shearing the sheep

Like the hordes of door-to-door Bible salesmen who used to swarm through small towns in the South and Midwest, or the televangelists who now fire up the faithful 24/7 on their own cable channels, the leaders of the Tea Party movement are parlaying the rage and fear of their acolytes into immense personal fortunes.

Rush Limbaugh's lavish and steadily growing radio contract has been a feature of this landscape since before the demeaning term "teabaggers" came into use, but he has nothing on the recent arrivals in the right-wing millionaires' club -- Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Michael Steele. It's these three that Frank Rich zeroes in on in his regular Sunday New York Times column today.

After dismissing the non-scandal of Harry Reid's remarks, now ancient history, concerning candidate Barack Obama's complexion and diction, Rich homes in on the recent careers of the movement conservatives' most high-profile leaders. He details Steele's current for-profit book tour on company time and his brazen defiance of any in the Republican hierarchy who might challenge its propriety, Palin's abandonment of the Juneau state house for the greener pastures of Fox News, and Beck's on-air flacking of gold coins sold by one of his sponsors. Rich saves his choicest revelations, however, for an exposé of the upcoming Tea Party Convention and Palin's role in it:

She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.

Rich goes on to lay bare the nuts and bolts of this event, which looks like an attempt to create a sort of teabaggers' Disneyland.

The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show.

I have to wonder whether the people who consider themselves a part of this movement realize the extent to which their irrational fears are being patronized and gamed. Are any among them the same fools who voluntarily travel to Las Vegas regularly to be separated from their money?

And lest anybody think I'm calling the sincerity of the chief ideologues of this movement into question, I'm not. I'm sure they believe the stuff they're saying, even when it's obvious bullshit like Palin's "death panels." They believe that stuff as if their lives depended on it, which quality of their lives certainly does.

the body-mind connection

It's usually referred to as the mind-body connection -- a way of saying that states of mind such as chronic depression or panic attacks, besides being damaging in themselves, have adverse physical consequences as well.

But naturally the reverse is also true, and now that I'm beginning to recover from recent bouts with psoriasis, including the fear generated by watching it spread rapidly, my outlook is suddenly a lot sunnier, even if the weather isn't.

Becoming convinced that sleeping under wool blankets was aggravating the condition (which I had suspected for some tIme) I finally got motivated to go down to Feddie M's and buy a cheap cotton comforter. Voila! Two nights under that thing and those ugly red patches began to clear.

And here I thought wool would be better because it's a natural fabric. It's amazing what we put ourselves through in our efforts to be organically, politically, sartorially, and aerodynamically correct.

So yes, there is a mind-body connection, and today they're both doing about as well or better than might be expected considering my age, history of bad habits, and sexual orientation.

glenn doesn't heart sarah

Atrios has the video, and calls it "Your moment of Zen."

And so it is. Even Glenn Beck is offended by her vapid stupidity.

This is sort of like the time Couric asked her what newspapers she reads and she said "All of them."

It's a non-answer and evasion, identical to the ones I got from high school students who hadn't read any of the assigned books.

"Which one of the novels we read this year did you like best?"

One day at Fox and already she's in trouble. Good.

********(snip)*********

The White House seems an odd venue for on-the-job learning, but maybe that's what's happening.

Sounding more like a populist than he ever has before, Barack Obama today reamed the banksters, telling them "We want our money back" and proposed a new tax on the biggest banks that would recoup at least some of the money the government lost bailing out the "industry" in 2008 and 2009.

He also called the bonuses the banksters are in the process of awarding themselves "obscene."

"We are already hearing a hue and cry from Wall Street, suggesting that this proposed fee is not only unwelcome but unfair, that by some twisted logic, it is more appropriate for the American people to bear the cost of the bailout rather than the industry that benefited from it, even though these executives are out there giving themselves huge bonuses," said the President, suddenly sounding presidential.

"What I'd say to these executives is this: Instead of setting a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I'd suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibility," he added.

Let's hope he means it, because he needs to realize that adopting populist positions and then undertaking actions to match those positions is his only hope for political survival under a system in which his return to office for a second term depends basically (unless the vote is very close and the circumstances unusual) on his winning the popular vote.

Now, if he can get on the same page as the majority of Americans when it comes to other issues such as perpetual war in the Mideast, torture of detainees, and the need for a health care public option, his presidency might someday amount to something. it's a steep learning curve, but he's a talented young guy, and he might be beginning to realize he's been badly advised and misled.

the horned serpent

Just as our bodies evolved out of earlier forms, so have our minds. That the body and its constituent parts have changed over time is undeniable when we consider, for example, the appendix, which at one time served a now-unknown digestive function, but exists today merely as a vestigial remain whose only purpose, it sometimes seems, is to cause trouble.

Likewise, the human psyche has evolved from a primeval and truncated animal mind which consisted mostly of instincts and their closely associated instinctive fears, and only gradually over time acquired the capacity for rational and abstract thought. Dr. Jung in his "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams" observes that "This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind, just as the structure of our body is erected upon a generally mammalian anatomy," and adds that "(T)he experienced investigator of the psyche cannot help seeing the analogies between dream images and the products of the primitive mind, its représentations collectives, or mythological motifs."

To illustrate this principle of the persistence of pre-human elements in the human mind as they continue to manifest in even modern myths and legends such as "Superman," Jung uses the example of real dreams dreamt by a child and preserved in the form of stripped-down fairy tales. He wrote:

I particularly remember the case of a man who was himself a psychiatrist. He brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his ten-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was eight years old. It was the weirdest series I had ever seen, and I could well understand why her father was more than puzzled...each dream begins with the words of the fairytale: "Once upon a time..." The amazingly potent images of the little girl's dreamscape were as follows:

1. A "bad animal" appears, a horned serpent that kills and devours all the other animals. But God, who is actually four gods, comes from the four corners and brings back all the animals the monster has eaten.

2. The dreamer ascends to heaven where people are celebrating pagan dances, then descends to hell where angels are doing good works.

3. A mob of small animals comes to frighten the dreamer. They then grow to a huge size, and one of them eats her.

4. A mouse is penetrated by worms, then snakes, then fishes, then humans. Then the mouse becomes human.

5. She looks at a drop of water under a microscope and sees that it is full of branches.

6. A bad boy has a lump of dirt, from which he breaks off pieces to throw at people passing by. When they get hit, they also become bad.

7. A drunken woman falls into the water and comes out sober and changed into a better person.

8. In America, many people are rolling on an ant heap and getting attacked by the ants. The dreamer panics and falls into a river.

