Don't Ever Be Right

Don't ever be right -- about anything, the price of oil, the Iraq War, because if you do you'll be wrong. It's much better to be wrong, but in the right sort of way.

Back in 2002 Barack Obama was right about the Iraq War before it even started. Now he's in big trouble for it.

There's this Fred Barnes guy, a Fox talking head on a thing called "The Beltway Boys," and on last Saturday's show he says of Obama, "You know, I’ve thought for a long time that Obama’s not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don’t think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be."

Exactly. It was very wrong of Obama to be right about that. He was supposed to believe what "the entire world believed," because the fact that he didn't showed that he's not "very strong on national security."

I see. So back in March, 2003, when I was watching the teevee and realized we were actually going to invade Iraq, I said out loud, "Boy, these clueless morons are gonna get themselves and rest of us in soooooooo much trouble..." And that shows that I secretly sympathize with the terrorists.

Obviously, anybody who's right about stuff should not be taken seriously.

Which leads the NY Times columnist Paul Krugman to observe, "Look at a typical lineup on the Sunday talk shows, discussing the war: you very rarely see an 'expert' on the issue who wasn’t pro-war. Look at a recent panel at Brookings, advertised as representing a 'uniquely broad' range of views on Iraq — from liberal hawks all the way to conservative hawks.

"The fact is that in our national discourse, at least in DC, you’re still considered 'not serious' if you were right about Iraq. And you’re also considered extreme and shrill if you were right about Bush."

So be very careful about that being right stuff. Chances are, anybody who was right about Iraq, is right about Iran, and knows where oil is going is not at all serious. Such people are wild-eyed radicals with lots of strange, liberal ideas, and most of them are probably closet Marxists who believe the government should impose public transportation on innocent motorists.

But Is It a Cult?

"Although the authority and tradition of the Christian religion were decomposing in the New World's freedom, there was a counter-desire to escape from disorder and chaos," Fawn Brodie wrote in 1945. She was commenting on the yeasty, sometimes overwrought cultural atmosphere of early 19th-century America, which birthed two important homegrown religions, Mormonism and modern Unitarianism.

I got into a debate earlier today on the subject of Mitt Romney's candidacy, and invariably someone brought up the question of whether the LDS Church is a cult. Another poster suggested that Unitarianism is a cult.

The Mormons have two holy books. One is the Bible, the other is the Book of Mormon, purported to be an amplification and completion of the Bible.

It is, in fact, a crude hoax, badly written by an impoverished and highly imaginative New York farm boy in his early twenties, in 1829, in a mock-King James style. The phrase, "And it came to pass" occurs in this ridiculous volume more than 2,000 times. Mark Twain described it as "Chloroform in print."

The book asserts, among other preposterous claims, that Native Americans are descended from an immigrant party from among the lost tribes of Israel who journeyed to the New World. This nucleus actually spawned two groups -- good descendents who remained white, and bad descendents who turned dark. Later on the dark people, called "Lamanites," wiped out the white people.

If this isn't a cult, then I don't know what is.

Fawn M. Brodie didn't write the Book of Mormon, but she wrote the book on Mormons. An apostate who grew up in Utah and whose uncle was president of the LDS Church, her 1945 biography of the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, launched a brilliant career in the History Department at UCLA. "No Man Knows My History" is also the book that inspired me to return to college and learn how to do historical research, in 1980 when I was 40.

Brodie went on to write numerous highly-regarded biographies, especially her life of Thomas Jefferson, which for the first time broadcast knowledge of his black descendents to a wide public.

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Unlike the Mormons, still in awe of the work of their founder, Modern Unitarians have little knowledge of and less interest in their forebears such as William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Unitarian-Universalists, those hyphenated nonbelievers, are hardly a cult, though what they are is hard to say. They claim they have no creed, and look baffled when someone reminds them that believing it's best not to have a creed is in itself a creed.

I'm a Unitarian. That means I believe that if there's a God, there's only one of her. But I don't go to the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

When I was a kid I did go, with my parents, to a Unitarian church. Nearly all the members, including my parents, were atheists, and a few were agnostic holdouts. For some reason these people wanted to spend their Sunday mornings sitting in a building that looks like a church and singing songs that sound like hymns and listening to a guy who looked and dressed like a protestant cleric deliver a humanist speech that sounded sort of like a sermon. Why they took comfort in this ritual I don't understand to this day.

My point is, that's not the behavior of cultists, but simply the behavior of people who are confused, and not very introspective.

T.J. Faulkner's All-White Blues Band

We were a garage band without the garage.

The guitarist David Higginbotham e-mailed me earlier today and asked me to recall and write down everything I could about a bizarre chapter in our lives, a short-lived association with an improvised and seat-of-the-pants blues band we were part of in San Francisco forty years ago. Its official name was Mother Blue, but I always thought of it as T.J. Faulkner's All-White Blues Band.

In 1968 I was working the sandwich counter at a well-established, sleazy, and sometimes frightening dive on Upper Grant in North Beach, the Coffee Gallery. T.J. Faulkner was one of the local musicians who played there frequently for a chance to pass the hat. T.J. was tall and emaciated, with sandy blonde hair and huge John Lennon-style glasses which constantly slid down his nose. He played only slide guitar and always in the key of open D, usually the Roll and Tumble Blues, an old Delta standby, and often the first tune young kids in Mississippi learning that style try to imitate. His guitar sounded kind of like farm machinery, and his vocal style was that of a man whose feet hurt. It was definitely bluesy, and boozy.

I don't know how T.J. got wind of the fact that I knew how to play drums (although I hadn't played or owned a kit for six years). Probably my girlfriend, a plump, pretty, black-haired Jewish girl just arrived on the west coast from New York City, told him. She was always trying to promote me, even after we were married and she knew better.

T.J. introduced me to his partner, a harmonica player named Albert Ponzi who performed under the stage name Albert Rush. He had a fat wife whom he loved passionately, and was a mild and harmless person. I offered to rent a kit and show up for a rehearsal, and when I did I was surprised to discover that I could play as well as I had when I stopped drumming, six years earlier, as if I'd never missed a day.

We rehearsed, amazingly enough, in T.J.'s second-floor San Francisco apartment, and even more amazingly, never got any noise complaints, even though rehearsals were frequent and amplified. We'd show up at about ten in the morning to be greeted by T.J., trembling and shaking from heavy drinking the night before, trying to roll a cigarette and scattering Top tobacco all over the place. Then he'd give one of us fifty cents to go downstairs to the corner store to get him a quart of beer. It was the only way he could steady himself enough to play. I remember the ritual well -- a puff on the cigarette, simultaneously pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, then a quick swig on the quart bottle.

T.J. lived with his wife, a pretty woman with a shriveled leg and a perpetually fear-stricken look on her face, as if catastrophe was about to strike at any moment. She seemed to consider it her lot in life to be living with an alcoholic street singer.

There were four of us. I never figured out how we secured the services of David Higginbotham, a young, blonde, neat and fastidious North Beach hippie who managed to give the group a fairly fat sound. He played a conventional guitar -- a Telecaster I think -- with a heavy emphasis on the bass strings, to compensate for our lack of a bass player.

Our first job (if you could call it that -- we mostly played for free beer, which was fine with T.J.) was at an all-black bar across the street from the Cow Palace. That was a nerve wracking night, but it actually came off pretty well. We had about 20 songs, about half of which were variations of the Roll and Tumble Blues. We also covered "No Expectations" by the Rolling Stones, and Robert Johnson's "Walking Blues," as well as an obscure twelve-bar goodie called "Duckin' and Dodgin'" by an obscure prison singer, Hog Man Maxie. The name was soon applied to David the guitarist, whom T.J. ever after referred to as Hog Man Higgins. Probably our best songs were covers of Savoy Brown's version of "Shake 'Em on Down" and Bo Diddley's "Don't Let it Go."

