I'd Rather Whine Than Resign!

The UN Building, with about 7 stories lopped off the top, in honor of John Bolton (click to enlarge)


Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the world of corporate government, where incompetence and inflexibility are directly proportional. You might want to keep the following links bookmarked for the next time you screw up at work and have the pink slip waved in your face.

Olmert: yeah, I killed hundreds of innocents, so what? I'm stayin'!

Wolfowitz: yeah, I handed out a mega-salary job to my main squeeze in clear violation of the rules of my organization, so what? I'm stayin'!

Gonzales: yeah, I might have fired some attorneys for purely political reasons, though I don't exactly recall--so what? I'm stayin'!

And now, our feature piece for today comes from Shady Acres Mike, who we haven't heard from in a while. Today he answers the question, "is a Bush veto of the $124B Iraq Supplemental automatic?"



It appears so. These guys seem to be highly out of touch. Keep in mind though that they do have at least a year to forge a political deal (if it gets to be more than that, no one will deal with them--it will become the next administration's headache). If they are able to foster a political deal they would look somewhat reasonable.

As for the loyal opposition, they cannot lose in the eyes of the reasonable American. Thank God that the forces of reason won both houses because the position the Dems are in now is only because of their ability to set a legislative and oversight agenda.

However, I am not optimistic that a political deal is in the offing. There is no military solution to being an occupying force in the midst of a civil war where neither warring party wants you there. So only a political solution remains. This administration has not done the hard work needed to lay down a path for such a deal. As a matter of fact, they seemed to have done just the opposite by refusing, at least publicly, to deal with the various factions whether inside or outside of Iraq. They have been defiant by taking a unilateral course. They believe that the US no longer needs to be a participant in history-making with others, but rather be THE history maker. It is this hubris that will make it difficult to cut a deal. In effect, they thought they could take a short cut. They initially tried to favor the Shia so that they would hold sway over the country. That backfired and they are still in the process of backing out of that strategy.

In the meantime, no real centralized body or association of various Sunni factions exists. Who represents the Sunnis? The Shia seem split down the middle between two main factions as well. At the same time, this administration has threatened the neighbors who continue to fuel the sectarian violence. No short term political solution looks likely. This will take time, patience, negotiations, and compromise -all things this administration either lacks or has shown no actual ability to afford.

I found myself in rare agreement with Donald Trump the other day. He recently stated that he sees Condi flying all over the world, meeting with many world leaders, but he never sees a deal. What, he asked, is the secretary of state supposed to do other than cut deals? Perhaps it is too late and they have gone too far to be trusted at the negotiating table for any major negotiation, including peace in Iraq. What a mess they have made. What a mess they will most probably be leaving to the next administration.

Have you seen the new poll results form NBC? The Bushies are so out of touch once again. Large majorities of Americans think there should be a timetable - by approximately a twenty percent margin. Only 22% of Americans think we are headed in the right direction as a country. Large majorities of Americans thinks that the surge is not working - again, by approximately a twenty percent margin. This is why anyone associated with the quagmire that is Iraq is being painted with the same brush. McCain has hit free fall, even Hillary is sliding. Obama and Giuliani who did not vote on the subject have risen in their place.

As for the neocons, the noose is tightening around these hoodlums and incompetents: Abramoff and 10 other K Street influence-peddling convictions with three more Congressman to come about to go down, Plamegate and the Libby conviction, Tillman and Lynch, politicizing the Justice and other departments, Katrina, with investigations on torture, spying on the public without warrants, and intelligence manipulation yet to come. It's going to be hard for anyone who supported this administration to survive once it all comes out. Thank God for checks and balances, thank God for karma, for justice, for true oversight, and for the rooster coming home to roost. And the far right are out of touch again, they are simply trying to stall and deceive by making false comparisons with other administrations and by changing the subject.

If property values continue to sink and the economy slows down on top of all of the above, the 30 year trend to the right may be about to be swing the other way. The right could lose the independent vote for a long time to come. Even without the economy taking a slide, rising energy costs, rising health costs, rising education costs, and continued reliance on big oil and foreign carbon based energy at the expense of the very environment we live in could cost the Republicans the middle class independent vote for a long time to come. And the right is out of touch again if they think that can rely on all their past bromides with which they ran America into the ground.

It's time for a new America. Lets see who will be ready to usher that in.

--Shady Acres Mike

Monday with McKenna: President Lab Rat

I have two links for everyone who watched the Bill Moyers special last Wednesday, Buying the War (viewable here). Moyers featured the work of two young journalists whose work went largely ignored by the MSM. These two journalists, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder's Washington bureau, set out to critically examine the deceptions that were being advanced as truth, the lies that were packaged and bought by the rest of the media establishment. You can keep up on the work of these two men by adding their RSS feeds to your news reader:

Warren Strobel

Jonathan Landay

For another example of Landay's truth-seeking-missile approach to journalism, see this post of ours from January, 2006. And now, here's Terry, to explain what a lab rat and the leader of the free world have in common.



Is there anything left to say about Iraq? Troop surge or no, we’re getting nowhere fast! Surely, even the president knows this. Or does he?

It's easy to say that George Bush doesn’t know this, or much of anything – that he’s stupid. We’ve said it in this blog, and it’s a belief that has wide currency. But let’s get serious for a minute. It’s hard to imagine anyone being as stupid as George Bush would have to be to not understand what’s going on with the war.

But if he’s not stupid, then what? One alternative might be that he possesses a unique mix of arrogance, intellectual mediocrity, and stubbornness. In any case, even lab rats can change their behavior when their actions don’t yield results, and certainly George Bush is at least as smart as a lab rat – so he too can’t fail to recognize that however hard we try, we remain stuck in the same Iraqi quagmire.

So yes, George Bush knows.

If there is no chance of winning, then why does he urge America to pour more men and money onto the pile? And here, I must state for the record that it usually is not a good idea to speculate about anyone else’s motives. If someone does something, it’s best to judge the action by its results. With most people, failure begets change, but with George Bush and Iraq, failure begets nothing but a series of repeated failures*. So just this once, let’s try to find out what motivates the decider.

One reason to continue our war effort is that if we leave, Iraq will devolve into complete chaos (as if it hasn’t already). This is in fact one of George Bush’s public explanations for fighting on. It’s also John McCain’s (in McCain’s case, I think he’s in earnest). It could be true, but it’s hard to imagine an even more urgent level of chaos. Still, let’s accept that it is not an unreasonable point of view. But if that’s the concern, then why not begin a regional conference on Iraq’s future? To do so, the US would have to go hat in hand to the Iranians and Syrians, but it is we who are losing lives, not they. To the Democrats' credit, those who fear even more chaos do support a regional conference. But Bush and his allies do not.

If Bush doesn’t want a peace conference, what other reason could he have for staying the course? (Staying the course has suddenly disappeared from the Bush talking points, but that’s what the troop surge is - staying the course).