9. She is in a desert on the moon, and sinks so far down into the dirt she ends up in hell.

10. She touches a shining ball she sees in a vision. Vapors come out of it, then a man comes and kills her.

11. She is very sick, and birds come out of her skin and cover her completely.

12. Clouds of gnats hide the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one, which then falls on the dreamer.

A person would have to be singularly unimaginative or obtuse not to see the mythological elements in several of these dreams, or the shortened stems of fairy tales and legends of monsters, trolls, magic animals, and elves. Some are fairly easy to interpret, such as number five, which appears to be a very short version of the origin of the earth.

Keep in mind that all these wonderful and powerful images sprang fully formed from the mind of a child. One might argue that she had absorbed some of these ideas from religious education, but Jung reports that her parents were the type of moderns who knew the Bible only through hearsay, and were not at all religious. She could only have gotten these images and "stories" as she styled them from the subconscious, primeval, and instinctive regions of her mind. This is the stuff dreams are made of, and nothing reveals the evolution of the human mind so well as the persistence and consistency of this kind of subconscious imagery from prehistory and beyond down to the present.

noozertainment

Over the past few years it's become more and more difficult to tell the difference between news and entertainment, because to a large extent news has actually become entertainment. The management at all four major networks (I'm including CNN, but not FOX) now require that their news divisions turn a profit. Or else!

Gone are the days when networks and local stations expected news programs to have lower ratings than, say, "Your Hit Parade," or "Saturday Night at the Movies." Station and network managers knew back then that the news was serious. And without saying so, they were very much aware that a lot of the public finds anything more serious than "American Idol" boring, and they made allowances for that reality.

Fast forward to today's bean-counting TV execs saying, "Oh, no! Not boring! We can't have that!"

So we see media frivolity mirrored on internet political discussion sites, where partisan one-upsmanship and juvenile name-calling often replace serious debate. But that's only because some in those places take their cues from the mainstream media. What would you expect from people who get most of their information from TV?

A lot of the time the only way a viewer can tell whether he's watching "CBS Evening News" or "Entertainment Tonight" is by i.d.'ing the anchorbabe -- is it Katie or Mary?

Glenn Greenwald wrote an excellent column on this topic today at Salon.com, in the process of reviewing a new book, "Game Change," by a couple of high-profile "political" reporters. Apparently it's a shallow, sensationalist gossipfest which pretends to be serious political reporting. Greenwald says:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment (sic) and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book, Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is poring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

This is happening at a time when the U.S. is threatened with several crises simultaneously, any one of seriously threatens our continued existence as the kind of nation we've historically been. And instead of serious examination of these issues from our corporate media, we get political gossip about a dumb and careless statement concerning race made by Harry Reid, global warming denial, partisan bickering of the "we're good and you're bad" variety, blame game evasions and general incomprehension of the ongoing economic collapse, and pants-wetting childish monster-under-the-bed cowardice over terrorist attacks that misfired. The economic and social ramifications of peak oil, and a looming world-wide food shortage are not deemed worthy of even the slightest mention.

I know we can do better than this. But we'll have to re-transform ourselves back into adults and outgrow news as entertainment if we're going to deal adequately with what we're up against. The consequences of refusing to do so may well be catastrophic.

Click on Tom Tomorrow's "Action McNews" for a larger (and legible) view.

Winter Break

It was an unusual winter's day today in Seattle. It's not just that there was no rain; that happens often enough. But additionally, there was actually some sunshine -- weak sunshine, partial sunshine, but sunshine nonetheless. And the temperature rose to an unwinterly 54 degrees, so that it felt almost warm outside.

That was the signal for the sun-starved Seattle techno-proletariat to throng to Green Lake and enjoy an unanticipated and serendipitous winter's break. We may not have another weekend like this until April, and maybe not even then, and everybody who's lived here longer than a year is acutely aware of this. So out came the sneakers and sweat pants, the dog's leash and little Howard's tricycle, and by eleven the three-mile walkway which circumscribes the lakeshore was crowded with hikers, bikers, dog-walkers and baby-strollers, all smiling, jostling one another politely and somehow never colliding as they navigated the narrow pathway, which is divided by a white line, just like a regular street, so as to accommodate people moving in both directions.

Have you ever noticed that most of us habitually travel a circuit like this in one direction or the other? For me it's always counter-clockwise. Walking the lake the other direction would feel wrong.

The lake was perfectly still and reflective today, since there was no wind. There were no wavelets or turbulence of any kind -- not even a ripple.

A day on Green Lake in pleasant weather is enough to restore one's hope in both humans and the natural world. It's not exactly what's called "Getting back to nature," because the lake's intensely urban setting makes walking it the type of experience I call "nature-lite." But the combination of water and sun and exercise seems to bring out the best in people, and the rarity of such days at this time of year seems to awaken a gentler side of the psyche than is generally elicited by the abrasive and stressful nature of city life.

We're supposed to have the same weather conditions tomorrow as we had today. How convenient, for this winter's break to occur exactly, precisely bookended by the two weekend days, before the darkness and rain descend again on Monday.

helpless

On an internet discussion board, a frequent poster started a thread asking what this country might do "To form a more perfect union." I suggested the key, not just to a more perfect union, but to a country we can live with, required our banishing private money from public politics. I suggested a Constitutional amendment requiring all candidates to run short, exclusively publicly-funded campaigns.

So of course, almost immediately someone replied, Private money cannot be banned from elections. It can be driven under the table even farther than it is now. The rich are always has a lead on power.

At what point did the U.S. become the "Can't-Do" capital of the world?

Anytime anyone these days points to something this country needs to accomplish in order to begin functioning again, such as providing universal access to health care for its citizens, or dealing adequately with the twin crises of global climate change and peak oil, or banning private money from public elections, somebody else pops up immediately to say "Oh, that's impossible, we'll never be able to do that."

We used to be a country that believed in itself, and we thought we could do anything, sometimes to a fault. When did we change into a country and a society where people sit around thinking up reasons why something can't be done?

"Oh, it's because you need 60 votes in the Senate to move it to a vote." (Well, change the goddam Senate rules then.)

"Don't you understand? That's impossible. We'll never do that." (Wasn't it true 110 years ago that humans would never fly because it was impossible?)

So don't tell me that bribery and corruption can't be driven out of politics because we can never get rid of 100 percent of it. I know that. But if we're determined we can eliminate most of it, and furthermore public attitudes, once directed to the severity of the problem, can reconfigure so that bribers and influence peddlers have about as much social status and social approval as child rapists.

I'm not the least bit interested in hearing why we can't do this or that. What I want to know is how we're going to get it done.

See also Orville Schelle's essay at TomDispatch, "The Melting of America: The Story of a Can't Do Nation."

too much information

Went duckin' and dodgin' through downtown Seattle traffic today and somehow got to Virginia Mason Hospital, where I'm now in the waiting room for an appointment with the physical therapist. Like a lot of other things, downtown Seattle is doable if you plan for it. But don't plan too much -- you might outsmart yourself.