After the Cow Palace job we had another beer gig in Berkeley, and then a job that actually turned into something down in Palo Alto. By that time we had an ersatz manager named Jim Rose, and when he saw a film crew shooting in the Palo Alto bar while were playing, he cornered the guy in charge and shook him down. We got about 50 bucks apiece that night.

There were also a couple of bass players, but they didn't last. One guy showed up for rehearsal, sang and played well, and obviously felt like he was better than the group, which he was. He came along for a free-beer matinee Rose fixed up for us at a little bar in Bernal Heights, and sang about half the tunes. Afterward, T.J. accused him of "trying to take over," and that was the end of him.

About this time the three-month rental on my little three-drum, one-cymbal kit was up, and I'd had enough of T.J.'s delicate condition. Whenever we played, we'd always have to get enough alcohol into him so that he'd stop twitching and be able to play fluently, then work to keep him from downing so much that he ended up on his lips. He also fought with his poor wife a lot, and the drama was beginning to get on everyone's nerves. Plus I'd just been indicted for refusing the draft and I was expecting to go to jail soon for a fairly long stretch.

I never did go to prison (I was eventually acquitted), but I was glad to be done with T.J. Faulkner's All-White Blues Band just the same. I didn't lose contact with Higginbotham (we were practically neighbors) and later on he and I were togther in even stranger adventures. But that's another story.

Tin Shackin' It

Things are very quiet in the tin shack right now. I'm using hardly any electricity; the little refrigerator is plugged in, but not running at the moment, and there's a small fan blowing the stale air from the back room. No air conditioner (I don't have one), and it's cool enough to leave the swamp cooler off all day.

I drove about a mile and a half round trip to the corner store to get cigarettes, and that's all the driving I want to do today.

Outside the wind is gusting and blowing leaves about, but that's not a noise-pollution type sound. It's both natural and seasonal. The sun is shining intensely, but with the wind the temperature will barely top 80 degrees today.

It's very peaceful and quiet here. Most of the residents aren't back from their summer travels yet, and the park's generous vegetation has assumed that shaggy, overgrown look typical of the season. There's almost no traffic, no dogs barking, and only rarely does the sound of a human voice break the stillness.

All this makes for a contemplative atmosphere, and today it agrees with me.

Mad Bombers

Billions spent on weapons systems hardware is just the beginning. Many of the 600 billions (a new record) we will spend next year on "defense" will go to the maintenance of the American Empire, and the three wars we will be fighting to expand it.

This empire consists of between 700 and 1000 overseas military bases. The official number is 702, but that doesn't count the huge installations in Kosovo and Iraq, or the more modest ones in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, and Uzbekistan. Building new bases and maintaining the old ones costs billions.

In addition, Seymour Hersh informed us this past week in his latest New Yorker article that the long-anticipated attack on Iran is imminent. So instead of going to Congress next year with multi-billion dollar funding requests for two wars, Bush will be juggling three Middle-East campaigns at once.

The attack on Iran will be a turning point in the rest of the world's relationship with the American Empire. The civilized nations of the earth will turn against us with startling unanimity. We and our empire will be isolated.

The public is now unprecedentedly alienated from the workings of what has become an imperial government. Approval for the president and the Congress are both at all-time lows. And our political system provides no remedy for this dissatisfaction.

With most Democrats voting with the Republicans for a de facto declaration of war against Iran, both parties have shown themselves to be willing tools of the military-industrial complex and the lords of empire.

Anybody who expects justice and redress of grievances from the Democrats is trying to get blood out of a turnip.

The only solution to the problems which are destroying us, the problems of militarization and empire, is for the people to take matters into their own hands. But there is no sign of revolution stirring, and no prospect of people rising up to do what was done to the old Soviet Empire in the early '90's, or for that matter, to the British Empire in 1776.

We need to break the grip of this war machine and its empire on the life and bank account of the nation.

Only when the people are able to grasp the reality of their own power and their potential to force change will the solution to our depraved and suicidal behavior be at hand, for this is behavior which manifests as paranoia, military belligerence, and a doomed attempt to dominate the globe.

The Roosevelt Manifesto

The American economy is on the brink of revisiting 1929. American citizens are increasingly running into debt in their struggle to pay the doctor, make the house payment, make the car payment, AND buy $3 gas. We have to wonder how we got here. America is supposed to be the place where everything always gets better and better.

But we've been here before, and it was the same kind of laissez-faire economics which put us in the poorhouse in the 30's that have led us to disaster today.

Addressing the prevailing wisdom that unregulated free markets will automatically solve all of society's problems, the 32nd president, Franklin Roosevelt in 1937 aggressively asserted the role of government in establishing "that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness" for everyone.

This was the second of Roosevelt's four inaugural addresses, and its lessons need to be relearned if we're going to deal with the economic disaster unwinding today and sure to intensify with the next wave of foreclosures this coming January, February, and March.

Declaring that when he took office in 1933, "We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it," Roosevelt added, "We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the long run economic morality pays."

Roosevelt skewers the notion that government regulation of business is evil, and instead insists it's necessary to "bring private autocratic powers into their proper subordination to the public's government. The legend that they were invincible—above and beyond the processes of a democracy—has been shattered."

The same kind of immoral, unregulated lending and securities practices that gave rise to the Great Depression have once again brought us to the edge of disaster. Roosevelt speaks from the grave, telling us what we need to do.

Now all we need is for the present-day political system to produce a leader with Roosevelt's stature and courage.

Until that happens, we'll have to be happy just watching the ghost of Franklin D. Roosevelt beating up the ghost of Milton Friedman.

Planning the Crime

George Grosz, "Sonnenfinsternis"

The preznit was putting out through a spokesperson today that he wants a peaceful solution to the "Iran problem." I guess the independent press still has some clout in this country, since Bush's sudden pacifism was in response to Seymour Hersh's new Iran article in the current New Yorker, which just hit the streets and the web over the weekend.

"The president has said that he believes there is a diplomatic solution that we can use to solve the Iranian problem. And that's why we're working with our allies to get there," said Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, quoted today in an Associated Press article.

Bush is lying, of course (so what else is new). Hersh's article details how he and Cheney are planning to give the orders to attack Iran very soon, and that the key to their being able to do so is the collapse of opposition to such an attack within the Pentagon.

There's a good synopsis of Hersh's article at Tom Tomorrow's site, This Modern World, which also links to the full New Yorker piece.

The most important points:

*Since the generals weren't buying their plan to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities and other infrastructure sites, the White House came up with a new plan this summer. According to Hersh, "Now the emphasis is on 'surgical' strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq."

Also according to Hersh, "The revised bombing plan for a possible attack, with its tightened focus on counterterrorism, is gathering support among generals and admirals in the Pentagon."

And that's the key: the new plan is endorsed by the brass hats, and there is virtually no opposition in Congress to an Iran attack, which proves conclusively that the current Democratic Party is the biggest bunch of Judases in American history, and possibly the biggest bunch that ever walked the earth.

I'd suggest reading the entire Hersh article. The White House, of course, is sniveling about all the un-named sources, as if Hersh's contacts in the Pentagon and White House would allow their names to be used. This is tomorrow's news today.

Last Laugh

I don't feel like adding to the hundreds of thousands of words that have already been written, spoken, and spouted concerning Ahmedinejad's visit to New York this past week and the domestic hatefest it generated. It's enough to say that the president of Iran has now been designated our current Satan incarnate, and that Saddam Hussein has a worthy successor, and one whose country contains almost as much petroleum as the dead dictator's.