I believe the reason is pure (and malicious) politics. And here, please remember the old saw that politics stops at the water’s edge, that when it comes to foreign policy, we are Americans first. Republicans keep reminding us about this when Democrats bring up the War’s failure. But it turns out, in this case, Republicans are the worst offenders. Here is the plan: Bush knows he can’t win; he also fears the long-term political damage to the Republican cause, and especially to conservatism if the US leaves Iraq while he is in power. As much as the American people have given up on Iraq, when we leave, the final exit will remain as a stain upon whomever presides over the last days. (Remember the picture of our last days in Saigon). George Bush is stalling for time – hoping to push the sting of his defeat onto his likely Democratic successor. If anyone believes that politics stops at the water’s edge, nonsense. George Bush plans to sacrifice maybe 2000 more Americans lives and spend as much as $200 Billion for what amounts to a small political advantage for his party. Shame on him!

Of course, there is another reason to stay, and that is that Bush never intended for the US to leave Iraq. Iraq was to be the new permanent base for future US military operations in the Middle East (the defense of our vital interests, which are oil and Israel). This is the thesis of Chalmers Johnson, a renowned foreign policy specialist. His notion is simple (not simplistic): US power depends on massive amounts of fuel, which is to say, oil. It takes millions of gallons of jet fuel to provide the air supremacy that allows us to create shock and awe. And our navy also gulps millions of gallons of diesel fuel (think of how much oil it takes to keeps an aircraft carrier group in the Persian Gulf. With the US having been thrown out of Saudi Arabia, we decided to construct permanent air bases in Iraq (we keep saying that we aren’t doing this, but what we build there has every appearance of permanence). Read this article, written before the Iraq war started. It’s not all that Mr. Johnson has to say on the subject, but it’s a good start. You can also check out his Blowback piece.

Here at Daily revolution, we are often reminded that human folly is not new. If we are conversant with our art and history, we have a chance of avoiding the repetition of human tragedy. George Bush may be closest to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Like Lear, he is pretty much alone now – note how few defenders he has in Congress. Of course, the Bush presidency hasn’t quite devolved into madness, but who knows how the next 19 months will go?

*To all those who urge us to fight on, and remind us that America has fought much harder wars than Iraq; I agree. But if we look at our other difficult wars, in each case, the commander in chief made lots of changes AND admitted mistakes when they occurred. In our revolutionary war, George Washington started out being aggressive, but after a series of disasters in New York, he learned never to jeopardize his army – that his job was to preserve the army and buy time. During our civil war, Lincoln admitted the many failures in the Eastern theater, and as a result, he replaced generals regularly until after three years he put Grant in charge. In WW2, Roosevelt was frank about our early difficulties. He too replaced all the early commanders and by the end of the war, the senior commander in Europe was a man who was a mere colonel when the war started. Bush has neither admitted problems (till way too late) nor made effective changes (also till way too late).

--T. McKenna

A Soldier Rebuts His Tyrant Bosses

This article, by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, has been getting a lot of attention lately—particularly from lefty sites such as Truthout and Think Progress. It richly deserves all the attention it can get: it is a crisply written, orderly, and eminently sane exposure, from an officer who has served in Iraq, of all the managerial incompetence that has defined this war's corporate conduct.

My blogging partner Terry McKenna reminded me of something that helped to put Lt. Col. Yingling's message into context: before the war started, the Army held war games, which were meant to test the military's prevailing combat strategy against an enemy that lacked our resources and firepower. The commander of the "insurgency" in these tactical war games quit before they could conclude, because, once his forces started "winning," the Army told him to stop and play by its rules (Marquis of Queensbury, anyone?). Here's an excerpt; the whole expose—from August, 2002, mind you—is here:

The most elaborate war game the U.S. military has ever held was rigged so that it appeared to validate the modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts it was supposed to be testing, according to the retired Marine lieutenant general who commanded the game’s Opposing Force.
That general, Paul Van Riper, said he worries the United States will send troops into combat using doctrine and weapons systems based on false conclusions from the recently concluded Millennium Challenge 02. He was so frustrated with the rigged exercise that he said he quit midway through the game.

Monday with McKenna: Inside the Artist's Brain

Monday with McKenna today features a trip inside the mind of an artist, but first let's take a tour of the brain of neocon ignorance. The graphic here is the front page of this town's leading tabloid, a Rupert Murdoch property that lives to offend. And what can be more offensive than this cover insult to a man who's in the hospital, and was still listed in critical condition at the time this moronic Photoshop smut was created? And if Mr. Corzine was a good Bush Republican, do you think we'd have seen this? I think this crap makes Imus look like a choir boy by comparison. Kicking a man when he's down is one thing; kicking him when half the bones in his body have been broken and he's breathing through a tube...it's journalistic dementia.

And while I have you thinking about sick, psychotic institutions, check this out: the U.S. Army now has an insurance claims department. They examine claims arising from our military's incidental murders of innocent Iraqi civilians, and pay or deny based on the most randomly corrupt judgment imaginable. Read some of the examples from Greg Mitchell's column at E&P, and see whether your blood pressure hasn't gone up by a factor of two by the time you're done. Incidentally, it was the ACLU that got these files on military killings of civilians; so purchasing a membership would not be a waste of $35, if you ask me.


So this isn't just a troop surge, ladies and gentlemen; it's a bureaucracy surge. But according to Clueless from Crawford, the Dems are "handing victory to our enemies" because they refuse to fund this shit without a timeline for ending it all. Click the graphic for Stewart's roundup, which includes the "airing of the platitudes."

Ah, god, if there's anybody from Norway reading this: how's the job market there, and could I get a green card? Will it help me if I tell you that my kid's playing Grieg on the piano these days?

Never mind, let's all just escape from it for a few minutes, to go inside the mind of my artist co-blogger. So while I go onto my ISP's servers and delete a few thousand emails (for more on that, join us on Geek Wednesday), here's Monday with McKenna...



Where does artistic inspiration come from? And I don’t mean this to be an abstract question. If we are to discover the poetry within ourselves, we’ll need to know how to muster the force of artistic inspiration.

This week I’ll review inspiration from the initial flicker to the finished work of art. In my example, I’ll use inspiration from this past week. The finished work is also mine, though from a long time ago. And by the way, if I haven’t made it clear in past essays, I am a trained fine artist; so, while I earn my living in business, I still paint from time to time.

Artistic inspiration varies a little bit with the specific art involved. The same flicker may tickle the painter or poet, and both may pick up a notebook to memorialize their ideas, but then their courses diverge. The visual artist works with line and tone. If words are included at all, they supplement a sketch. On the other hand, the poet works exclusively with words. And we include a musician, who would compose by setting down notes on a staff.

This week, my inspiration came from the return of Spring. And despite our being solidly into April, Spring did not seem all that present for those of us in the New York City area. Our weather was cold and blustery, and as of this writing, we await a Nor’easter and possibly snow. Still, it was Spring that aroused me from my drowsy train ride home. My daily commute starts in dank Penn Station; we spend the first 10 minutes in a dark tunnel. After we emerge into the light, we pass through the dreary salt marsh known as the Jersey Meadows. Newark is our first city. As we move past, the towns get progressively smaller, the lawns get larger and the people whiter. My ride ends more than an hour later in suburban Morris County.

On a typical day, I read and slumber. Last Tuesday, I suddenly noticed a flicker of bright colors and movement. In the middle distance, on a playing field, a group of girls were arrayed in a circle practicing wheeling motions with their arms. They were led by an adult (their coach?) stationed in the center. I guessed they were junior high school girls, and were practicing cheerleading.


As I said, I was dozing, but the late-afternoon raking sunlight and the bright colors on the girls clothes sparked my interest, so I opened up my notebook and scrawled the following scribble.