It's been another week of dealing with businesses and agencies who either couldn't get my change of address straight, or thought I hadn't paid a bill that I took care of a month ago. This difficult process used to be easy, back in the days when we all wrote checks and mailed 'em in. There was always a space on the back of the bill where you'd write in your new address and that was that -- somebody at the electric company or the phone company or the magazine wrote down the new address on your file card and life went on. Then came the cyber age, and...well, you know the tune as well as I do, I'm sure. Everything that used to be simple is now immensely complicated.

It seems to me that our present-day mania and obsession with total control has paradoxically led to its opposite -- a loss of control. Formerly simple processes, which were vulnerable to the occasional clerical error, have been overlain with layers of complexity intended to make them fail safe, and loaded with automatic, "system-generated" responses which are frequently confusing or wrong.

But that's progress.

Glenn Greenwald's Salon column today addresses this same phenomenon and its disastrous effect on the nation's security and intelligence services, as evidenced by the Christmas Day Underpants of Mass Destruction fiasco.

Greenwald writes: As numerous experts...have attempted, with futility, to explain, expanding the scope of raw intelligence data collected by our national security agencies invariably impedes rather than bolsters efforts to detect terrorist plots...for two reasons: (1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots.

The whole column is worth a read, since it deals not just with the issue of too much information, but also with the fact that much of this irrelevant, useless, and in-the-way information is illegally gathered for no good reason. The scareder we get, the more we violate the rights of our own citizens while tying ourselves in panic-stricken knots.

Bogged down in the minutiae of intercepted phone calls and yards-long watch lists, our swollen security forces, whose various and sundry agencies either can't or won't communicate with each other, missed the Nigerian kid whose own father had tried to warn them about him, and left him a gap in the system a pregnant rhinoceros could have run through.

This is where mass mania and social obsession of any kind leads, to a society that can't get out of its own way.

Reluctant Motorist

Go here to get Tom Tomorrow's astute comments and contemptuous opinion of the cowardly and childish Underpants of Mass Destruction hysteria.

I was thinking about flying to the southwest this spring, but now it looks like I'll have to drive instead, even though driving is tough for me.

And no, it's not because I'm afraid of being blown out of the sky by terrorists. It's because I refuse to submit to a bunch of stupid, hysteria-driven TSA torture rituals.

If the terrorists really want to take me out my car is easy to spot, even though the license plate no longer says NSECTO.

Glurk

Early January in Seattle. This is the season for what I call "the glurk."

A lot of people begin to suffer from seasonal affective disorder, or S.A.D. this time of year. A lot of others, like myself, don't have symptoms of full-blown sad, but become gloomy and kind of sloppy, just like the weather outside.

Here's a view of the downtown skyline, or maybe I should say "glurkline," from West Seattle. On a sunny day it's gorgeous, and even now it's kind of impressive.

The city is still beautiful, especially after dark, which comes very early now. The thousands of lights shimmer and seem to vibrate subtly in the wet atmosphere. However, driving out to see it after dark in this weather is not the wisest idea.

Still, a good thing to do when it's wet and cold like this is arrange to meet friends in a warm, brightly-lit, somewhat noisy restaurant for a good, solid meal washed down by lots of hot coffee. It's great party weather. The Salish Indians used to repair to their long lodges in the late fall for the winter round dances. They filled up on salmon they'd smoked during the summer and thanked the deities for their prosperity, wholly a function of the primeval abundance of this land and this gentle, inland sea.

Some salmon smoked the traditional way by the Duwamish, in a pit lined with alder leaves to hold in the smoke from the embers of green alder twigs, would be good right now. But I'm having spaghetti from Central Market instead, and I'm not complaining. We do complain about winter here, but I'd still rather be in Seattle than in Minnesota or Chicago or even Santa Fe.

forward and backward

Today is a Palindrome, that is, a day whose date reads the same from right to left as it does from left to right.

01/02/2010

This century is fairly rich in Palindromes, having 12. The last one was October 2, 2001. But prior to that you have to go all the way back to August 31, 1380 to find one.

And no, it is NOT named after Sarah Palin. You're confusing it with Palindrama.

Don't even get me started on the very mysterious number number 34.

Dwight Eisenhower was the 34th president of the U.S. He was easily the wisest and quite possibly the best president of the postwar era, and a conservative Republican. Now there's a great mystery for you right there.

With a wave of the litter scoop to the Seattle Times

Illustration by Julie Paschkis

happy new decade

Thank God the double-zips are over. One advantage of the new decade is we can now go back to using two two-digit numbers to name the year we're in, just like we did back in 1992, rather than saying "2000-this" and "2000-that."

So happy twenty ten, everybody. It looks to be both better and worse than the last couple of years have been.

One reason Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is such an infernally long book is because it took the Empire so long to fall. It was such a gradual process that it led one wag to observe that "Rome fell without a sound." Likewise, the Empire of the Pentagon and Wall Street is taking its time unravelling, and either it or its zombie will be around for a while yet.

There's precious little for revolutionaries to do these days. There's not much need to recruit volunteers to help bring down the Empire, since the people running it seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

2010 Will see no improvements in what used to be called The Economy. That sound reminiscent of the other shoe dropping will be the crash of commercial real estate coming on line, compounding the twin phenomena of paralysis in the residential real estate markets and intractable unemployment. Hard times are here to stay, because this is not a downturn, but a collapse, and unless you're in the retail grocery business or working a family eats-style restaurant, you're looking at no job, or one which yields fewer rewards for more work.

The good news is that a lot of people are changing their behavior to adapt to changing conditions, and many who aren't drowning in debt or foreclosed onto the street actually seem happier now. With their hours at work cut back, and making less money, folks adjust by driving less, shopping less, cooking and entertaining at home, and taking the dog and kids for a walk in the park rather than ferrying the little ones to ballet lessons, soccer practice, firearms training, and so forth. Family life and scenes of seedy domesticity are all the rage in this crumbling economy, and as long as there's enough money for food, affluence can go fish.

Is it possible we can be happier with less? That goes against the Gospel of Affluenza, but the truth is you'll never know what life is all about if you spend it behind the wheel of a moving vehicle in suburban traffic.

crazy heart

Rush Limbaugh is said to be resting comfortably this morning in a Honolulu hospital. He suffered an apparent heart attack yesterday while vacationing in Hawaii.

I suspect too much weight, excitement, rage, and viagra are to blame, and maybe a few too many Mai Tais. He can probably still live a long and comfortable life, but he'll have to make some major changes in his lifestyle, or lack of it.

I wonder if this is the end of his radio career. I would caution him against the emotional pumping up he habitually indulges himself in. Maybe he could work as a smooth jazz deejay.