I'll leave it to Dennis Perrin to sum up (from his blogpost, Booga! Booga!): "(W)hat (Ahmedinejad) says isn't important. He's merely an archetype that American politicians and their media megaphones can pelt with self-serving garbage. From Romney, to Hillary, to Rudy, to Pious Joe Lieberman, no one can overstate their case. The wilder, the better. In fact, I'd wager that Ahmadinejad is playing these and like-minded Americans for howling chumps. His ever-present grin is a giveaway."

Besides setting off ten thousand cable news replays of the two-minutes' hate, Ahmedinejad's visit was the subject of countless debates in internet discussion groups. It was at one of these I found myself entangled with a poster who referred to the Iranian prez as "subhuman scum," condemned him for homophobia among other things, then loftily opined that "some cultures are better than other cultures." I had to agree.

You have to wonder about cultures that don't lose old habits and attitudes that imperil their own survival. The Romans, for example, just kept on expanding their empire and making new enemies. It wasn't the smartest thing to do, in the long run.

An Associated Press story on the financial page on Thursday, 9/27, provided an example of what I'm talking about.

"Oil and other petroleum futures surged Thursday amid supply concerns sparked by a decline in crude inventories at a key Oklahoma terminal and the confrontation between the West and Iran."

So with oil at record high prices, we invite the prez of one of the world's largest oil-exporting countries over here so we can take target practice at him.

"Many traders are betting the West will take action against Iran before the end of the year, and worry that economic sanctions or a military strike will result in the disruption of oil supplies from the Middle East."

It's the mark of a superior culture I guess. Having allowed itself to become addicted to petroleum, the political arm of said culture responds by shooting itself in the gas tank.

Fight for Peace

Yesterday, September 21, is designated the Internatinal Day of Peace.

Of course, we're at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and maybe Iran is next if Dick Cheney has his way, so the International Day of Peace kind of got lost in the shuffle.

Now, we all know that the way to get peace is to go to war and shock and awe people with how many bombs and whizbangs you've got. Any fool knows that.

So with that in mind, On Memorial Day, 2005, President Bush urged Americans to pray for permanent peace.

"I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Memorial Day, May 30, 2005, as a day of prayer for permanent peace," he said.

This sorta reminds me of a send-up Mad Magazine did years and years ago of the teevee show, "The Rifleman."

Johnny Crawford: You shot all those people because you believe in justice, didn't you dad? That's why you do it. Because you believe in justice. Isn't that right, Pa?

Chuck Connors: No, son. I do it because I believe in killin' people.

Harajuku Girls

"Harajuku Girls" is a pop song by Gwen Stefani. It's a celebration of the trend-setting Tokyo neighborhood where fashions destined to cross the wide Pacific and invade California originate. Like most trendy, in-crowd songs, it's kind of dumb and childish.

What this has to do with the Southwest Airlines flap is not immediately apparent. Indulge me for a minute.

By now everybody is familiar with the story of the woman who nearly got kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being dressed in a way that some airline personnel thought was "too provocative."

Like most Americans, I'm a live-and-let-live type of person. I see no point in trying to control other adults' behavior if that behavior is not overtly anti-social or dangerous. I believe in minding my own business and letting other people mind theirs. And I don't sweat the small stuff.

Though we may not be aware of it, a tolerant attitude as a cultural trait is a very important facet of democracy. Describing democracy in 500 BC, Pericles of Athens (acccording to Thucydides) said: "Just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people's feelings."

Nicely said. But then I saw this gal, supposedly a victim of Southwest Airlines, on "Today," and didn't like her. A bottle blonde who works at Hooter's, she'd be rather undistinguished looking if not for the hair coloring, the makeup, and the clothing which is engineered to attract maximum attention.

"You obviously wanted attention, honey," I thought to myself, "you just don't like the kind you got."

I got an e-mail this morning from a former colleague of mine about the "latest style" in Japan. It's a type of skirt that appears to be transparent. They're actually not see-through, but are printed to create the illusion of a diaphanous material that reveals the entire body, including whatever undergarment the wearer might or might not have on, from the waist down.

"Coming soon to a Wal-Mart near you," this much-forwarded e-mail warned in a shrill tone.

So I was in Harajuku in April, and didn't see anyone wearing anything even remotely similar to what the pictures attached to the e-mail showed. "This must be a very recent development," I thought.

But an internet search turned up that these garments have been around since 2003. So why didn't I see any examples of this "new craze" when I was in Harajuku in 2007?

Because this is an internet hoax, that's why, as I soon learned by consulting Snopes.com. The Snopes entry, "Rear Admirable," even included the same pictures as were in this morning's e-mail. They've been making the rounds for four years.

Beware the internet hoax. The net makes urban mythmaking a lot easier than it used to be.

And also be reassured now that there are boundaries to people's foolishness. Despite Madonna's launching the ridiculous trend of wearing one's lingerie on the outside (presumably so the underwear police can "check it"), and Britney Spears's half-length shirts which encourage naval engagements, and men's pants that are always falling off, there are still some ways of making an idiot of oneself that are off limits.

There will be times, being as how tolerance and outrageous behavior reinforce each other, that some girl will get on a plane with her butt hanging out. My advice is pay no attention to her.

Highly Recommended

Time to take a break from the war and other depressing subjects. Onward and upward with the arts! Here are three artists no dilettante should miss.

Flannery O'Connor, IMHO, was the greatest American writer, Her mercilessly, precisely drawn characters and powers of description were frightening. She wrote a couple novels, neither of which is up to her prodigious standard. Her forte was the short story, a concentrated form that lends itself to an unrelenting intensity which no writer (or reader) could sustain for more than 20 consecutive pages or so.

All of O'Connor's short fiction is impressive, but one of my favorites is "Revelation," which concerns a middle-aged southern lady forced by violent and unanticipated events to confront her own mean, judgmental nature. In it O'Connor shows off her talent for reproducing dialect, a technique devastatingly effective when done well and disastrous when done badly.

The woman with the snuff-stained lips turned around in her chair and looked up at the clock. Then she turned back and appeared to look a little to the side of Mrs. Turpin. There was a cast in one of her eyes. 'You want to know wher you can get you one of themther clocks?' she asked in a loud voice.

'No, I already have a nice clock,' Mrs. Turpin said. Once somebody like her got a leg in the coversation, she would be all over it.

'You can get you one with green stamps,' the woman said. 'That's most likely wher he got hisn. Save you up enough, you can get you most anythang. I got me some joo'ry.'

Ought to have got you a wash rag and some soap, Mrs. Turpin thought.

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Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds recorded and performed in Natal, and their 1939 South African hit, "Mbube" (The Lion) eventually became the 1961 a.m. radio hit, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." It's accessible on Yazoo's "The Secret Museum of Mankind Ethnic Music Classics: Vol. 4, 1925-48" DVD. The original is decidedly superior to the American versions, although the Tokens' hit carries a lot of nostalgia.

Wikipedia has a wonderful page on Solomon Linda. Be sure to follow the link to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." It tells how Linda's creation was brought to America by that tireless collector, recorder, and publisher of obscure and beautiful music, Alan Lomax, and was kept alive and passed along by the eclectic folkie, Pete Seeger.

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I discovered Sandow Birk when I happened into the generally deserted and generally undistinguished Palm Springs Art Museum a few days ago. There hidden away in a pedestrian collection of western (as in cowboy) art was his "Great Battle of Los Angeles."

Birk is young (I can't find his exact age) and decidedly post-modern, which as nearly as I can figure it, means all his work is referential, frequently in a mocking but also reverent way. He sends up famous paintings and imitates without exactly copying the styles of Caravaggio, David, Goya, Daumier, and many others. He has a special flair for a kind of mock-heroic mode in the manner of Revolutionary War painters such as John Trumbull, except in Birk Trumbull's grandeur is replaced by a sort of campy sleaze, even though the hyperbolic gesturing is the same.