The scene vanished before I finished. On the same ride home, I made a few more sketches for later use. But as far as getting a second shot at drawing the scene again, I was never able to. I had my pad and pencil at the ready the rest of the week, but the girls and their teacher never reappeared. Still, I had my inspiration.

But how do I turn a brief notion into a finished painting?

In the days of the “academy,” artists went to great lengths to reassemble a scene. They would dress models in the correct garb, and sometimes recreate an entire battlefield or similar large scale backdrop. Contemporary artists by and large shun such practices. For myself, I will make lots of preparatory sketches, but that’s as far as I go.

Then it’s on to the grunt work of artistic composition. And as much as the several arts differ each from the other, there remain lots of similarities. Painters cover their canvas once and then re-paint again and again. So too, writers make a first draft and rewrite obsessively. From what I’ve heard, Ernest Hemingway’s first drafts were remarkably pedestrian. Each draft tries to push closer to the original spark. Countless re-paintings or redrafts eventually reach a conclusion (or a stalemate, when a work is abandoned). The key is to be unafraid to destroy (tear up – paint over) your previous hard work, even if a particular passage seems a great success. Finish occurs when the work clicks.

Works that fail may be picked up again after months or years.

And that’s it. An obsessive process of rewriting or repainting until the work is done.

So… how do you keep reaction fresh when you’ve had a work of art in front of you for months?

For painters, we can re-assess several times a day. After each break, your return to the studio gives you a brief moment for a fresh reaction. But for writers of novels, re-engagement comes slowly. Nonetheless, the artistic quest remains the same: did I get what I was after? If not, keep trying.

The what you are after is much less solid matter. Unvoiced, the artist tries to keep it alive in mind’s eye while continuing to prune and refine. But the specific “what” is never explicitly stated. Eventually, a work is finished. Even then, you may give yourself a time off, and one more look. Did you get what you wanted? If yes, then you are done.


So… what about my finished work. This one was finished some 34 Springs ago after a month of daily painting. I no longer have my original studies, but I can remember what I saw and what I was after. It was late March, and I was home from art school (I was sick for about eight days… a rare experience for me). I passed a local park and watched two boys take turns with a basketball. I can’t say what it was about the scene inspired me, and the work changed a lot as I painted. After a month of painting, I stopped with the following entitled the Rites of Spring.

By the way, if you pay for Showtime, you ought to watch the new series: This American Life. In an episode entitled ‘God’s Close-Up’ a young Mormon painter is shown selecting his models, posing them in an elaborate crucifixion scene, and photographing the scene to use are reference for a finished work. The links won’t allow you to see all that much, but if you have access to Showtime, watch this interesting episode. The art itself is relentlessly pedestrian. And no, I don’t know the artists name, nor do I have a link for him.

—T. McKenna

Monday with McKenna: Philosophy vs. Punditry

We're going back to back with Terry McKenna to start the week. He'll be with us today and Tuesday. You may recall Terry's piece on McCain from a few weeks back. As Frank Rich observed Sunday, McCain's lies (the subject of Terry's piece) have finally caught up with him (and W.R. Pitt of Truthout also weighs in with a similar insight).

Being a philosophy graduate myself, I feel a particular resonance with Terry's theme today. So here comes Part 1 of Terry's reflections on philosophy and punditry.


It’s the day after Easter; what better day to consider man’s search for meaning? Sadly, our era no longer values such a search. In an earlier era, the philosopher Rene Descartes corresponded with nobility and was granted a pension by the king of France. Half a half century later, Isaac Newton was England’s man of the age. But today, if a bright high school student admitted an interest in the study of philosophy as their college major, surely he or she would be vigorously discouraged.

Philosophers seem as irrelevant as poets and goldsmiths, though perhaps not quite so irrelevant as alchemists. We’ve replaced philosophy with journalism, and replaced philosophers with opinion makers such as newspaper columnists and the like. If philosophers created works of permanent value, today’s columns and OP-ED pieces are mere ephemera. If likened to food, the works of Plato nourished generations of scholars, today’s writings are mere snack food; useful only to fill our flabby minds with empty calories.

This week was a good one for our bloviators. In addition to the Iraq war and Nancy Pelosi’s unscripted comments during her middle east trip, we had the resolution of Iran’s seizure of fifteen British sailors and marines.

I’m happy for the sailors. Though their professional rigor turns out to be less than impressive (come on, you guys gave up about three days!) still they came home alive and unharmed, and in the middle east, maybe that’s remarkable enough.

Fifteen sailors and marines and a minor border incident don’t mean much in the scheme of things, but you wouldn’t know it from all the noise in the news media. For the bloviating class, the past two weeks became just another opportunity to show off in print, on the radio, or on camera. Were their guesses on the mark? Thing happened so quickly that it’s easy to check. It turns out no one was right (except maybe Tony Blair when he attempted to cool the rhetoric). The end came much sooner than anticipated. And – although there may have been some behind the scenes bargaining - it doesn’t look like either side gave away much. It could be this simple: Iran recognized that it got as much mileage as it could and ended it. But look at the headlines from a sample of articles (I selected a screen shot of sample articles via Google). Note the breathless energy (click graphic to enlarge).

So, if our pundits are full of shit (and if you track almost any issue, you’ll see that they are) then whither the search for information at a deeper level?

Sadly, the search for a deeper understanding of current affairs is led by the self same bloviators who are so disappointing. I had the opportunity to hear one of them on two occasions this past week, John Bolton. If you don’t remember him, he’s the hardliner that Bush appointed as UN ambassador (in a recess appointment). Though he’s a bully, he is also considered a serious man. He has spent a lot of time in and around government working on international affairs - particularly arms control. At the risk of over simplifying his position, he is suspicious of attempts to sign treaties with rogue states that have no intention of doing what they promise. His bottom line is that negotiating with such states quickly morphs into an attempt to reform them, and such efforts are doomed to failure. He prefers instead a policy of regime change.

Regime change sounded good until we found out that regime change is only half the battle. And war itself is much more complicated than just sending out a bunch of smart bombs. With the disaster in Iraq, we are now faced with the recognition that war is a dirty business that almost never yields the desired outcome. The deeper lesson is that the US is not quite strong enough to remake the world on its own terms.

—T. McKenna

Tomorrow: Part 2

Monday with McKenna: The NeoCon Threat to Good Government

It's been a couple of weeks since we last heard from Mr. Terry McKenna, and I'm sure you've had more than your fill of my New Age nonsense. Therefore, without further prologue, Monday with McKenna:


This week my topic is the Bush Administration’s attack on America’s history of open and honest government. But first, and by way of introduction, a couple of brief comments.

George Bush continues to trumpet alternative fuel vehicles as an answer to our over-consumption of oil.

Comment: NO, asshole, we need to mandate fuel economy, not a switch to a different carbon based fuel source.*

George Bush, John McCain, Joe Lieberman and the rest of the war mongers believe that setting a date for withdrawal is announcing the date of our defeat.

Comment: We have already lost this one. Neither are we surrendering to Iraq – they didn’t conquer us: if we leave, we are just LEAVING.