He picked an appropriate time to experience a life-changing event. The moon is blue, the worst decade in living memory is over, and we could use some peace and quiet, the better to seriously contemplate where we're going from here. To do that, we need an atmosphere free of the hysterical static spewed out by the false and greedy prophets of the past decade.

good old daze

On a discussion forum I sometimes frequent, a poster is outraged over Bill Clinton's continued popularity, and asks How can it be that President Bill Clinton (1992-2001) is still such a popular man not only in the United States but throughout the world?

I'd be popular too if I'd been president of the U.S. at a time when the illusions of permanent prosperity and effortless American domination of the world were riding high. Life was real easy then, and there was no reason to assume it would ever end.

During the Clinton 90's it seemed that everybody was working, there were no wars except a kind of a low-grade ongoing rumble with Iraq, plus a little, short war in the Balkans, in which the U.S. sustained no casualties. Those were for Clinton, a draft dodger, to establish his war cred, essential for any American prez. But military spending was way down in those days, and we all benefitted from that.

Gas was cheap and it looked like the party would go on forever. We worked, shopped at the mall, acquired houses full of useless junk, made love, drank, and sang. We saw the peace and prosperity on the surface and didn't think about how thin and fragile those things were, or about the structural instability and insecurity they rested on. It was a time when we could enjoy our illusions.

The worst thing we had to worry about was a gob of spooey that happened to end up on a blue dress that belonged to a pudgy bim.

Then George W. Bush stole an election, and the world went to shit. That was the overture for the double zeros, and it set the tone for the decade from hell.

And you ask why Clinton is popular? How could he not be?

are we there yet?

Now that predator drone attacks have become Obama's murder weapon of choice, it's worth asking whether he's a reluctant or an enthusiastic terrorist. He's obviously a prisoner of his own military when it comes to deciding what wars to pursue and how, but naturally keeps his feelings about his servile status hidden from public view.

The predator drone aircraft firing hellfire missiles at people on the ground these days along the Pakistan-Afghan border and in Yemen is the perfect weapon for our timid president. It's a cowardly, ignoble, and anonymous sort of killing machine, supposedly aimed at al-Qaida higher-ups, but invariably it mostly wipes out civilians.

What would happen if Obama said "No" to these degrading drone sorties? What would happen if he said "No" to the war in Afghanistan, and our growing military involvement in other places in the Muslim world such as Yemen and Somalia? The historical example of the emperor Pertinax might help us answer that question.

Publius Helvius Pertinax was a virtuous but severe Roman soldier who acceded to the throne of the Empire in late 192, 200 years after the death of the Roman Republic. Humbly born but distinguished by superior merit and toughness, Pertinax rose through the ranks of the army, and served as governor of the far-flung provinces of Syria and Britain as well as two other lesser known places. His career was marked by his honest and incorruptible administration, informed by the personal qualities of discipline and humility, and though a product of the Empire he seems to have looked for his role models to the greatest and most illustrious leaders of the long-vanished republic. In the decade of the 180's he became one of the leaders of the Senate.

We learn from the Historia Augusta that Pertinax fell victim to political intrigue when the praetorian prefect (commander of the troops stationed in Rome, the Praetorian Guard) Sextus Tigidius Perennis forced him out of public life. He was recalled after three years to Britain, whose army at the time was in a state of mutiny. He tried to quell the unruly soldiers there but one legion mutinied and attacked his bodyguard, leaving Pertinax for dead. When he recovered, he punished the mutineers severely which led to his growing reputation as a disciplinarian. When he was forced to resign in 187, the reason given was that the legions had grown hostile to him because of his harsh rule. This series of events foreshadowed his end, but was forgotten when he returned to hold the highest offices in Rome once more, including the consulship, at the end of the 180's.

Upon the violent death of Commodus, the degenerate and corrupted son of Marcus Aurelius whose worthless life was snuffed out by a palace plot, Pertinax found himself named Emperor by the Praetorian Guard, who had long since usurped that prerogative from the Senate. The new emperor was expected to give a large "donative," or gift, or more bluntly, bribe to these "service" men, who from the end of the first century C.E. increasingly held the state hostage. But when he discovered the treasury was nearly empty thanks to the personal excesses of his predecessor, and being the sort of administrator who by natural inclination found corruption and bribery repugnant, Pertinax refused to come across with the cash. Edward Gibbon sums up the short reign of Pertinax with the well-balanced observation that "A hasty zeal to reform the corrupted state, accompanied with less prudence than might have been expected from the years and experience of Pertinax, proved fatal to himself and to his country." When the Praetorians realized they were not going to get their usual payoff from the tough old soldier, 300 of them rushed the palace gates and unceremoniously killed him. His reign had lasted 86 days.

Following the death of Pertinax, the Praetorians overestimated their power over the government and managed to insult what little pride that degenerated and dissipated generation of Romans had left, by selling the emperorship to the highest bidder. It was purchased by a rich businessman, Didius Julianus, whose short reign likewise ended violently, and set off a train of events generally referred to as the Year of Five Emperors.

Would Barack Obama meet a premature end if he refused to go along with the Pentagon's unstated policy of perpetual war? Would he have some sort of accident? We'll never know, for Obama possesses neither the spine nor the heart for such a confrontation. But someday before too long, someone will, and then we'll find out whether our own Praetorian Guard is still under the control of the civilian authorities, or whether, like the Romans on the eve of the third century C.E., our ass now belongs to them.

christmas time is here

I don't want to go all negative by getting into a description of the dreadful occasions wrought by the ghost of Christmases past, so I'll just say that the holiday of all holidays was great this year, so much so that I felt like Christmas is finally what it's supposed to be.

The emphasis was on the family gathering and the shared meal. My sister Chris and I are now the matriarch and patriarch of the clan, which includes six nephews and nieces, one grand niece, and occasional attached boyfriends or girlfriends. Missing this year were my other sister Sue, recovering from knee replacement surgery, my nephew Trevor, working as a cook at a Colorado ski resort, and my daughter Rachel, snugged up with her boyfriend in their new Portland, Oregon home.

The gifting was short, limited, and more symbolic than lavish. That's as it should be. This holiday is not about stuff (not if I can help it).

It was so much fun I'm already looking forward to next year, and hoping everybody can be there, and there's no roster of the missing. This family, like so many others, has been fractured and divided so many times over the years that it's ready for an extended period of healing and growth.

God bless us every one.

real journalism

Is there anyone left still doing real journalism in the U.S.?

What I'm asking is whether there's anybody doing the hard work, research, and fact checking necessary to get to the truth of complex and contentious issues. I'm asking if there's anyone left who's humble enough to do this work outside the glitzy, personality-driven, showbiz and celebrity atmosphere of the TV newsroom. I'm also asking if there's anyone who retains that most important journalistic trait, independence, which enables a reporter to examine and investigate the sometimes preposterous claims of government sources and people in authority, and then report on the truth or falsehood of those claims, as the reporter understands such truth.