Birk is prolific, technically adept, in demand, and represented by major galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. His website is here.

Cornpone

Fred Thompson is the biggest zero to run for the White House since Millard Fillmore. The fact that some Republicans and movement conservatives are looking at him as their knight in shining armor shows just how desperate they are.

He's avoided debating and I don't blame him. He's got nothing to say, or at least has said nothing so far that I've heard.

For example, in an AP story from the Iowa campaign, Thompson said people around the world are looking for any signs the U.S. is relenting in combating Islamic radicals, and boldly added "It is extremely important that we not show weakness." He only speaks in vague generalities, and on this occasion was extremely careful to say not one word about the Iraq War. Presumably he believes we ought to keep doing the same thing that hasn't worked for the last five years.

Click the "Principles" tab at the Fred08 website and all you get is a long, boring essay on Federalism that takes about 10 times longer than it needs to to convey the message that Fred is a small-government conservative, like Reagan was. I've never seen a candidate so utterly devoid of ideas.

The opening page of this website, incidentally, is a masterpiece. It contains what I assume is a mission statement, an amazing string of platitudes that slither off the page and generalities that glitter, and is completely content-free.

Sort of the like the candidate.

I can see already what kind of campaign Deputy Dawg is going to run. It's going to be one of those image jobs: so here's Fred in blue jeans and a big cowboy hat, getting in his red, American-made pickup truck to go out and "mend fences" while his biscuits-and-gravy baritone resonates with meaningless bromides about, security at home and strength abroad, prosperity, keeping the government out of the people's business, mom, apple pie, and patriotism.

No plan. No ideas. Just an armload of tired, recycled chliches about big government being bad and the need to smite our enemies. Mostly though, DD is just about that southern-fried, real macho man image.

And the first time he shows up for a debate, the pros like Giuliani and Romney are gonna stick this guy in the blender and turn it on to "puree."

Decline

Bush, accompanied by Secretaries Gates and Rice, "diverted" his flight to Australia last Tuesday to make a surprise visit to Camp Cupcake in Anbar Province, ostensibly to meet with Petraeus and other brass.

However, the real purpose of the visit was to spin the U.S.'s loss of Anbar. Through the magic of public relations, Bush has turned that loss into a successful counterinsurgency campaign, which by coincidence also illustrates how wonderful the "surge" has been.

Anbar today is administered not by the U.S. military, but by the Baathist forces who have fought us to a standstill there for the last three years. They're a remarkably forgiving bunch, and seem happy to cooperate with the U.S. in return for being back in charge. This despite the destruction of Fallujah and other savage acts perpetrated against them.

From the website of Middle East expert Professor Juan Cole: "These Sunni tribal sheiks were one of Saddam Hussein's central constituencies. They supported him, provided him with manpower and officers, and benefited hugely from his largesse. They and their constituencies were the ones who suffered most from the fall of Saddam, the rise of Shiite power, the growing Iranian influence, the Kurdish efforts to recover claimed territory, the adoption of a national constitution that failed to take account of Sunni interests and the looming possibility that they will be denied what they would consider a fair share of future oil revenues."

So the Baathist Sheiks of Anbar are doing what Shi'ites and others have done before them: finding a way to get the U.S. to support their objectives.

They're getting weapons and training from the Americans, ostensibly for use against al-Qaida in Iraq. But one day when they no longer need the support of U.S. forces, they will turn those weapons against the Americans, if any are still around, and reassert the total control they lost when Saddam was toppled. They're just biding their time.

This reminds me of a passage from Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall:" "The most important condition of peace was understood rather than expressed in the treaty. Aurelian withdrew the Roman forces from Dacia, and tacitly relinquished that great province to the Goths and vandals. His manly judgment convinced him of the solid advantages, and taught him to despise the seeming disgrace, of thus contracting the frontiers..."

Also from Juan Cole, the Mahdi Army is warning U.S. expeditionary forces not to try to re-occupy the area around Basra recently abandoned by the departing British army. British casualties from IED's were extremely heavy in 2007, and the Madrists have served notice that they're quite capable of defending themselves.

The final disposition of Iraq is beginning to take shape, and the administration's "official" version is already under construction. We will, of course, declare this disastrous humiliation a victory, and head for the exits. This is the start of the end game we're seeing. Baghdad still needs to be fully resolved, although it looks like the Shi'ites will prevail there.

Then we can come home.

Looks like Bush and Cheney won't get their oil. But I'm sure they'll figure out a way to spin that, too.

Bin Laden Triumphant

On the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it's painfully clear that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, accomplished everything they hoped to achieve with 9/11 and more.

Three of the four planes hijacked in the attack struck their targets, and the two that hit the World Trade Center completely destroyed both buildings. This was, by bin Laden's own admission, more than he expected.

The United States, led by an idiot who is backed by a crew of attention defecit-disordered pirates, was manipulated into cocking back its massive right arm and throwing a roundhouse sucker punch at the wrong target. I find it hard to believe that bin Laden didn't plan this outcome also.

The Iraq War has been a more effective recruiting tool for Islamism world wide than bin Laden and others like him could ever have devised.

Bush, bin Laden said in his latest tape, is "like the one who plows and sows the sea: He harvests nothing but failure." And who can argue?

In the process of our falling into the Mesopotamian pit he dug to trap us, we destroyed one of bin Laden's old enemies (bin Laden habitually referred to him as "a socialist infidel"), then murdered him along with his depraved sons. How sweet this must have been for the "crazed" Islamist, who in today's tape looked and sounded anything but.

After six years of fruitless and disastrous war, the United States has lost nearly a trillion dollars, nearly 4,000 of its best and most passionately committed young people, its global reputation and credibility, and its ability to control events around the world by threatening military force.

Local revolutionaries and malcontents everywhere now know that a gigantic, heavily-armed, technically sophisticated war machine can be easily defeated simply by decentralizing the battlefield. This was the lesson of Vietnam. Bin Laden and other Islamists learned it. Bush and Cheney and the American arms industry never will.

Bin Laden still hasn't achieved everything he wants. He would like the U.S. to work to re-establish Sunni dominance over the Shi'ites before we leave Iraq, and he needs our "help" in bringing down the Saudi royal family. Once he accomplishes those objectives, he can die a natural death at home in bed, with a smile on his face.

Besides the work bin Laden and al-Zawahiri have left to accomplish, they have to live with the fact that nearly a million Iraqis, most of them innocent of any involvement in this struggle, have been snuffed out by the war they enabled. But bin Laden is a fundamentalist, and painful death here on earth means little to him. I'm sure he believes that God will sort out the dead, reward the virtuous, and punish the evildoers.

Bin Laden also encouraged Americans to consider taking up Islam, or at least threatening to do so, as a means of ending the Iraq War, because, he said, "as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and have begun to look for an alternative, and this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam."

Is bin Laden really our enemy? I believe he is, and so far he's won every round. He's got us outfoxed, outclassed, outmaneuvered, and tied up in so many knots we can't get out of our own way. We're going to have to play our cards a lot smarter if we ever want to have any chance against enemies as good as this guy. Because right now the U.S. is looking like, in the immortal words of Richard M. Nixon, "a pitiful, helpless giant."

Chupacabra

A woman in Texas holds up a photograph of a coyote which has died from an extreme case of mange. The animal was completely hairless by the time it expired, its abdomen distended by runaway inflammation which began on the skin but became general.

The woman insists, however, that the corpse is a chupacabra, not a coyote. The legend of the chupacabra (literally, "goats sucker"), a mythical beast said to attack and suck the blood of livestock, originated in Puerto Rico about 20 years ago.

A couple months ago I saw a similar mange-ravaged animal dead against a curb about a quarter mile from where I live. Nobody suspected that Desert Hot Springs might be infested by chupacabras, but unlike the woman in Texas, we hadn't been losing chickens to a mysterious predator.