BushCo and the Assault on Good Government

America at its heart has been a very successful experiment in self-government. There are lots of reasons for this, one being the entry of millions of energetic Europeans and Asians to a vast and under populated** land full of rich soil and mineral wealth. Another is the absence of a ruling class of petty nobles and landlords who in other societies have been empowered to exact rents and other restrictions upon commerce. Thus, citizens have been able to engage in commercial activity with much less interference than almost anywhere else. We expect our public officials to behave fairly, and for the most part - except when it involves contracts to provide goods or services to the government itself – they do. Building permits, licenses and all manner of government activities are carried out for the genuine public interest. Town engineers practice engineering in a professional manner; geological surveys are genuine; and our national weather service provides solid and sound weather information. By and large, American civil servants have no agenda but to provide service. (To Chomsky-ites, followers of Howard Zinn and old leftists who dote on America’s failures, you are right as far as it goes, but so what—in the scheme of things, America is as good as many and better than most. Fairer as a whole than nations like Russia, China or Zimbabwe, and not quite as fair as places like Sweden and Norway.)

Oh yes, to those who say we are a nation of laws and not men – hogwash! Just think of Iraq and its constitution. Or of the UN and its numerous covenants and protocols. Suffice it to say that it takes a lot more than a signed document to generate a civil society or to inspire good behavior.

Starting with the New Deal, Congress created agencies that took on various roles that conservatives claimed were properly left to the states or to the people. The Supreme Court also took on a more activist role to re-make America into the free land implied by our founding documents. When a conservative president was finally elected after a space of five decades (with the election of Ronald Reagan), conservatives decided to use the executive branch to destroy programs that they were unable to attack directly.

Thus, Reagan appointed James G Watt – an avowed opponent of federal conservation programs, to manage the Department of the Interior. Reaganites especially hated environmental laws, housing programs, the Department of Education and the enforcement of civil rights laws. But Reagan operated before the flowering of modern Right Wing think tanks, so his efforts were not as focused as those today.

Enter Bush II (Really Ronald Reagan II) and cadres of trained right wing professionals, each ready to speak the newspeak of corporate evasion and to hide their mission, which was to bend federal programs into supporting the right wing policy arm - actually, anti-policy arm, since the right wing has no real policy, just newspeak meant to build a consensus against policy. Gail Norton at the Department of the Interior was one example. She was a protégé of James G. Watt and built her career setting up what are known as astro turf groups*** with a fake environmental agenda. And think of the FDA. This formerly proud servant of public health was shaped into an instrument of conservative Christianity when it stalled the approval of the morning after pill.

In almost all spheres of activity, officials have switched from serving the American people to serving the president. Thus Treasury lied to the nation about the cost of the Bush tax cuts; and the Defense Department lied about the cost of the Iraq folly. And when they are not lying to us, the feds are simple nincompoops like Brownie.

So Alberto Gonzalez’s lies are not surprising. The entire executive is bathed in deceit.

But are we ready to conclude that the future is lost too? I don’t think so. At the local level, our civil servants still serve us honestly. And Democrats by and large believe in the government that they serve, but we won’t know how they will act until they win back the White House, which they surely will do in 2008.

And before I go, an expression of thanks to the hospitality of San Francisco and the surrounding towns within northern California. I just returned from a seven day trip to California, my first ever. Now I understand what led many of my generation to extend their stays in this strange but attractive land.

____________________


*If you think ethanol is a solution, then please read up about the cost of raising the corn necessary to produce it. The net energy yield is close to zero. And for those interested in sugar instead (especially as produced in Brazil) the yield and costs are better, but the bad news is, the Brazilians use slave indigenous labor to clear the Amazon jungle in order to get open land for sugar can.

**Yes, I know that North America was populated by millions of what used to be called Indians, but after the European settlements had been established, disease and warfare (especially disease) so shrunk the existing population that the later immigrants felt they were entering a virgin land.

***Astro Turf groups are funded by industry, or sometimes by wealthy right wing zealots (for example, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Move America Forward, and Focus on the Family). They are named to sound friendly, but beware, they have a mission and are to be feared.

—T. McKenna

Practicing Inner Elimination: The Way Beyond Guilt

Yesterday, we suggested that guilt is error's dark companion, and is responsible for most of the resistance to the admission of a mistake, especially from people who have made so many of them, like the members of the BushCo team.

Well, as luck would have it for us, Bush did issue an apology yesterday, on behalf of "the system."

"The system failed you and it failed our troops and we're going to fix it...I apologize for what they went through and we're going to fix the problem."

Apology accepted, Dub. Now, "fix the problem"—fire your VP, your AG, and your rap-dancing marketing director, and then leave office yourself. Then, all of you, get out of the public eye and work on expelling the demons that have driven you and our nation to this desperate point of geopolitical chaos, murder, domestic waste, and pervasive corruption. Get treatment for the disease that has so long afflicted you.



It all begins, as it can for many of us, with a recognition of the falsehood of guilt as a principle of human nature. As I say in The Tao of Hogwarts:

...is there anything, anywhere, in Nature that experiences guilt, except humans? Do animals or plants or rocks or stars or the earth itself feel guilt—do any of these things subject themselves to the punishments and the hideous self-torment of one who perceives himself as inherently flawed and poisoned by Nature with Sin? Or is guilt what makes us who we are—original, uniquely human, the Lords of the Earth and the fullness thereof? If guilt is what makes us special, what distinguishes us from all other forms of creation, then I would suggest that it is time to renounce the distinction and return to our pre-human evolutionary roots.

Fortunately, that last bit is quite unnecessary. We can, in fact, "fix the system," by committing ourselves to a program of "inner elimination." We all value good habits and practices of physical elimination, because we know that if we couldn't shit, pee, sweat, fart, or belch properly, toxins would build up in our bodies and make us very sick. But we often fail to apply the same principle to our minds. That's where the "inner No" comes in. Here is another excerpt from my book, which includes guidance on some basic principles of "inner elimination:"

Say an inner No to the validity of guilt as a principle of human nature. In a brief, daily meditation, ask for help from the hidden world and firmly, yet without bitterness or hatred, say the word "No" three times to the idea of guilt as a natural aspect of your being. Say a further No to any group ideology, pseudo-scientific theory, religious belief, or social doctrine that arises to your consciousness as a specifically intrusive source of the belief in guilt as a natural human trait. Ask the teaching Presence of the Cosmos and the helping cosmic energy of dispersion to dissolve the notion of guilt from within you. Finish each meditation with an expression of thanks to the cosmic energies that are thus clearing you of these destructive attachments and prejudices against your true nature. Many people have found this to be an extraordinarily restorative and cleansing exercise, and the best part of it is that it costs you almost no outer effort and only about two or three minutes out of each day.