I'm happy to say somebody is doing just that. This morning I learned from Atrios that today's New York Times front-page article recounting the recent crimes of Goldman-Sachs drew heavily on information reported two months ago by the McClatchy News Service's Greg Gordon. McClatchy is the best, and as far as I can tell the only national news service still doing real journalism in this country today. They're a national newspaper chain -- 30 dailies mostly in medium-sized cities -- and their website is an invaluable source of independent and honest reporting. McClatchy is nothing less than a precious national resource.

The Goldman-Sachs article referenced above is a gem. It's long and detailed, but written so clearly and cleanly that the complex scams run by Goldman to defraud their investors become easily comprehensible to laypersons, and the arrogant criminality of the banksters is suddenly illuminated by the full light of day. How Henry Paulson, later Bush's Treasury Secretary, sold "securities" known as collateralized debt obligations, backed by subprime mortgage loans, to unwary investors, how he was able to tout them as "triple-A rated" after bribing the ratings agencies to become accessories to the scam, how he knew these "securities" were on the verge of tanking, and how he purchased billions worth of insurance bets known as credit default swaps against losses connected with those so-called securities with his left hand even as he was selling this garbage with his right hand, is all laid out in Gordon's expertly crafted piece, and I would highly recommend anyone remotely interested in these nefarious doings read the whole thing.

Those of us who respect and admire real journalism haven't forgotten that during the run-up to the Iraq War, when CNN's Wolf Blitzer was cheerleading for the administration and echoing their WMD claims, when Chris Matthews at MSNBC was echoing Cheney's and Rice's ridiculous assertions about "mushroom clouds," and when the holy New York Times was running front-page articles by Judith Miller, who was only too happy to act as the Bush administration's lead stenographer in spreading these lies, McClatchy was the only news outlet to question the administration's propaganda, and to debunk some of the more outrageous lies and obvious fabrications coming out of the White House. That kind of courageous independence and commitment to the truth is almost, but not quite vanished from the news business, but as long as we have McClatchy American journalism is still alive.

Here in Washington McClatchy owns four papers including Tacoma's News-Tribune, an excellent daily out the state's third-largest city, the Bellingham Herald, and the daily paper in Olympia, the state's capitol.

Also in the New York Times this morning was an editorial whose apparent purpose is to perpetuate the lie of the Iranian nuclear threat. Somebody call McClatchy.

bellyview bounce

I crossed the Lake Washington Floating Bridge today and went to beautiful, scenic Bellevue (sarcasm alert). Ordinarily, visiting Bellevue is not high on my list of priorities, since it's a) a suburb, b) ugly, c) like a transplanted slice of SoCal; even the name is redolent of places like Glendale, Newport Beach, and Vista Mierda; d) traffic is bad, and e) I usually get lost there, and become terrified that I'll spend the rest of my life driving around Bellevue, trying to find my way back to the bridge and having to pee.

But I really needed to go there today, because I felt it was mandatory for me to visit my dear sister, lying in a hospital in Bellevue recovering from yesterday's knee replacement surgery. But I dreaded going so much that I was nearly decided not to. I had been warned that traffic would be unusually bad, that the hospital itself was one of those huge, hopelessly spread out medical-industrial complex campuses, with an inscrutable archipelago of parking satellites, and so forth.

But in the end I was shamed into making the trip, by reflecting unfavorably on my own selfishness and by the firm conviction that it wouldn't be as bad as the time we went to see Rachel dance at the Gypsy Den in Santa Ana and spent five hours crawling through LA in stop-and-go traffic on a Friday evening, unable to get out of the car, taking turns crawling into the back seat and peeing in a bottle.

I wasn't about to take the bus, though, I can tell you that. Or I should say the three buses it takes to get there. I figured it would be hard enough even if I made it as easy as possible, and I hate challenges.

In the end the whole thing turned out to be as easy as a walk in the park. After consulting internet maps, I knew right where I was going; traffic was light, parking at the site was no problem, and finding my sister's room was a piece of cake. My sister seemed happy and is recovering comfortably from yesterday's surgery. We had a great visit, and I even enjoyed some of the scenery in Bellevue, although I must add that inevitably the only scenery worth looking at over there is bipedal.

It really helps to be a pessimist in these situations. When things are as bad as you expected, you're mentally prepared, and if instead all goes well you can allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised.

art imitates death, destruction, and dissolution

From what I'd read about it on line and in the papers, my first impression was that the new, "blockbuster" movie Avatar was just another special effects orgy to avoid. All I ran across was people raving about the film's numerous visual gizmos, whiz-bangs, and eyeball candy.

Yesterday I got my wake-up call from Kunstler -- this one's actually got real content, and what it says about who we are and where we're at will blow your socks off. Say no more, Jim: I'm there.

They say (and you know who "they" are) that art imitates life. In our own time, in this ruined world, in this confused and clueless society, living under this rotted hulk of a government, there ain't much life, so art is forced to imitate death and decay. A world, a society, and a government, all of which suck, is the hand today's artists have been dealt, and they have to change their approaches to match changing conditions.

Avatar is about humans (who are unmistakably Americans) invading a far-away planet (for "planet" read "country") called Pandora, on behalf of a giant, predatory, corrupt corporation back home, in order to steal that place's most valuable resource, a precious mineral bearing the wonderful name unobtanium. The invaders apparently need this stuff to be able to continue leading the lifestyle they've grown accustomed to back on the "homeland" planet, and will do anything to get it. That includes (of course) massacring all the nine-foot-tall, blue humanoid creatures who inhabit the place, called Na'vi, a simple and harmless race who for some reason are not kindly disposed to our intention of looting their planet.

Does any of this sound familiar? If it doesn't, you're not conscious.

I'll let Kunstler, who's actually seen the thing, post the review. After noting that the audience went wild with delight over what they'd just seen at the end of the movie, Jim says:

It seemed to me that they were applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show -- but in the story itself they had just watched the US suffer a humiliating defeat on a distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.

More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid, detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of nature. Nice. And the final irony was that (director James) Cameron had used theatrical technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America's broader techno-grandiosity -- as the army's brute robotic warriors fell to the spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens. Altogether, it was a weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight, too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.

Nothing surprises me any more, and I don't doubt that Americans are quite capable of uncorking a standing ovation after watching themselves metaphorically get ground into the dirt like a cigarette butt.

This sounds like fun, and I eagerly await seeing it at the first opportunity.

sol renewed

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, or shortest day of the year. Here in Seattle, the heart of darkness, it was cloudy and rainy today, and dark by four.

The darkness is more complete in Alaska, but you don't notice it as much because everybody is indoors almost all the time up there from November on through to April.

