"A violent man will die a violent death."- Lao Tsu

Doing the Job American Journalism Won't Do By Counting the Jobs They Will:

The Olbermann Counter: Obama Media BJs To Date -
"Not that there's anything wrong with that."

[View Source to Copy Code]

IF YOUR LIFE ON THE WEB is running too s l o w, if your browsing and grazing at this site or that is just b o g g i n g   d o w n, what do you do?

Like any good cybernaut, you look for the "techno-fix."

There are, of course, many fixes to find. New connections, new computers, new hard drives, new browsers, new plugins, and more. But the first thing everyone should do is to take the cure common to all cyberspace slowdowns. You click on your browser menus and tell it to "Clear History."

"Clear History" works wonders for your cyberlife. As you move within the web, your History grows, and the more History you hold the slower your web brain, your browser, thinks and acts. Thinking slowly and acting slowly may be wise in life, but it takes the zip out of your online drive.

When you "Clear History" your browser forgets all the places it has been, all the things that it has seen, all of what it has learned. All that bitsludge is wiped away and your browser's internal brain is made as smooth as a baby's bottom, as blank as a goldfish's brain. Things run faster, you get loaded more quickly and will probably stay loaded longer. You flash but you don't crash. Why would you? You've "cleared your history."

I probably didn't have to tell you to "Clear History." You knew it. Pretty much everyone knows it. But this better browsing tip seems, like many other dubious cyberspace insights, to have oozed out into the real world, into the world dimensional.

And when 2D goes 3D there's always a problem.

Applying cyberspace notions to the world at large, like beliving the Mapquest is the territory, is usually a mistake, but people, being people, are always eager to make new mistakes. After all, "cyberspace" explains so much, doesn't it? Cyberspace has become the new paradigm and controlling metaphor of our age, supplanting the use of the computer as the controlling metaphor in the last quarter of the 20th century, much as the idea of the "clockwork universe" caught on at the dawn of the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason was driven forward on the escapement of the highest tech of that time, the clock.

As humans, we prefer that our "things" define us. It is always easier to explain ourselves through things than to explain ourselves outright. If mistakes are made, well, "Things didn't work out."

Of course, during these intellectually eviscerated times we can look back on the clockwork universe of the Enlightenment as a time when giants walked Europe's Cathedrals of Thought; Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, Montaigne, Kant, Hume, Jefferson.... the list is, as you know, still dominant though it be mainly male, all dead and very white. They all rose up in the age of clocks but they, in a real and metaphorical sense, wound the clocks. They "had" time and they would never "Clear History."

As much as these founders of our world valued time, they valued History more. Out of that time and that History, the Enlightenment swept across the world. When that wave receded it left many gifts on these shores, not the least of which were "The Declaration of Independence" and "The Constitution of the United States."

The Declaration and The Constitution: These two artifacts of history were the quintessence of the most revolutionary ideas to arise in the mind of man since .... not fire or the wheel, but previous... previous.... long before... since standing up on the hind legs.

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Dr Irek Malecki, of the School of Animal Biology at The
University of Western Australia (UWA) collecting semen from
a male emu, who is much gentler than a male ostrich, using
an artificial cloaca. [Aren't you glad you can't quite make
out the details in the picture?]

WARNING! The details of the following post will have way-too-much-information.New research helps ostriches orgasm (ScienceAlert)

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"Even though the sprayers use half the flow of a garden hose, the water shoots out at 3,000 pounds per square inch -- more than enough power to send the guy behind the hose flying."

No. Paycheck. Big. Enough. Spectacular and cringe-inducing photos of how Seattle's Space Needle is getting cleaned -- Spit and polish for a Seattle icon

Both Democrats and Republicans have long understood one of basic truths about the US: "In America, you never outgrow your need for bullshit." The difference is that the Republicans seem to want to apply that maxim to make profits and get rich, while the Democrats want to use it to obtain power to take away the profits from the rich -and everyone else - through taxes and regulations.