Identify the areas in your life where you are bound by group affiliation, and sever the ties on the inner plane. In Hexagram 59 of the I Ching ("Dispersion"), Line 4 has this poem:

He dissolves his bond with his group.
Supreme good fortune.
Dispersion leads to accumulation.
This is something that ordinary men do not think of.
(from the Wilhelm/Baynes translation)


Let this insight lead you to reflect on the aspects of your life—work, national affiliation, an academic, social, religious, or other group allegiance, and even family life—that need to be examined for the limitations they may be imposing on your true nature and the fulfillment of your individual uniqueness as an independent moment within the Cosmic Consciousness. Many of us have spent much of our lives trying to live up to the group self-images projected upon us by collective ideologies—the obedient child, the good and sacrificing husband/wife/parent, the loyal, hardworking employee, the patriotic citizen of a particular nation. The fact is that children naturally behave as adults would like them to, when obedience is not beaten into them as an ideological imperative engraved on the stone of an institution's moral code; we are all of us more natural, loving, and enduring marriage partners when we are allowed to live independently, even as we maintain the inner connection with our beloved, free of the darkly threatening decree to "honor and obey" another; we become more loyal, supportive, and nurturing parents when we give up the lugubrious self-consciousness of "sacrificial duty" towards our children; we are more productive and creative workers when we are liberated from that obsessive and vaguely paranoid attachment to the institutional ethic of "hard work"; and we are far more beneficial to our community and our nation when we consider ourselves as citizens of the Cosmic Whole, rather than as parochially allied to some tribe, clan, or state and its prevailing ideology of the moment.

So consider which of the institutionally-programmed self-images of the collective ego are most limiting you in your inner growth as an individual, and work on releasing these bonds, in the knowledge that you are truly benefiting the natural family, community, business organization, and nation by doing so.

Be led to a more accurate and personally viable understanding of error and its place in our lives. In the I Ching, there is no direct mention of guilt, because, as we have discussed, guilt has no basis in cosmic reality. However, it is understood throughout the oracle's text that error is an aspect of the way of inner growth for humans, and so the I Ching speaks in many places of "remorse" or "regret." This, indeed, is how we are meant to understand the role of error in our lives. In contrast to what the collective ego and its ideologies would have us believe, there are no spots that won't wash out: our bodies, after all, are 75% water—the basic element of the baptismal ritual is already within us in abundance! So when you have said or done something which you regret, and that you recognize as an error, a temporary separation from your true nature, try the following steps in a brief meditation:

♦ Ask for help from the Cosmic realm in understanding the cause, nature, and the correct resolution of your mistake, and apologize to the Cosmos for the error, in a free and open inner expression of remorse that is unstained by guilt, self-blame, or bitterness.

♦ If it is an interpersonal issue that has occasioned your error, then apologize to the person you believe you have wronged, on the inner plane. Simply let your consciousness speak to that person and express your regret sincerely, as if they were right beside you in the room. This practice has a far greater transformative effect than most people would be willing to acknowledge, until they experience it for themselves.

♦ Finally, ask the Sage, the teaching energy of the Cosmic Consciousness, to guide you in understanding what, if anything, must be done, in addition to the above, to resolve the effect of your mistake and return you to harmony with the principle of Te, or Modesty. You may use the I Ching or other oracle, or simply attend to the messages you receive in meditations, in dreams, or through your own reflection. If you feel that any action or communication on the outer plane would be helpful in completing the resolution of your error, ask for help in learning the correct approach in this respect. And remember this: the capacity to say from your heart, "I am sorry" reveals an ability of such greatness as the leaders of the most powerful nations on earth completely lack. As with any meditation, finish by expressing your thanks to the Cosmos for its help in guiding you through this process of self-understanding amid an awareness of remorse.

If guilt, blame, and fear are severely troubling you, seek help from a professional. The guilt and self-blame that are engendered by our futile efforts to live up to the institutional ego's monumental self-images lie at the root of many depressive and anxiety disorders. We are not born to live in an inner state of slavery, ever fearful that we will be deemed insufficient to the self-images that cultural laws, moral codes, religious beliefs, and societal norms define for us and program into us. Your need for help is not a manifestation of something aberrant or weak in your true nature, but is rather a result of cultural conditioning. You can find a counselor, therapist, or other professional through talking to family and friends, or via professional organizations that offer referrals based on your needs and resources.

Meat in Rove's Market, Bush on the Bone...

I found this item in my daily email from Progress today (link with video here):

DAILY GRILL
"General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee."
-- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), 3/27/07, on how safe Iraq is because of President Bush's escalation

VERSUS
"I mean, in the hour since Sen. McCain's said this, I've spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There's multiple humvees around it, heavily armed."
-- CNN's Baghdad correspondent Michael Ware, 3/27/07

Mother Jones joins in on the grim fun with this quiz on the war, which is fairly challenging—I only rate at the "cable news TV pundit" level. And while you're there, subscribe, why don't ya? It's $10 for a whole year of some of the best research and journalism you can find out there.

And while we're having fun, our buddy Norm Jenson discovered this video and posted it to his outstanding blog. Creationism, evolution, and peanut butter. Hilarious stuff—Jon Stewart couldn't have come up with anything so raucously bizarre.

The best argument ever for vegetarianism: And what's President Meathead up to, you ask? Why, he's been speaking before the American Cattlemen's Association to talk foreign policy (now how could I make up any of this?). In an obvious swipe at his audience's competition, the pig farmers, the Meathead-in-Chief said, "the House and Senate bills have too much pork, too many conditions on our commanders and an artificial timetable for withdrawal. And I have made it clear for weeks if either version comes to my desk, I’m going to veto it."

And then came his old warhorse: “The best way to protect this country is to defeat the enemy overseas, so we don’t have to face them here at home.”

Now if I were a conservative pundit, I'd have been all over this one long ago. Check out the stats: every war we've ever fought on our own soil, we've won*. Overseas, we've won a few, lost two, and had a number of ties. So if I were a true conserva-hawk, I'd want to fight 'em over here! Bring 'em on!

But since I'm just a liberal blogger, I'll simply say that this is yet another example of the disconnect with reality so recurrently typical of this Prez. In fact, I'm working on a Mental Status Examination based on recent speeches and press conferences, which I'll be able to present next week sometime. So come back then to learn a little about psychiatry and the certifiable leader of the free world. Meanwhile, a word from Bob Herbert in today's Times:

The executive branch is under the control of a belligerent and often amateurish group that has hacked away at civil liberties and is adamant about pursuing a war that neither Congress nor the public wants.

_____________________

*"we," of course, refers to the armies led by the person or government of Washington. So Washington's army won the Rev War, and Abe's squad carried the day nearly a century later—albeit at the loss of virtually an entire generation of the country's male youth. We also won the war of 1812, beat back the Mexicans, and of course genocidally annihilated dem pesky Injuns. A proud domestic military history, indeed.

"War is Over, If You Want It"

The Collateral Damage Dance Troupe performs prior to the start of the UFPJ NYC Peace March on Sunday (click to enlarge)

Well, I looked around the American mass media for awhile today, just to see whether citizen protests mattered as news; apparently they do not—that is, on this side of the pond. But over in England, the BBC had it on their front page, here.



But our media wouldn't be interested in this past weekend's marches because, (a) aside from some verbal shit-slinging from a few disordered Bush supporters in Washington, there was no conflict, no violence; and (b) no star appeal. It appears as if either the weather or the limelight potential didn't suit the Hollywood peace glitterati or anyone else among the rich and famous this time around. Which, after all, is fine with most of us.

This was very much our march, our statement. There was no flowery rhetoric, no makeup trailer, not a speck of glamour, at the march I attended here in New York. Boy, it was great: old folks, young folks, baby strollers, toddlers, teenagers, gays and straights, Communists and Democrats (and, I suspect, a few Republicans), walking side by side. Nameless to the network media or the rest of the National Enquirer set. Just ordinary people; small but strong.