December 21 is the day the sun dies and is still, but only for a day. He's reborn on December 22, and begins his new life, working toward full fruition on the other side of the year, 182 and 3/4 days up ahead. His death and rebirth were observed and anticipated by humans watching the skies even before history began, and holds the secret of the origin of our most important religious beliefs, rituals, and celebrations.

They've been telling two myths around the shores of the Mediterranean since time began. One is about the soldier hero who fights in an overseas war, then gets lost with his men and runs into a bunch of snags attempting to sail home, and wanders around the sea for years. The other is the story of a god who dies and then comes back to life, and that one originated in the winter solstice.

Resurrection

I'm not going to write a review of Allen Toussaint's "The Bright Mississippi," easily the most talked about record to come out this past year. Plenty of other people have already done that, and there are some pretty good reviews posted at Amazon.

For rock-and-roll hall-of-famer and New Orleans native Toussaint, now 71, "Bright Mississippi" caps his 50-year career as a record producer, music arranger, composer, and studio musician in New York and New Orleans, during which most of his energies were directed to soul, funk, and R&B projects. "Bright Mississippi" is his first foray into the type of music I like to call American classical, and the 12 tracks on the disc are much more than just song titles. Each is a "signature" tune closely associated with a musician possessing significant historical cred, so that the track list is also a roster of this music's greatest names: Egyptian Fantasy (Bechet), Singin' the Blues (Beiderbecke), Winin' Boy (Morton), West End Blues (Armstrong), Blue Drag (Django Reinhardt) and Solitude (Ellington) are augmented by standards that everybody has played, such as St. James Infirmary and Just a Closer Walk with Thee.

It's all instrumental except for one vocal track, and although the instrumental attack is intense in places (Toussaint's piano playing especially), it goes down very easy.

However, the greatest importance of this carefully-chosen sampling of American classical pieces, which has generated such a surprising amount of buzz and excitement for an instrumental collection, is not just musical. Toussaint has made a a couple of emphatic statements with this record; one is "This music is still important;" the other is "We're still here."

Even as the American Empire totters toward its grave, American culture, as embodied in the musical heritage of New Orleans, has shown itself to be not just still alive, but vigorous, fresh, vital, and robust. Washington D.C., the national epicenter of corruption and the shell which houses a now nearly totally dysfunctional government, may have forgotten about New Orleans, but New Orleans refuses to go away, and in fact will be back on her feet and stronger than ever when Washington D.C. is a haunted ruin.

Our government, saddled with debt, crippled by Byzantine rules, protocols, and procedures, addled by war, overrun by lobbyists and rotten with payoffs and corruption, now seems a fragile and ephemeral thing. Who knows how much longer it can last before it declares bankruptcy and awaits the rush of creditors hoping to salvage something from the general ruin? But the music, literature, and language of America is made of much tougher stuff, and is in no danger of passing away.

We'll still have a country here, even if we might not always have a government. I'm not worried about America.

We're indebted to Allen Toussaint for celebrating the most classical and traditional music of our precious heritage in such an appropriately reverent and well-timed manner, and the titles on this record are like a strand of jewels.

And after this temporary, de facto, rotted, and dysfunctional government has passed away and Washingon D.C. is a ruin, we should locate the capitol of the new government that replaces it in New Orleans, where the heart of America's cultural heritage still beats.

the sun sets on the empire

It wasn't very long ago that American wars were fought by American soldiers and sailors, but not any more. A new book by Jeremy Scahill reveals the extent of involvement and details the specific activities of the Blackwater Corporation and its fascist warlord/Christian crusader honcho, Erik Prince in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's a sobering story, and one that convinces me that the Evil Empire of the Pentagon is on its last legs.

Blackwater is far from being the only corporation providing mercenaries and hardware in the war-for-oil effort; it's just the most high-profile of the bunch. Even such mundane duties as KP and driving trucks are seldom done by armed services personnel any more; the petro wars are being fought on contract, and also by local auxiliaries, who take on an increasingly important role as these perpetual conflicts wind toward the end of their first decade.

Edward Gibbon, in his great and famous history of the decline and collapse of Rome, notes that "That public virtue" called "patriotism is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members." And as lately as the Desert Storm campaign of the early nineties, American military action was almost exclusively undertaken by just such citizen-soldiers as Gibbon describes. So Iraq, now largely a mercenary operation, and Afghanistan, where much of the burden of war is borne by either contractors or mercenary auxiliaries, are radical departures from our recent past.

Gibbon also adds that "Such a sentiment (patriotism), which had rendered the legions of the (Roman) republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince, and it becomes necessary to supply that defect by other motives..." Chief among these "other motives" of course is hard cash, and recently the American command in Afghanistan were shocked to discover that they were having serious difficulties with local recruiting because they were being outbid by the Taliban.

They're not only being outbid, but out-thought as well. Sometimes I think the current American policy in Afghanistan was thought up by Mullah Omar, and then planted inside the U.S. command structure by double agents before being conveyed to the White House. Omar seems quite confident that the easiest way to total victory for the Taliban in Afghanistan is to manipulate the American Emperor into sending 30,000 or so more troops, to get the Americans to pour billions more down a bottomless well and subsidize the opium trade in the process, and to turn a few psychotic Christ-cultists and professional Muslim haters like Erik Prince loose among the Afghan population.

"I've got this pitiful, helpless giant* right where I want him," gloats the sinister Talibanister.

And the saddest part is, Emperor Publius Assholius Obaminus doesn't even know he's been punked by the Mullah. Such is the fate of doomed empires.

*The phrase was first used by President Richard M. Nixon in the early 70's to describe the U.S. in Vietnam.

Pictured: portrait bust of Emperor Marcus Julius Philippus, better known as Philip the Arab, who seized power in 244 CE and was assassinated in 249 after falling victim to a military coup. I'm struck by his resemblance to Barack Obama.

the divine turding

One sunny day in 1887, 12-year-old Carl Jung was tripping happily through the town plaza in Basel, Switzerland, and admiring the way the sun gleamed off the newly-restored and freshly-glazed tiles of the city's cathedral. Suddenly the lad felt the frightening approach of what his biographer and editor, Sonu Shamdasani, calls a "terrible, sinful thought."

The boy suppressed the evil thought for several days, but it continued to haunt him, lurking inside the deepest recesses of his innermost mind. Finally he decided that God wanted him to consciously think this thought, just (Jung reasoned) as He had actually wanted Adam and Eve to sin.

So the boy C.G. Jung stopped resisting the message emanating from the primal regions of his subconscious mind and allowed himself the vision of Almighty God, enthroned in heaven, unleashing an almighty turd on Basel which smashes the cathedral roof Jung had so recently been admiring and brings down the entire structure.

