice how to take it.
I have a similar relationship with my job that I have with my country: Love my work, hate my boss. I'm Project Manager of a large camp for security teams! WOW! I started as a Housekeeping supervisor at my last job. I get to make decisions and stuff, now, like a real grown-up person! If the guy who hired me had known me better, well, let's just say I got real lucky. Still, this will always look awesome on my resume, no matter how it ends up. But my boss drives me insane. He's one of those guys that thinks he knows something about work, even though he's had a silver spoon up his butt for most of his life.
I have met alot of friends here in Iraq... There is a family that I've been working with since my first week here. I brought them with me when I changed jobs. When I leave, likely I'll never see them again. That's true anyway, even in America... It's rare that you ever again meet up with people you knew in a certain setting (school, work, etc..) once you leave it. But the difference here in Iraq is that the departing is much more stark. Every time I go on vacation, my Iraqi friends make a point of making me promise to come back...
There's also a very real excitement that comes with being in the middle of the world's most watched TV drama. I've met ambassadors, seen really big explosions, and whistled 'Darth Vader's Theme' while Paul Bremer and Dan Rather walked by my dinner table, back in the CPA days. I've eaten dinner Iraqi style in the home of some Bona Fide Iraqis... That family I was telling you about. I've driven in a not very sober state alone at high speeds down Route Irish, 'The Most Dangerous Road in Iraq'. Okay, yes I'm stupid.
The money. It's great. I can buy a chicken farm with a fireplace, now.
  But let's get right down to it. There is not one single reason named above keeping me here, in and of itself. They do make a fine casserole, though.
And what do I think of the war? The war sucks. All the lies, which are more obvious than George W. being a throwback chimpanzee, they suck too. You know what else sucks? The insurgents. They suck pretty bad. They kill more Iraqis than anyone else, in the name of God. Alot of my employees have had to quit because someone found out they were working for Americans, and were threatened. One of Scott's employees was actually kidnapped and ransomed for $30,000 or so. That sucks. My best Iraqi friend, Steven, was afraid to tell his new girlfriend that he worked with Americans until 2 months or so had passed and he made sure she wouldn't be the type to tell someone. Pretty sucky. If you check out some pictures I found on a disc here, you'll see lots of other sucky stuff related to the war.
Anyway, not sure where I was going with that.  I'm not sure that there's anywhere to go with it.
  So as you can see, if nothing else, my reasoning certainly is pretty messy. Good thing I named my page the way I did... so Apropos!