It's only natural that we prefer romantic and exotic myths over sordid and grimy reality, and therefore understandable why, in his now-famous "Vietnam" speech of August 22, President Bush said "I'm confident we'll prevail (in Iraq) because we have the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known - the men and women of the United States Armed Forces."

The pundit Tom Engelhardt noted that this breathtaking statement, besides being the only sentence in that speech which hasn't been exhaustively analyzed by critics, historians, and bloggers, "wasn't simply passing blather for an audience of vets, but a thematic summary of the thrust of the whole address..."

"Past American presidents," Engelhardt wrote, "might perhaps have spoken of the 'greatest force for human liberation' as being 'the American way of life' or 'the American dream' or American democracy, or the thinking of the Founding Fathers. But it took a genuine transformation in, and the full-scale militarization of, that way of life, for such a formulation to become presidentially conceivable, no less to pass unnoticed, even by fierce critics, in a speech practically every word of which was combed for meaning."

He might have added that the full-scale militarization of the American polity has been accompanied by a full-scale flight from reality. To "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength," we can now add "Cluster Bombing is Liberation," then retreat into the comforting myth that free markets and the two-party system will solve all our problems.

That's certainly preferable to confronting the sordid and grimy reality.

Political Chupacabra

Examining Barack Obama's jingoistic and inflammatory remarks about Iran reported in the New York Daily News a few days ago underscores the fact that both our political parties are now sales teams for the same franchise. Both have been fatally corrupted by corporate money, and especially by "campaign contributions" flowing to candidates from the constellation of firms which comprise the petrol-military complex.

And if you wonder, as historian Gabriel Kolko does, "why the U.S. makes the identical mistakes over and over again and never learns from its errors," (for example, Vietnam, followed by Iraq) the obvious answer is that powerful people are making lots of money from those mistakes, and rigging the political system to keep making them.

"It is close to impossible to assign some weight or priority to the arms industry but it must be taken into account that the arms manufacturers have power, strategic lobbies in Washington, contribute heavily to politicians who need campaign funding, and gain financially whether America wins or loses it wars," Kolko observes.

Likewise, the oil industry stands to maximize its profits by keeping the regime of happy motoring going as long as it can, no matter how many category-five hurricanes slam the Gulf Coast. So like its dependent, the arms industry, it also contributes heavily to politicians, thus underwriting the political system which is now dedicated to making "the identical mistakes over and over again."

It's all about money, folks. Money, money, money, money, money. Money which is paid to keep us hypnotized by a political system which promises to deal with our problems at the same time it perpetuates them. Money to bribe us, so as to prevent our confronting reality.

Reality

The sordid and grimy reality is that we are warring ourselves to death.

The War on Terror, not terrorism, is destroying us. The reflexive habit of perpetual warfare is bankrupting us, has undermined our credibility around the globe, and has turned us into an immoral and paranoid tribe of savages.

At the same time our military-industrial complex pays off our politicians of both parties for the privilege of making war on the people of the Middle East and money at home, the petrol boys address their generous contributions to the same quarter so they can enable us in our continuing war on the atmosphere and the oceans.

We are not addressing our problems: habitual warfare and its attendant squandering and misallocation of resources leading to impending bankruptcy; peak oil, and global warming.

And the root problem: institutions making megabucks from our problems are bribing the decision makers to avoid dealing with those problems.

Anyone suggesting realistic solutions to the problems we face is immediately labeled "an extreme left-wing radical" by the corporate media, which works 24/7 to keep the American people in a state of ideological narcolepsy. Hence, as a people we show little interest in actually dealing with our problems.

But you can be sure, that even though we may not deal with the reality of the situation we face, reality is certainly going to deal with us.

Pulling Their Covers

An interview with Harry Reid in today's Washingon Post reveals that the Senate majority leader is now willing to "compromise" with the Republicans on the matter of troop withdrawals from Iraq.

In this case "compromise" means, "We compromised and the Republicans won."

Reid said "his previous firm demand for a spring withdrawal deadline had become an obstacle."

An obstacle to what? An obstacle to standing for absolutely nothing?

I would respectfully suggest that we boycott the Democratic Party in the 2008 elections, unless sometime between now and then they should decide to change their approach and take steps to become a real opposition party.

People like Reid are phony liberals and a phony opposition. They voice disapproval of administration policies while at the same time making sure that no effective steps are taken to change those policies, usually motivated by a desire to achieve "bipartisanship" or some such nonsense.

We had a somewhat overused but true saying back in the '60's: If you aren't part of the solution you're part of the problem. It's become increasingly clear over the past eight months that the Democrats are not part of the solution.

"Who, pray tell do we turn to instead of the Democrats?" a debater on another forum asked when I introduced this argument.

That's an honest question. And the honest answer is, right now, nobody. We won't have anybody to turn to until quite some time after we stop believing the Democrats' lies, that is, after we stop believing they're who they say they are.

That honest question echoes the plaintive statement of the popular and well-regarded Democratic blogger Digby, ("Hullabaloo", at digbysblog.blogspot.com) who admitted at one point she supports the Democrats, "because I don't know what else to do."

I think Dennis Perrin has the Democrats down cold when he says, "...the Dem leadership can't wait to show that they, too, can wage war and bomb "rogue" countries like Iran, so really, what would be their complaint -- that Bush was reckless concerning Iraq? That Bush has hurt the U.S. global image? This is about a far as the Dems will go. They don't want to indict, much less dismantle, the present system. They want control of it, to prove that they're effective managers of empire. Think the global capitol-religo war will end should, say, Hillary be elected?"

I'm one who lived through the Democrats' splendid little war in Vietnam a generation ago. I already knew what phonies they are. That's why I hate to admit that I was fooled again by these wolves in sheeps' clothing in 2006, but such was our desperation to get out from under the Bush regime.

The Democrats are, in short, enablers of war and lovers of the corporatocracy. They subscribe to this rotten system of misgovernment every bit as much as the Republicans. They just pretend not to.

But I have a feeling that their failure to end or ameliorate this war will finish them. This might be the Last Waltz.

And then, after some time passes, the vacuum left by the departure of the Democrats will be filled, but at this point we know not by whom, or what. Let's just hope we get a real opposition party this time, one that recognizes "bipartisanship" and "civility" as the pious frauds they've been all along.

The Democrats have no excuses left. It's time to cut them loose, and look elsewhere.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

In Defense of the Wrongly Maligned Senator Craig Whom We Are Sure is Being Railroaded and Abused by the Press

Here's an interesting statistic: 41 guys over a four-month period were busted for cruising in the that rest room where Larry Craig was unfairly entrapped.

So my first question is, isn't that kind of a vice squad version of a speed trap?

And secondly, why are the cops in that town spending so much of their time sitting on toilets?

You can't run down and collar too many robbers from that position, especially if you've got a "wide stance."

Be Choosy. Chew Chew-Z.

Today's GAO report is only the latest interesting development in what has been a week of them.

This morning's AP story covering the premature release of the report strongly implies that General Accounting Office personnel leaked it to forestall the administration's revising and editing of it before the public got wind of it. "The political wrangling came days before the report was to be officially released and while most lawmakers were still out of town for the August recess, reflecting the high stakes involved for both sides in the Iraq war debate," the story by Anne Flaherty says.

To put it another way, GAO personnel wanted to make sure that reality trumps the spin generated by Bush-Cheney's habitual fantasy.

"Reality," said the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, "is the one thing that, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away."

Earthlings who people some of Dick's novels have been transplanted to hostile extraterrestrial environments, and chew exotic drugs like Can-D and Chew-Z in order to escape their bleak reality, which unfortunately always returns when the drug wears off.