This was all a pretty elaborate way of expressing the idea that (as people usually say today), "I'm spiritual but not religious." And Jung himself later said of this vision that through it he had experienced "the direct living God, who stands omnipotent and free above the Bible and Church." He left out that his vision also graphically expressed resentment and contempt, as it was also a judgment on the uselessness of the Church, and its failure to serve its stated and intended purpose.

In our own time the mosque still rules in Muslim lands, but the Church (whichever church it may be) no longer holds a monopoly on spiritual allegiance here in the West as it did during Jung's 19th-century boyhood. For many Americans today, especially, our national symbols (the flag) and scriptures such as the Declaration of Independence are venerated by modern citizens with an intensity of devotion that is truly religious (or spiritual). Nationalism for many reasons is the natural religion of the modern-day citizen of advanced, industrialized countries.

I think it's time I took a trip to Washington, D.C., so I can admire the dome of the Capitol.

suckered

I wish I could take back the post I put up here yesterday, but it's way too late for that. It's a matter of record now that I got suckered into buying a used scapegoat, focused all my rage on a fake villain, and completely missed the boat.

Barack Obama and his evil mentor, Rahm Emmanuel, as they constructed their industry-friendly health-care "reform" scenario, needed someone willing to play the bad guy, someone who doesn't mind being vilified, cursed, and spat upon. Joe Lieberman is always more than willing to take on that task; he's useful if a bit over-used for such purposes.

And having read Glenn Greenwald's Salon column this morning, and having now been disabused of my naive and easily-manipulated indignation, I'm angrier than I was before.

The emasculated, industry-friendly "reform" bill we're getting is what this administration really wanted all along, despite what the president was telling us, according to Greenwald. As always, he documents and backs up all his arguments capably and thoroughly.

Greenwald is easily the best political commentator anywhere on the web today. He's a former prosecutor with a steel-trap mind, never takes the bait, and unerringly knows just where to dig to uncover the real story.

See also Jane Hamsher's column today at Politico for more on a realistic appraisal of the respective roles played by Obama, Harry Reid, and Lieberman in this tremendous bait-and-switch scam on the American people (that's us, folks), now a fait accompli.

Far from being a Bolshevik, President Change-No-Change is a thoroughgoing butt boy for the corporatocracy, and has never been anything else. He needs to keep big pharma and the insurance companies happy, so the Democratic Party will continue to enjoy the lion's share of their largesse rather than the Republicans.

I keep having to constantly re-learn what I already knew: Obama is the biggest phony to ever sit in the Oval Office. He's an even bigger phony than Reagan was. Remember him? Mr. Balanced Budget?

And I forgive Joe Lieberman. He just wants to be a big shot, and in the process of trying to fulfill his ego-driven fantasy only shows himself to be a big whore and a big mess. You have to feel sorry for the guy.

What we really need to do to get this country back on track is forget about waiting for government or any part of it to do the right thing, and take matters into our own hands, as people in Copenhagen are doing at this very minute.

It's time to raise some hell.

quotes of the day

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the red book

The Red Book, whose formal title is "Liber Novus" (New Book) was written and illustrated by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung beginning in 1914, after he'd been shaken by a series of apocalyptic visions. In one, he looked out a window and "saw blood, rivers of blood," foreshadowing the imminent world war which would soon prove to be the deadliest and most irrational conflict the world had seen up to that time.

Jung probably had no idea how long he would be at work on the project, which he finally abandoned unfinished in 1930, after 16 years. He was aware of its significance, however, and carefully laid the hybrid Latin-German calligraphy on 600 pages of parchment with India ink, embellished them with a multitude of startlingly bright images, and enclosed it all between folio-sized red leather covers.

By 1914 Jung had already parted ways with his early mentor Sigmund Freud, in whose limited conception both the subconscious and the human soul were dominated by sexual content. Jung overleapt Freud's limitations, and The Red Book partially chronicles the development of what one reviewer calls his "mythically suffused conception of the human psyche."

But even more importantly, Jung was driven to resolve the inevitable conflict between his methodical and systemically ordered scientific mind -- his rational self -- and the irrational and instinctive contents of his psyche, the great discovery of his scientific work. This is also the great psychic conflict of our secular, technological age, and our overemphasis on rationality and method can only prevail for so long before it is undermined by explosions of dream imagery and instinctive spirituality emanating from below, from the subconscious, or as some would have it, the soul. What else are all the various "New Age" movements but this?

Now as the end of my own trail of life comes in sight, I need to read this book and tie up all the remaining loose ends of the past 65 years. And, as if on cue, a facsimile of The Red Book has now been published, appearing in October of this year. I'm going to order my copy today, and I anticipate this will be the last book on the list, and the final volume among I don't know how many hundreds I've read in my lifetime, fully digesting maybe half of them.

Click on Jung's illustration for a larger view.

cream puff war

I went to my local Target Store the other day to get my daily dose ("Give us this day our daily dose") and they had "Merry Christmas" written on the doors with some kind of glittery stuff.

Not "Happy Holidays" or "Have a Mellow Yuletide" or some other veshch, but "Merry Christmas." So I guess Bill O'Reilly has won, and defeated the nefarious forces arrayed against him who were making war on Christmas. Yay, Bill. ("And lead us not into a Fox station.")

Then I went inside the store, and saw these flashin' lights, and heard these tweetin' things, and there was one type of escalator for humans and another one just for their shopping carts all loaded with swag.

It was pretty scary. "What's this world comin' to?" I asked, but nobody answered. I was just a lonely old man, talking to himself.

perpetual emotion

An old friend stopped by last night, and after a few moments of catching up on the doings of mutual acquaintances the conversation turned to politics, because my old friend is a political animal.

And since he's a lifelong Democrat and loyal trooper in the cause, my old bud felt obligated to stick up for Obama's version of the Afghan War, and for the excuses and rationalizations Barack used the other night to attempt to justify the so-called "surge," but my friend's heart wasn't really in it.

Earlier in my life I would have gotten angry, but now all I feel is sadness when confronted with the illogical contortions of liberal political orthodoxy. I tried to patiently explain that the Bush-Obama war "over there" has almost nothing to do with what's going on in Afghanistan, and everything to do with what's going on in this country, with what we've become.

The war has no purpose and no object other than itself. We're fighting a war in Afghanistan because we have to be having one somewhere.

Are educated and well-read Americans really unaware that we've fulfilled George Orwell's prophecy of perpetual war? And who is the "real enemy" in this conflict, other than ourselves? For the true purpose of the perpetual war and this country's $900-billion annual military expenditure, as Orwell observed, is to keep us frightened, poor, uneducated, and unable to act in our own self-interest.