For those of you who don't live here, New York is not a glamour, culture, or fashion capitol for the vast majority of us who call the city home. Who can afford to do Sardi's or the Hard Rock or Tavern on the Green or Elaine's or Broadway? Nah, that stuff is for the wealthy minority and tourists who have probably saved for years to get tix to The Producers and a table at SPQR or Sparks. I've lived here 25 years, been to one Broadway show and little else besides. For us, New York is more about a sun-splashed afternoon on Strawberry Fields or a pedal boat on Prosect Park Lake or the top deck at Yankee Stadium (not lately, though) or a long walk on the Piers or a bike ride over the Brooklyn Bridge and up the West Side Promenade. Or a protest march in midtown. It's inexpensive, fun, refreshing, and gives you the chance to meet your real neighbors. But again, it's not exactly stuff for the Cindy Adams set, which is fine by us.

Favorite sign seen at the protest: "Hillary is Bush with Tits". Really, it was there.

Speaking of Hillary-with-a-penis, guess who might have noticed the protests this weekend in Washington, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere? Yep, you guessed it: why else did he whine to Congress today about getting his escalation funding bill passed? Think maybe he heard all those tens or hundreds of thousands of people yelling all weekend in the streets "no more money for war!"? Now he wants to play rough with the blue Congress, turn the screws on them a little, show them who's still boss.

Well, will they let him get away with it? Probably: Democratic majority or not, cojones are still decidedly in the minority on Capitol Hill.

Here's Bush's nod to reality in this moment: “There will be good days and bad days ahead as the security plan unfolds.”

Let's clarify for a minute what he's talking about, because when we normally talk about "bad days," it usually involves a deal at work not going through, or your kid getting an F in math, or a fight with the spouse or significant other...that sort of stuff. But when Dub talks "bad days," he's saying, "there will be hundreds, probably thousands more deaths...there will be massive amounts of human life and taxpayer treasure wasted in the carnage, soaked up by the desert sands...there will be more terrorists, more bodies, more widows, more orphans, more desolation." That, folks, is what we have to look forward to if Congress does the jelly-spine act again (we know the mass media will).

I would suggest that, whether or not you voted with your legs and your voice this past weekend, it's high time to:

get on the phone

write some letters

send some emails to the fat cats in DC and let them know what you voted for with your ballot last November.

And remember..."War is over, if you want it."

Monday with McKenna: Dissent is Developmental

Dissent is developmental: It's one of the guiding principles of this blog, and of many like it, that dissent makes government, corporations, and society in general more alive, more responsive to the people. Therefore, they are more popular and usually more profitable, whenever they give dissenters a free voice.

This is, to me, such a self-evident truth (to borrow an old phrase) that it always astonishes me to discover that many people can't understand it. Yet on Saturday in Washington, there were the wingnuts, insulting protesters and accusing them of treason—as they "guarded" national monuments threatened by defamatory rumors that almost certainly started from within their own disordered brains.

Fortunately, we had no such business here in New York on Sunday. Overall, it seemed a tad smaller than last April's; yet spirited and vibrant nonetheless. I walked the whole route and saw no signs of disorder or conflict—even the cops lining the route seemed relaxed. At the very end, two lonely counter-protesters held up a sign labeling the other 50,000 or so of us "left-wing protesters bent on demoralizing our troops."

I'll have more on the march and its meaning later this week, along with more pictures. But today is Monday with McKenna, always a celebration of dissent in itself. Today, he takes on the image of "straight-talking" John McCain, and finds little, if anything, of substance.


A public figure caught in a lie.  Don’t you just love when that happens?  This week, the news highlighted two more such public figures, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former straight talker, John McCain. 
 
Mr. Gonzales was in the news in a big way until out of nowhere, the US released a transcript of terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s testimony.  It seems that the good Shaikh has admitted complicity for nearly every terrorist act committed against US interests, as well as many more that he may only have imagined.  So this bit of manufactured news knocked Al Gonzales and his lies off the front page.  On the other hand, John McCain’s verbal misdeeds have garnered scant interest.  Still, his faltering presidential campaign is so desperate that it has resurrected the STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS – a campaign bus decorated with that formerly apt slogan.  But this time, the bus’s incumbent is no longer quite the reporter’s friend that he was 7 years ago. 



It is easy to make light of Mr. Gonzales’ lies.  Who expected better from a person whose entire career has consisted of crafting false or exaggerated claims.  He is, after all, a lawyer. In his public role as the president’s counsel, we’ve all become familiar with Al Gonzales’s frozen grin (or is it a shit eating grin?).  And if Americans of ten years ago were once titillated by Bill Clinton’s Socratic dialogue over the meaning of “IS,” then we should now be in perpetual stitches over Al Gonzales’ tautological defense of our use of torture - first he defined torture out of existence, then he assured us that America doesn’t use torture… (because we’ve defined it out of existence!)  This grandchild of illegal immigrants achieved his American Dream when he became Attorney General; now it’s about to come an American nightmare.  If he survives in office, it will be as a shriveled and powerless figure.
 
The lies of John McCain are more troubling.  The son of an Admiral, and the grandson of another, success was his birthright.  He graduated from Annapolis, and began his naval career as a pilot.  Shot down during the Viet Nam war, he served honorably as a prisoner of war, inspiring his fellow prisoners, and gaining fame when his inspiring story became better known.  After leaving the Navy, he attained quick political success, and until recently was known as a maverick and gadfly.    
 
His troubles began after his 2000 campaign loss.  Having learned that honesty is not the best policy after all, he morphed into a strong Bush supporter, but at first he kept his independence.  As we got closer to the 2008 campaign, McCain has moved ever closer to the right wing ideologues he formerly inveighed against.    
 
Am I being too hard on John McCain?  He is hardly the first person to sell his soul for the big prize.  Ronald Reagan began his presidential bid in 1981 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, heart of the segregationist south.  And even John McCain’s STRAIGHT TALK EXPRESS faltered briefly in the 2000 primary season over the use of images of the confederate flag in Southern states.. 
 
But is McCain a liar? While Mr. Gonzales’ statements would probably meet anyone’s definition of lie, John McCain’s would not.  But McCain’s strange transition from giving open explanations to speaking political Newspeak is a sad one to his admirers.  Those on the right who are being persuaded to vote for him now, must somehow be made to think of McCain’s past as a lie.  The political moderates who have admired him must instead think of his current statements as untrue – and that if elected, that the old John McCain would emerge.  Thus the entire McCain campaign is embedded with deceit.  His new positions have been crafted carefully to hide the truth behind a political smokescreen.  Thus, from a big picture point of view, John McCain is lying.  His deceit started a few years ago, when he reversed course on the president’s tax cuts.  Now he can’t give a straight answer to a reporter’s simple question about HIV.
 
I recommend that you go and study his website. On a superficial basis it looks harmless enough, but when you delve into the articles, you see right wing poison.  Try the article “Addressing the Moral Concerns of Advanced Technology.”  Dealing with a number of issues, the article highlights McCain’s supposed concern about "fetal farming."   This is a straw man, raised to scare voters away from a sober consideration of the issue.  Stem cells were unknown except in theory as late as two decades ago.  We still know little about them, but research on embryonic stem cells seems the likeliest avenue to gain new knowledge, since the stem cell represents an embryonic state – before cells specialize.  We are lying to ourselves if we believe that by avoiding such research, we have preserved the least shred of human dignity for the thousands of embryos locked in cold storage.  If these cells have dignity, then how dare we consign them to eternal nothingness.  But they are not human life, only potential.  Until successfully implanted in a healthy uterus, they do not deserve the least legal protection.  But troglodytes on the political right have managed to sway a media too poorly educated in the sciences to understand that they are being spun. 
 