The boy king and his vice-Lucifer have been hitting the Can-D pretty hard for years now, but there are signs that the comedown and hangover are imminent, and assumptions that the war will continue until this pair of inebriates leaves office are up for revision.

There is now an antiwar movement inside the government and, apparently, inside the Pentagon as well. From a McClatchy News story yesterday: "In a sign that top commanders are divided over what course to pursue in Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday that it won't make a single, unified recommendation to President Bush during next month's strategy assessment, but instead will allow top commanders to make individual presentations."

We already know that General Petraeus is going to deliver a report that panders to Bush's Can-D-induced hallucinations, but the McClatchy story reveals without going into detail that a significant number among the top brass in the DoD are no longer willing to play that game. They're planning to get real, or in other words, come out against the war.

Add to that the growing opposition to the war in Bush's own party, especially among high-profile senators like Warner and Lugar, and what we're describing is a tight circle closing around the Oval Office.

Up until a few days ago I thought Bush and his Rasputin would get their way, and that nothing could prevent their continuing the war unobstructed at least until January 20, 2009. But their position is beginning to look bleak, and a combination of forces may conspire to pull the rug out from under them, and confiscate their stash of Can-D.

"Earth to George and Dick; it's time for you guys to come down."

Vapour Trails

President Bush was in New Orleans yesterday. Well, he has to be somewhere. And he told the people of New Orleans that "There are better days ahead."

He also said, "Workers of the underworld arise, you have no place to go but up." OK, I'm just kidding about that part. But he did actually say, "It's sometimes hard for people to see progress when you live in a community all the time."

I know what he means. Like most of us, I never saw myself growing when I was a kid, but there it was.

So look a little harder, people of New Orleans. If you don't see the progress, it's because you live there all the time and you're just not looking hard enough.

Aw, Leave the Poor Kid Alone

Everybody's bagging on the Miss Teen USA contestant from South Carolina, 18-year-old Lauren Upton, because she turned into mumbling bowlful of quivering curds when fielding a question about geography education, or our lack of it.

She still finished third in the pageant.

And no wonder. Ms. Upton is so devastatingly beautiful it's scary. A person like this shouldn't have to be smart and articulate as well.

In 1976, President Ford revealed during a debate with Jimmy Carter that he had only a hazy idea of what the Iron Curtain was, and didn't know that Poland was on the other side of it. Very few people made fun of his ignorance at the time, even though he was a) President of the U.S., and b) unlikely to drive anyone mad with desire.

For a chance to interview Ms. Upton on her knowledge of geography, I would climb the highest mountain, swim the deepest river, travel through the Dismal Swamp, and collapse wet, exhausted, and muddy at her feet.

I think she should immediately be named ambassador to Iran, even if she has no idea where it is. Working through a translator, she could meet with Ahmedinejad and skip the geography, instead falling back on the standard beauty-pageant default answer to all questions: "Pray for world peace."

He'd deactivate those reactors in a heartbeat.

U.S. Economy in Foreclosure

What a great economy, eh? The only thing keeping it from utter collapse right now is the steady price of oil, hovering a couple clicks above $70 for weeks now. If that takes off again...or I should say, when it takes off again this fall, look for something like real panic to set in.

The first signs of panic are already apparent. The Dow fell over 280 points today, apparently in response to the Fed's refusal to bail out the Big Money Boyz more than they have already, and lower the prime interest rate.

"There had been some hope on the Street that Fed policymakers might have sent a stronger signal that they were more willing to cut interest rates to help calm turbulent market conditions," said the radically understated AP story reporting on the free-fall.

"The task of people holding power now in the finance sector (which itself may be a conceit at this point) is to manage the rapid dissolution of hallucinated wealth in such a way that as few people as possible notice that x-trillions in dollar denominated pixels have vanished from the hard drives," says Jim Kunstler, describing the "turbulent market conditions" alluded to in the AP story with a little more gusto.

The Big Money Boyz are the ones who are going to lose all those trillions. They're the ones left holding the bag, and they should be. They're the ones who made the "sub-prime" loans, and bundled them, and sold them to people who would bundle them into securities and sell them again.

All that money isn't going to disappear without repercussions.

What's driving it? 100 Homes a day are getting foreclosed on in Southern California right now. That's the regional story anyway -- each region has its own.

The other shoe is about to drop. "(E)ven the optimists," says the LA Times story, "predict that the problem will soon get much worse."

"'We know it's coming,' said Tina Hess, the assistant Los Angeles city attorney who handles housing enforcement and problem properties."

In LA, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties, abandoned pools in foreclosed back yards are breeding mosquitos. People are afraid of West Nile virus. Plagues are descending on our unhappy, decaying country.

"(T)he damage may not occur all at once but be stretched out into the Fall of this year. Anyway, the massive amounts of adjustable mortgage resets coming down through Christmas, will blow out many more cell walls in the ailing body politic," Kunstler says.

Sam Berdino

xxxxxxxxxIts proper name is San Bernardino, and once upon a time it was an all-American city. But people who grew up there call it San Berdino, or Sam Berdino, or sometimes just Samberdino, and today it's an all-American mess.

What makes this sunny, smoggy city of 200,000 or so such a fascinating study is its prototypical decay. Sam Berdino has declined much in the same way as most of the rest of America has, at the same rate, and over the same period. Its illnesses -- pollution, a shrinking tax base, a dying downtown, the eclipse of agriculture and collapse of key industries, petroleum dependency, and a widening gap between a small, rich elite and the increasingly nonwhite and non-English-speaking mass of workers, their dependents, and other assorted hangers-on -- typify the malaise afflicting the U.S. as a whole.

If citizens of our country once considered the U.S.A. paradise on earth, then Sam Berdino was Paradise with a capital "P." When local merchants the Harris family opened their massive, palatial department store at Third and "E" Streets in 1927, the springtime air in Sam Berdino was heavy with the syrupy fragrance of orange blossoms wafting from the thousands of acres of groves surrounding this gorgeous town of 35,000. The white, heavily-ornamented Harris Building, as beautiful as it was prosperous, was a source of pride to the community as well as one of its primary economic mainstays, much as similar independent, family-owned community department stores all over the country were during the half century between 1925 and 1975.

Twenty years after the opening of Harris's masterpiece, another local Sam Berdino business took a great leap forward, one which carried with it extraordinary cultural, gastronomic, and nutritional significance for the entire country. In 1948 the brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald decided their barbecue restaurant at 16th and "E" needed something to set it apart from the other cheap eateries downtown and hatched an original idea. They called it the "Speedee Service System," and their new McDonald's Restaurant was an overnight sensation. The birth of fast food did not go unremarked by other entrepreneurs, one of whom, Glen Bell, began opening taco stands featuring the McDonald brothers' instant service system. His fast-food mini-empire culminated with the appearance of the first Taco Bell in Downey in 1962.

Another So-Cal entrepreneur attracted by the McDonalds' success was milkshake machine salesman Ray Kroc, who at first partnered with the brothers, then bought them out in 1961 for $2.7 million, and proceeded to carpet the earth with McDonald's restaurants.

By the time the McDonald brothers' new marketing idea was up and running, Sam Berdino's population had ballooned to almost 75,000 as the city was transformed once again during World War II, when it found itself with an air force installation and a major steel mill. Thanks to Congressman Harry Shepard, the city's WWII air depot was preserved, expanded, and christened Norton Air Force Base. Kaiser Steel, looking for inland plant locations during the war, built the steel factory, which was actually next door to Sam Berdino in the Hispalachian town of Fontana, sometimes called Fontucky due to its hillbilly/Mexican ambience. But the extension of the Sam Berdino freeway, also accomplished during the war, made the Kaiser mill an easy commute for the many Sam Berdinoans who found work there.