Republicans and Democrats alike may move to cut programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which the more right-wing among them are inclined to call "entitlements," but the Pentagon's monopolization of our resources, resources which might be used for health care, education, and putting people to work rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, is sacrosanct. Nation building on the other side of the world hogs the front burners, the public is hypnotized, the politically orthodox memorize their talking points, and the war goes on with our "approval."

temporary reprieve

I woke up this morning and realized immediately that my right hand wasn't shaking. For a Parkinson's sufferer, that's a very good sign, and a great way to start the day.

And the good news kept coming. After kick-starting the organism with coffee, I had a tremor-free hour-and-a-quarter yoga practice for the first time in a long time.

This was the result of an acupuncture treatment I took last night at a north-end Seattle clinic, consisting of a few needles inserted in my scalp, arms, legs, and feet. And even though the tremor, somewhat moderated, had returned by early afternoon, the morning gave me a taste of what might be awaiting me as a result of long-term treatment, which consists of a twice-daily consumption of an herb tea that tastes like dead frogs in addition to weekly acupuncture.

The most important outcome of beginning this regimen is the sudden appearance of hope, which is something none of us can do without. There's no cure for the disease, but if there's any chance these symptoms can be relieved I'll have all I need to carry on, and seek the kind of life I want to create for myself.

I'll have more to say about this as it unfolds.

the clown show

Every once in a while I'm reminded of why I mostly have chosen to avoid political subjects in this space any more.

It's not that U.S. politics is unimportant; it's simply too disgusting and depressing to ponder much. A passing glance at the New York Times front page and a cursory daily read of Atrios's blog is sufficient to remind me of why political topics are hazardous to my emotional health and sense of balance.

For example, the Times this morning reports that Despite recent fluctuations in global temperature year to year, which fueled claims of global cooling, a sustained global warming trend shows no signs of ending, according to new analysis by the World Meteorological Organization made public on Tuesday.

The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record, dating back 150 years, according to a provisional summary of climate conditions near the end of 2009, the organization said.

However, such evidence isn't good enough for the U.S. Senate, whose Republicans, along with a sizable contingent of Democrats, continue to view global warming as overestimated at best, and at worst a hoax. Sen. James Inhofe (Asshat-Oklahoma) says of the EPA's recent decision to regulate greenhouse gases if Congress fails to do so, that EPA's finding will have no impact on global warming because India and China, leading emitters of greenhouse gases, are left out. "So, our jobs and our emissions will move to countries that have few if any environmental requirements,'' he said.

Inhofe is one of the loudest and most ludicrous of the Senate cohort of global warming deniers.

No topic is serious enough to escape the ham-handed lies cooked up at the clown show. We're still getting daily doses of overheated, capital-fueled hysteria about how the country will go broke if we enact universal health care legislation. Meanwhile, more civilized nations have had comprehensive health insurance for all their citizens for over a hundred years, while the debate here has been raging intermittently since 1915.

To truly comprehend why anyone with heightened sensitivities might find himself or herself unable to contemplate political matters much longer than five minutes at a time, however, it's necessary to take a walk down memory lane, as Jonathan Schwarz does this morning in a post titled "How the Crock of Shit Gets to Your Breakfast Table."

Each morning Rupert Murdoch's media delivers a warm, steaming crock of shit to the world's people. How does it happen? To understand, let's take a look at one particular crock of shit, from September 24, 2002.

On that day, Murdoch's tabloid The Sun (readership eight million) ran a giant front page headline about Saddam Hussein's terrifying WMD:

HE'S GOT 'EM
LET'S GET HIM

Then on the inside of the paper, the headline was:

BRITS 45mins FROM DOOM

The Sun stories were based on a dossier released by the British government about Saddam Hussein's terrifying WMD. In it Tony Blair stated that "[Saddam's] military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them." This was so important the dossier repeated it three more times. That day Blair told parliament that the intelligence the dossier was based on was "extensive, detailed and authoritative."

So what was the ultimate source for this claim? The British media is reporting today it was AN IRAQI TAXI DRIVER. But not just any old Iraqi taxi driver—an Iraqi taxi driver BRITISH INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS NEVER MET. Here's what happened:

1. MI6 was "squeezing their agents in Iraq for anything at all."

2. The Iraqi National Accord, an exile organization set up with money from the CIA, had hooked up MI6 with a senior Iraqi military officer. This officer claimed he spoke to the taxi driver, and said the taxi driver in turn claimed he'd heard this from OTHER Iraqi officers he'd driven somewhere. So this was completely uncorroborated, third-hand, with a taxi driver in the middle.

3. The Iraqi National Accord's spokesman later described the "45 minute" claim as a "crock of shit."

4. Breakfast time!

Murdoch, by the way, owns many newspapers, not just the Sun, as well as the Fox News Channel and websites such as BeliefNet.

Had enough yet? I certainly have.

Pictured: Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana.

past present future

My daughter and her man have been haunting the antique shops and junque stores of their adopted city of Portland, Oregon, snapping up rusty, dusty objects and treating them as the Catholics do the relics of departed saints. A week or so ago they found an upright Victrola in working condition, an essential object of veneration for any serious devotee of antique music.

After a two-day trip to the Puget Sound region, they were able to wed this holy artifact with the thousand or so 78 r.p.m. phonograph discs my mother left behind when she departed this world a year ago today. The Victrola plays only 78's -- that's all there were in those days, and you have to wind it up with a crank on the side, and keep winding intermittently lest the thing wind down, transforming, let's say, Enrico Caruso from a bright tenor into a gurgling basso profundo. There's no electrical cord.

I got pictures of this combining of precious ingredients today via the internet, and I imagine they were up half the night listening to Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, Ukelele Ike, Tony Parenti's Ragtimers (with Wild Bill Davison on cornet and the never-surpassed Baby Dodds on drums), and the flapperish warblings of Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw, and Ethel Waters.

It's wonderful to be young, in love, and possessed of enough discrimination and aesthetic sense to know the difference between real music and ambient noise, between life and death.

the unheeded warning

I've probably linked to the video of Eisenhower's farewell warning to his country and fellow citizens already, maybe more than once, but in this time of the Pentagon's latest "surge," this one in Afghanistan, it bears repeating.

See it here.

There's a short passage from Ike's speech I've seen quoted half a dozen times in half a dozen different places in recent days which is highly appropriate in these hard and troubled times : "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

This unheeded warning is going to come home to us very soon.

moving day

Tomorrow is the big day. I'll be vacating the roomy old condo in Port Ludlow and moving into a small apartment on Greenwood Ave North in Seattle. It's going to be a tight squeeze, and it'll take some doing fitting all my belongings into the new digs. I may have to give a lot of stuff away.

That's the reason I haven't been writing much of late. Moving requires no small expenditure of time and energy, and I'll be preoccupied for the next few days.

However, I should be back to my regular blogging schedule by the weekend. Until then...