There you have it.  Two men and dreams either broken or about to break.  And you have to ask – especially with regard to John McCain: was it really, really worth it?
 
A note to a few of my young friends who read the blog and often point out the seeming extremity of my arguments. The blog is a polemic.  We present short arguments with an intense point of view.  Yes, I do gloss over a few of the details, and stretch my points for effect.  And yes, lawyers are not all liars (though I stand by my characterization of many of them).  And I’m still willing to hope that if elected, which I see as unlikely, the real John McCain will emerge.

—T. McKenna
_________________

Site Note: Our new banner graphic is a Photoshopped selection from some eclipse photography I found at APOD. I think it's cool, and anyway, the poor cat needs a break.

Now as this is my last free week before returning nose to corporate grindstone, there will be a content-fest here. More from the weekend protests; a fascinating look on Geek Wednesday at how a Microsoft exec bashes his company better than I could ever hope to; and some selections from a new book I'm working on about corporate America, its alternatives, and how we might go about tranforming the former through aligning ourselves with the latter. I suspect it's also going to be a fairly busy week in the news.

The Week Ahead at DR

Hey everybody, and a Happy Hangover Day to all you Irish who celebrated last night. I'm getting ready to go and join the protest march in Manhattan, as DR is a sponsor of the event (it's no big deal—you give UFPJ $50 and then help them get the word out in advance). So this week, we'll have photos and stories from the NYC march, as well as others around the country (if you have anything you'd like to share with the crass, post a link to the comments). It's all about keeping up the pressure on Power. You never know where the tipping point will come, nor how close you are to it; but if we just keep on pushing together, with the helping energy of truth behind us, then the moment will come when clarity and democracy are once again alive in this nation.

We'll also start turning a gaze on 2008, with a focus on what we need to do as voters to prevent another disastrous administration taking hold in Washington once the current lot of tyrants, sycophants, and all-round losers have been flushed away. One thing appears certain: the American mass media will not change in its obsession with slick, vapid imagery. So it's up to us to change for them, and show them the kind of vision that they have abandoned. Therefore, we'll start the week with a Terry McKenna piece on the reality behind Sen. John McCain's "Straight Talk Express".



After all, if you have to advertise yourself as a "straight talker" by painting it on the side of a bus, I'm already skeptical. I could just as easily promote myself as an intelligent fellow whose judgment and decisions can always be counted on, just because I scored well in that area on a personality quiz. In fact, here it is (New Hampshire, here I come):

What's Your Best Quality? Your Result: Intelligence   Your best quality is intelligence! People like you because you are smart and always make the right decision. Your intelligence also helps you handle tough situations.
Loving
Personality
Out-Going
Ambitious
Sense of Humor
What's Your Best Quality? Take More Quizzes

Friday Reflection: Crane's Reminder, and Our Purpose

Before we get to the Friday Reflection for today, I have some links to video material that you may find worth viewing.

The first is from a very familiar source, but it may not be what you expect. Jon Stewart, aside from being a very funny man and a trenchant social observer, has an extraordinary gift for interviewing (and believe me, it's a very rare skill in today's media). Check out this interview he has with former Clinton NSA chief Zbigniew Brzezinski. Also note ZB's ominous message of the moment. Let's hope the title of his book can serve as a guide to recovery as well as a reflection on a lost opportunity.

Next is a full-length documentary on two gritty British activists who took on Mickey D's—just click the graphic above to watch. I found it via Klassy's StumbleUpon page. It's pretty inspiring.

The last is an activist video site which you may be familiar with. It's featured in our Blogroll, and its teenage author is the topic of an excellent story in the current issue of Mother Jones. The webmistress in question is young Ava Lowery, and the site is Peace Takes Courage. If you haven't seen this young lady's marvelous videos, spend some time there and watch. Then remember—according to the MoJo reporter, this teenage girl from the heart of Dixie, along with her family, has been subjected to intimidation, abuse, and even death threats. So far, nothing has stopped her. This weekend, many of us will be continuing to make the restorative sounds of dissent thanks to the information and inspiration provided by people like Ava.



Our banner quote this week may have struck a vaguely familiar chord of resonance in many of you, even if you haven't read the book since you were in junior high school. The author is Stephen Crane, and the book is of course his classic, The Red Badge of Courage.

The men groaned. The luster faded from their eyes. Their smudged countenances now expressed a profound dejection. They moved their stiffened bodies slowly, and watched in sullen mood the frantic approach of the enemy. The slaves toiling in the temple of this god began to feel rebellion at his harsh tasks.

This is from the beginning of the book's very heart, where we discover how flight becomes the journey. It begins with a wild run from danger, which transforms gradually into a somber and regenerative retreat for the novel's protagonist, who only name is "the youth". Now I'm not sure of my facts here, because it's all coming from a distant memory (and at my age, memory for anything becomes a challenge); but I believe that the setting of the novel is one of the great blood baths of Lincoln's War, Chancellorsville. One of Crane's great accomplishments in this small novel was to accurately portray both the vast scope and the horror of that battle, with considerable historical authenticity.

But of more interest is the personal human dimension of the novel. Crane spends the first 50 or so pages portraying the fighting spirit of his characters—the cultural facade of courage. Then he reveals how easily that facade implodes; panic overtakes his warriors in a single moment:

A man near him, who up to this time had been working feverishly at his rifle, suddenly stopped and ran with howls. A lad whose face had borne an expression of exalted courage, the majesty of he who dares give his life, was, at an instant, smitten abject. He blanched like one who has come to the edge of a cliff at midnight and is suddenly made aware. There was a revelation. He, too, threw down his gun and fled. There was no shame in his face. He ran like a rabbit.

Perhaps back in some FOX studio, safe in the heart of the Union, some pundit or other might have described this turn in the battle as cowardice or "cutting and running." Well, that's exactly what Crane was describing: "cut and run" as in Nature overtaking social programming. He goes on throughout the rest of the book to reveal the intensity of the inner conflict between these forces—how disabling the institutional boulders of bravery and courage are to the human psyche. What terrible wars must be fought within the man who sees himself as departing from those rigid walls of cultural conditioning! What lifelong wounds are inflicted upon the soul of a man who is once condemned, by himself or others, as a coward, and what must be risked to redeem himself! This, added to the ordinary inner torment of war, breaks the human psyche into often unrecoverable and irreparable fragments. It is all happening right now.

The Iraq War has taken a psychological toll of unprecedented proportions. Stacy Bannerman focuses on this aspect of the war in a piece I found at Alternet:

Soldiers who have served -- or are serving -- in Iraq are killing themselves at higher percentages than in any other war where such figures have been tracked. According to a report recently released by the Defense Manpower Data Center, suicide accounted for over 25 percent of all noncombat Army deaths in Iraq in 2006.