To the discerning eye, the seeds of destruction are found in the glow of success, and as Sam Berdino's orange groves and sleepy, two-lane streets gave way to steelmaking, aerospace activity, and freeways, the quality of life in Paradise insensibly declined. Plus, Sam Berdino's relationship with the great city to the west, Los Angeles, usually called "Allay" by its residents, had always been uneasy. Less prosperous Angelinos seeking cheaper rents had gravitated toward the eastern side of the basin for decades, and the increasingly dangerous clouds of toxic smog generated by Allay's auto traffic tended to drift eastward also, carried by the prevailing westerlies, only to lurch to a sudden stop against the wall of the converging San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountain ranges which stand on the city's eastern margins.

By the time Sam Berdino was designated an All-American City by the National Civic League in 1976-77 it was on its way down. Business was off at the Harris store, although it would limp along another 20-plus years, finally closing its doors for good in January of 1999. By that time Kaiser Steel was already long gone. During the 1980's production at the plant gradually slowed, and it had already gone cold by the time Norton Air Force Base was deactivated in 1994.

Today the empty, still-imposing shell of the Harris Department Store broods over the bleak vista of Sam Berdino's nighttime nightmare downtown streets, now peopled mostly by winos and crackheads. What commerce is left in the city has migrated miles to the south, to a smoggy, treeless, paved-over expanse called Hospitality Lane, a five-mile-long strip mall bordering the freeway, whose interminable vistas of fast-food joints, gas stations, muffler shops, and standard chain retail outlets are a microcosm of the complex of diseases killing the United States.

For as it turns out, the McDonald brothers' Speedee Service System, which so delighted customers and restauranteurs alike in its salad days, is now seen to be the pestilent agent responsible for the twin plagues of obesity and diabetes from which America suffers so grieviously. As for Hospitality Lane itself, like any other petroleum-dependent nexus of commerce built at the very end of the age of cheap oil, it will be a ruin by 2027, just as downtown Sam Berdino is today.

Does Sam Berdino have a future? It might. It was Paradise once, and it could be again. But if Paradise lost is to be regained, Sam Berdino has to correct it's past mistakes and do one thing differently.

Everything.

David Tweaks Goliath

No, David didn't kill Goliath this time, but that heavily-armored, overgrown, dumb, slow-moving giant is really gonna be pissed.

A New Jersey teenager spent his last summer before college figuring out how to uncouple an i-phone from AT&T. It took extensive knowledge of both software and hardware, a soldering gun, and gallons upon gallons of energy drinks, but he got the job done (story here).

George Hotz doesn't plan to seek a patent or go into business to market the unlocked i-phone. He'll leave that to others. He published a step-by-step "how I did it" series of posts on his blog.

"I believe information should be free," Hotz says, adding that his obsession with unlocking the i-phone wasn't motivated by money, but because of his resentment of AT&T's monopoly on the device. He wanted to be able to incorporate his i-phone into his family's T-Mobile plan.

Right now, "T-Mobile is the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology," the AP story on Hotz's accomplishment reports, "but smaller carriers also use the technology, known as GSM. In Europe and Asia, GSM is the dominant network technology."

So even though George Hotz won't turn his idea into a business, we can expect a mushrooming cottage industry based on his idea to materialize overnight. Droves of European and Asian i-phone unlocking businesses should spring up in the next few weeks.

And George will make a little college money from his accomplishment. According to his blog, he's planning to sell his unlocked i-phone, the one that is now an internationally significant prototype, on E-Bay.

I love it when one of our giant corporation's plans for monopolizing markets, locking out all competition, and ruling the world, the skies, the oceans, and outer space, is sabotaged by one of us. And by "us," I mean one of those insignificant and inconsequential creatures known as a human being.

Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy

Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy is the kind of neighbor most of us dread. He shows up unbidden and unannounced at various hours of the day and night, invites himself in, and then becomes a free-flowing fountain of unsolicited advice.

"You really need to get a canopy for this place."

"Why don't you get a water pik? You'd really feel a lot better if you'd clean your mouth with one two or three times a day."

"You shouldn't be eating that. You need more vitamin B12."

He also volunteers to "help you with that," which for a person as allergic to home repairs and renovations as me is vaguely threatening.

But I'm glad to have Larry as a friend. He's annoying at times, but for someone as lonely as I've been for the last few months, it's a relief to have regular human contact, even from a noodge who won't take "no" for an answer. He's tactless, but he really just wants to help. Limited intelligence, unlimited heart, and definitely an unlimited capacity for repetition.

"You know, you really need a canopy for this place. Why doncha let me help you with that? If you just go down and by the parts we need, I could put it up for you in no time."

"Larry, I already told you (five times in the last fifteen minutes) I don't want a canopy like that."

However, others who know Larry have sternly warned me: "Don't let him 'help you with that.'"

Forearmed, I was ready, when the electric motor driving my prehistoric swamp cooler burned out yesterday, to resist his relentless insistence, once he got wind of the problem, to "Let me get up there and take a look at it." I'd already determined to rid myself of that ancient, rusty artifact which has been clanking and wheezing on my roof since I moved in here over a year ago. I'd arranged for a contractor friend of mine to install a new one on Saturday, which I planned to buy first thing this morning.

But first thing this morning there was Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy at the door, demanding almost angrily to be allowed to inspect my ancient Egyptian prototype of a cooler. What could I do? I folded, and within minutes he had removed the dead motor and its auxiliary parts and sent me off to Home Depot to buy replacements.

"I'm gonna save you hundreds of dollars," was both his stern admonition and modus operandi.

And good to his word, Larry and I -- but mostly Larry -- had the machine back on line by three in the afternoon, after a second trip to the hardware store and an instructive joint effort in reconstructing the motor assembly. He's more facile with tools and machine parts than I am, but because of a learning disability he's not always able to visualize how things are supposed to go together, which I happen to be pretty good at.

So now I can stay in my tin shack again because my cooler's working, and much better and more quietly than before, I might add. But more importantly, Larry the Swamp Cooler Guy taught me something about who I am and where I'm living. I'm no longer a man of means with extensive resources, who satisfies his infrastructural requirements by hiring self-effacing and polite temporary Mexican servants to haul away the old one and install a new one. Many of the people in this trailer park are poor, or at least, like me, not rich, and we get along by repairing things and helping each other and jury rigging life's paraphernalia. Financially, materially, and ecologically, it's the only way of getting by that makes sense.

So thank you, Larry. But I gotta tell you, I still don't want that hard canopy. Sheesh.

By the way, for those readers who don't know what a swamp cooler is, a.k.a. air cooler, desert cooler, evaporative cooler, and poor man's air conditioning, see this article at Wikipedia, and click on the illustrative diagram about halfway down the page for a bigger view. The machine is really beautiful in its functional simplicity, and it only eats about one-third the electricity an air conditioner does.

Horselover Fat

In 1974 the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick went crazy after having a vision at least partially brought on by an injection of sodium pentathol he had taken to undergo a dental procedure. Thereafter he worked under the signature "Horselover Fat" (Philip means "lover of horses" in Greek, and dick, in German, means "fat"), although the books of his last eight years include interpolations by Philip K. Dick, who criticizes Fat's philosophy and personal shortcomings.

Dick's descent into insanity was no accident or Act of God, however, because he was working hard at going nuts when he finally went there in 1974. He wrote a large number of amphetamine-fueled novels in the sixties and seventies, one of which ("The Man in the High Castle") won a Hugo Award in 1963. It was included along with three others among his best books in a just-published prestigious Library of America volume, signaling that the science-fiction pulp author has now been accepted into the hushed cloisters of "great literature."

The New Yorker's editors assigned Adam Gopnik to review the new book and recap Dick's life and career, which is probably what motivated me to buy the book within hours of receiving this week's issue. Gopnik is a marvelously disciplined writer and critic whose concision, clarity, and economy insure that no reader could possibly ever misunderstand him. His comprehension of Dick's central philosophy, repeated throughout the early novels and then articulated incoherently at the end, is surpassed only by his highly concentrated and accurate synopses of it.

In Dick's most famous novels, Gopnik writes, "the future (is) like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life."

Philip Dick had no pretensions of being a great writer. His prose is boilerplate narrative, characterized by a pedestrian technique and stock characters suitable to the lowbrow genre he labored in. What makes his work valuable and timeless is his philosophy and acute perception of the eternal human condition, his recognition that there is no hope, and that technological miracles, past, present, and future, have done nothing to alter the fundamentals of existence. As Gopnik explains it, "No matter what things may come, they will be exploited, merchandised, and routinized by the force of human weakness."

History is Merciless

The study of history, unlike the studies of philosophy or religion, has no idealized aspect or aspirations of transcendence. It's simply a dispassionate catalogue of the errors, disasters, and follies of the human race, punctuated at times with traces of integrity, or nobility, or acts of compassion. The truths told by Philip K. Dick resonate with me because I already knew them, having learned them 20 years ago in the history classes taught by Dr. Will Jacobs at the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

Jacobs used to point out that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (before 1914), nearly all historians, theologians, and philsophers alike believed that the human race was on the verge of creating a second Garden of Eden, this one to encompass the entire earth, due to the tremendous burst of creativity unleashed by advances in science and technology. Then came the two world wars with their incomprehensible slaughter and, in the case of the second war, unprecedented mass murder, and history's more perceptive observers recognized that advances in science and technology had unleashed at least as much destructive force as they had creative energy.

Likewise, there is a thread running through all modern history (from the 17th century on), Jacobs taught, that explains poverty, crime, and all forms of human degradation and misery as resulting from the greed, ignorance, and violence of corrupt institutions. Voltaire railed against the corruption of the Church and the animal greed and cupidity of Europe's aristocrats, and was convinced that if those institutions were abolished a utopian society must be the necessary result. Karl Marx was absolutely convinced that when capitalism was suprseded by communism, as it inevitably would be, the only possible outcome would be a human race at last free to bask in the warmth of its own fundamental goodness. Voltaire and Marx may not have had much in common, but they agreed that human nature was basically good.

"What's obvious, when we look at the holocaust and firebombing and nuclear warfare of World War II," Jacobs said, "is that the problem is not with corrupt institutions, but with us."

"We have met the enemy and it is us," said Walt Kelly's Pogo Possum.

I would disagree with my teacher only so far as to argue that corrupt institutions are a part of the problem, but that those institutions are an inevitable product of human nature. This was Philip K. Dick's core realization, and in his work, Gopnik says, "the social arrangement of power is always that of a brute oligarchic minority forcing its will on a numbed population, with amusements the daily meal and brutality the implicit threat; for all that has changed technologically, that fatal pattern has never really altered. The future will be like the present, he had once known, and now he saw that the past was like the future, too."

"The surest sign of the madness of the world," Gopnik says, paraphrasing Dick's central message, "is the violence that we accept as normal." All ruling classes, past, present, and future, rely at bottom on violence or the threat of violence to maintain and expand their authority, and the empire has always been, and will always be with us.

How to Steal an Election

California Republicans have hatched a plan which, if successful, might enable them to hijack the presidential election of 2008.

In mid-July of this year, quietly and without fanfare, one of the state's most powerful Republican lawyers filed a ballot initiative that will, if it passes, divide California's electoral votes, awarding all but two of them to the winner of the popular vote in each Congressional district.

Currently, California's 55 electoral votes (one for each of the 53 Congressional districts; one for each of the two U.S. Senators) go to the winner of the popular vote statewide, as is currently the practice in every other state except Maine and Nebraska. Republicans have long been aware that this state's huge bloc of electoral votes totals more than one-fifth of the 270 necessary for a candidate to be elected.

The attorney who filed the initiative, Thomas Hiltachk, is a legal expert described by Jonathon Alter in a Newsweek article as one "who specializes in ballot referenda that try to fool people in the titles and fine print," has placed the measure on the June, 2008 California primary ballot, which occurs four months after the state's presidential primary (now moved up to February 5), and for which a light turnout is expected.

In his lead "Talk of the Town" column in the August 6 New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg characterized the June 3 California primary as "...a few scattered contests for legislative nominations, but the only statewide items on the ballot will be initiatives," many of which will never make it onto the ballot for lack of signatures, or because of legal language problems, and so forth. But, Hertzberg explains, "Initiative No. 07-0032 -- the Presidential Election Reform Act -- is different. It's serious. Its backers have access to serious money. And it could pass."

The Republican strategy is this: suppose the 2008 presidential race, say, between Clinton and Giuliani, is close in both popular and electoral votes. In 2004, George W. Bush lost California and its 55 electoral votes, but he won the popular vote in 22 of the state's 53 Congressional districts. So "The bottom line" of this so-called Election Reform Act, Hertzberg says, "is that the initiative, if passed, would spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes -- votes that it wouldn't get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union." And those 20 hijacked votes might just be enough to throw a closely-contested national election into the Republican column.

The initiative is sponsored by Californians for Equal Representation, a false-façade non-organization whose mailing address is the offices of Hiltachk's law firm, which represents the California Republican Party. Hiltachk is also Arnold Schwarzenegger's personal lawyer for election matters, and he has been the motive force behind many well-funded ballot initiatives in the past, including the recall that catapulted Schwarzenegger into the governor's mansion.

Both Hertzberg and Alter point out that the same sort of subterfuge, only from the other side, is occurring in North Carolina, where the Democratic-controlled legislature wants to divide the state's electors in the same manner outlined in Hiltachk's California initiative. However the stakes are much smaller there. North Carolina casts 15 electoral votes altogether, and Alter notes that only three or four electoral votes are at stake.

He adds that "At least in North Carolina it's clearly constitutional. Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that the selection of electors is up to state legislatures 'in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct,'"
a criterion the California Republicans' "Election Reform Act" doesn't satisfy, thus placing it on shaky legal ground.

Initiative 07-0032, dangerous and destabilizing as it is, has attracted little notice among the voting public so far, although it has drawn the attention of more acute pundits such as Hertzberg and Alter. Most voters tend not to pay much attention to technical issues, especially those tinged with legal complexity, such as the arcane workings of the electoral college. Maybe California's voters will wake up when the t.v. ads start running, and they're alerted to the very real danger this underhanded and misnamed measure poses.

The so-called Election Reform Act would only be fair if every other state changed its rules in the same way, and everyone awarded electoral votes by Congressional district. "If California does what No. 07-0032 calls for while everybody else is still going with winner take all by state," Hendrik Hertzberg observes, "the real-world result will be to give Party B (in this case the Republicans) an unearned, Ohio-size gift of electoral votes."

It's now clear that Karl Rove's "permanent Republican majority" was a fantasy, but as the national election of 2000 clearly showed, the party of Bush and DeLay doesn't necessarily need a majority as long as it is able to grasp the levers of power one way or another. We've seen ample demonstrations in the past of Republicans' willingness to do literally anything to exploit, gain, and hang onto political advantage.

The California Republican party is now clearly planning to steal the presidential election of 2008, and only an informed, aware, and intelligent electorate in the state where this plot is quietly gestating will be able to stop them.

Jehosephat Jones

Jehosephat Jones was rotund, porcine, oily, and lugubrious. He had numerous bare, fleshy appendages emanating from his voluminous rotundity, and his mode of locomotion was rather that of an invertebrate crustacean with circumlocutionary tendencies.

He was altogether a dreadful creature, more to be feared than sympathized with.