Bannerman notes a similarly alarming set of statistics re. PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

"At least 30 percent of Iraq or Afghanistan [veterans] are diagnosed with PTSD, up from 16 percent to 18 percent in 2004," said Charlie Kennedy, PTSD program director and lead psychologist at the Stratton VA Medical Center. The number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans getting treatment for PTSD at VA hospitals and counseling centers increased 87 percent from September 2005 to June 2006, and they have a backlog of 400,000 cases, including veterans from previous wars. The most conservative estimates project that roughly 250,000 Iraq war veterans will struggle with PTSD.

These are truly alarming rates of psychiatric morbidity by any measure. But I am betting that neither Stephen Crane nor the subjects of his classic novel would have found them surprising. For like the Civil War, the Iraq War is a pointless conflict* marked by a continuous and escalating bloody mayhem in which friend and foe are often indistinguishable; and which has taken its toll limb by human limb, death by premature death.

Yesterday, the Senate failed again to commit itself to the will of the people. So more soldiers, more Iraqi civilians, will die or be maimed, physically and psychologically, by this insanity—unless we unite to tell these fat, lazy, licentious demagogues in Washington that we will not tolerate their weakness at a moment like this. That's what this weekend is all about: come and be heard.
_______________________

*The debate on the Civil War, which cost America half a million of its male youth, basically wiping out an entire generation, can be held at a more convenient time. In short, though, my position is that Lincoln could very easily have invited the South to go right ahead and secede, and then set up the appropriate blockades and trade barriers. There is obviously no way to tell, but my wager would be that the Confederate nation would not have lasted ten years on its own, and untold death and suffering would have been averted. Lincoln, at any rate, is not the demigod that is popularly sculpted in the marble and granite of our cultural conditioning programs. Nor, I suspect, would he be at all comfortable in the stone throne onto which he has been forced by the ideologues of our time.

We Are Small, Yet Strong

I was reading about the fellow who won the $200 million in the big Lotto jackpot last week, and it occurred to me that about 10,000 other people would have to win that same amount before they could pay for what's been spent on the Iraq War.

This is one big reason (there are many others) why this blog is sponsoring UFPJ's nationwide protest march this coming weekend. If you live in or near New York and plan to attend, post a comment if you'd like to meet someplace in the staging area between 35th and 39th Streets in Manhattan.

I'm going because I have a child who will grow up into the manufactured, profit-driven terror of our Halliburton era. I'm also going because there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people I will never know whose lives will be taken or ruined amid the perpetuation and escalation of this vortex of devastation fueled by the limitless avarice of a few old white demons and their advertising machinery.

We are small, yet strong. The fear that once froze us now has no room to cast its icy shroud, for the worst that can happen has already begun. The government of a nation conceived in liberty and equality has been overtaken by corporate tyrants and paranoid despots; the threat of a nuclear holocaust is intensifying amid the Cradle of Civilization; the Earth itself is under attack and responding in the only way it can, while Science—the god of the 20th century—freezes in horror at what it has made.

So there is no room for fear anymore. Neither is there room for the hero. The cult of heroism has contributed to the morass of death, corruption, and disorder that we now have. Activism, properly understood, is not about heroism; it is about working within one's natural abilities and influence, in the confidence that one's energy will attract its complement. Join us Sunday in New York or Washington or wherever you can get to, and you'll see what it's all about. Let this anniversary of the Iraq War be the last.

Uncle Dick's Dickensian Declaration

When it comes to following Uncle Dick around the world, nobody does it like Stewart and his roving reporter, John Oliver. Click the graphic and watch.

Meanwhile, the once-compliant lapdog mass media are suddenly starting to bark a little (or at least yip) over the White House's insistence on the "anonymity" of an "unnamed official" in Cheney's traveling party who referred to himself in the first person. Check out this quote:

"I've seen some reporting that says, `Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them.' That's not the way I work," the "senior administration official" said. "I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid reading of the way I do business."

The media, of course, are up in arms over the fact that Dick clearly identified himself as the source by talking about himself. Fine, that's very insightful of you, reporters. But what you missed while your panties were in a twist over the obvious is that the man also revealed plenty about himself and this administration's operations in Iraq and elsewhere these past six years.

Note, for example, the last sentence from that quote: "...an invalid reading of the way I do business." Replace "I" with "Halliburton" and you've pretty much got the idea of how Dick and his assistant from Crawford, TX have been operating throughout the dark dawn of the 21st century. It's all about business. Not government, not democracy, and certainly not diplomacy: it's about business. That is, mergers, takeovers, corporate occupations, and above all, profit at any human or environmental cost. That's been the story of this Halliburton administration. The "unnamed official's" comment is a Dickensian declaration: "I am a man of business..."

But to every Scrooge there comes a Jacob Marley. Once again, this is the dawn of the 21st century; and every dawning begins with darkness. Tomorrow, we'll come back to the discussion of the burgeoning light, and from what direction it is coming. Fear not, however: the light is there.

Give Them Hell (and Geek Wednesday)

Before I let the cat out of the bag for Geek Wednesday, here's a question that many of us should be asking Congress as it continues to walllow...that is, I mean, conduct, its debate on the Iraq War: the biggest four-star cheese in the U.S. military says that there's no evidence of Iranian involvement in attacks on US troops. Now Gen. Pace is presumably an expert on military affairs, and might know a little more about what's really going on than a dyslexic political figurehead or his criminally psychotic VP. So...who ya gonna believe, Congress?

And let's say that the General is misinformed: after all, he does lack the advantage of having a golden earpiece exclusively tuned to the Voice of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, Inc. What about it? Don't you end wars by negotiating with the enemy? Or is it remotely possible, would you say, that Gen. Pace's bosses don't really have an interest in ending the war? Could it be that Gen. Pace, being a soldier, sees all too clearly what the result would be of ramping this war up into a large-scale regional affair, with the possibility of nukes becoming involved? Could this be the General's motive for effectively spitting in the eye of his clueless Commanders-in-Chief?

Meanwhile, 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans!) openly support negotiation with Iran and Syria. Once again, we are at one of those turning point moments where we will have to enforce our common will, our common wisdom, on these ignorant tyrants who are ruling us. We will have to especially be all over Congress on this one, because like them or not, they represent our main chance at the restoration of democratic process here. We are in the midst of an escalation; we could be on the doorstep of an explosion whose devastation will threaten the lives of generations to come, including those of our kids now. Here's an idea; use Progress Report's tracking form to keep tabs on how your local Reps and Sens are leaning or voting on both issues, and give them hell. Call them, write them, stop them on the street next week when they're back home for their winter break. Just give them hell.

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Geek Wednesday

Hey you nutty people, it's pawprints time at Geek Wednesday. My human is busy trying to find a job, and you know how people can get whenever there's an economic crunch—first thing that gets downsized is the poor kitty's food, and I'm not interested in getting scaled down to 9-Lives anytime soon.

So what's going on in geekdom these days? Yeah, I know, the web is more cluttered than a 3-cat litter box with talk of DRM, now that both Steve and Bill are competing to sound the grassroots-iest note on DRM.

Not bad, but let's get real for a minute: is it possible that Norway put the fear of heavenly retribution into Steve's heart? Or that Uncle Bill is ready to take the DRM locks out of his brand new OS (see below)? Yeah, and the Japanese are going to slap some sanity into Dick Cheney's head. Oh, and I'm going on an all-vegan program starting tomorrow...

But, given some time and more of Uncle Bill's stum