When it comes to making money, the Republicans utilize bullshit brilliantly. Advertising, Marketing, Point-of-Sale, Packaging, Sales Pitches -- all these vast oceans of bullshit are theirs to command and control. Then it all goes to hell.

Strangely, Republicans can't seem to extend their talent for creating, managing, and deploying bullshit into the political realm. For when it comes to making propaganda for the political arena in 2008, the Republicans are running so far behind the Democrats that they are faced with a critical --perhaps lethal -- "Bullshit Gap."

The strategic "Bullshit Gap" in our politics is most obvious when contrasting the small flakes of bullshit drifting down from the John McCain camp these days with the radiant rays of luminous bullshit currently bedazzling millions when projected through the lens of the greatest JFK impersonator since Vaughn Meader, Barack H. Obama. But the bullshit gap is even visible in the small towns of America, those areas bypassed by the large mercantile bullshit generators of our culture and hence starved for fresh bullshit of any kind.

Case in point:

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Not only does the Republican Party need to grow a pair, sack up, look to its roots, and stop losing, it also needs to .... GROW.... A.... BRAIN! I'm not sure who this party is paying to advise it about propaganda, message, logos, and slogans, but if they are paying them more than 25 cents and two Wheaties box tops, they need to get it back.

This item just in from RightWingBozo Central, D.C.:

"It looks like Republicans will counter the Democratic push for change from the years of the Bush administration with their own pledge to deliver, drum roll please, "the change you deserve." - House G.O.P. Adopts Change Theme "

"The change you deserve!" Ah yes, that resonates with the American people.

Speaking for myself, I always expect to get "The change you deserve" in America. If I buy something for $4.95, I expect to get a nickel back. If I don't see that nickel in my hand, you'll hear about it. I like to toss nickels in the penny cup. Makes me feel rich. But as far is this "slogan" goes, I wouldn't give you a plugged nickel for it.

The fact that the Republican Party would even think of taking on a slogan like this confirms only that the Republicans responsible must have been given large shopping bags full of $100 bills from the Obama slush fund. I hope so. I can respect some old-fashioned bribery. Old fashioned stupidity is just too, too embarrassing.

If this is the best the Republican party can do, and more and more it looks like it is, I think they should forget "The change you deserve," and take up my own personal slogan for them that I minted a few months ago. It's free....

....and it has the advantage of being true.

Here's an interesting little wrinkle in the Kentucky voter ID requirements: [Emphasis added] "All voters must produce identification or be personally acquainted with the precinct officer before voting." - my.barackobama.com | Find your polling place for Election Day on Tuesday, May 20th

Polling Place 1 10:20 AM

"I'm here to vote."
"Do I know you?"
"Sure you do. My name's Bill Smith. I'm a friend of Barry's."
"Oh, yes, you are quite clearly someone with whom I am personally acquainted. Go right ahead, Bill."

Polling Place 2 11:20 AM

"I'm here to vote for Obama."
"Do I know you?"
"Sure you do. My name's Will Smith. I'm a friend of Barry's."
"Oh, yes, you are certainly someone with whom I am personally acquainted. Go right ahead, Will."

Polling Place 3 12:20 PM

"I'm here to vote."
"Do I know you?"
"Sure you do. My name's William Smith. I'm a friend of Barry's."
"Oh, yes, you are indeed someone with whom I am personally acquainted. Go right ahead, William."

Polling Place 3 12:25 PM

"I'm here to vote."
"Do I know you?"
"Sure you do. My name's Bubba Klinger. I'm a friend of Hillary's."
"I'm sorry, you'll need to show me a picture ID and your current voter registration card."

[In association with Mike Anderson]

"They told me you were a big Obama supporter, but I had no idea...." Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., greets Obama supporter Doris Smith during a campaign stop at Tudor's Biscuit World in Charleston, W. Va.

Hot Climate Could Shut Down Plate Tectonics

ScienceDaily (May 13, 2008) - A new study of possible links between climate and geophysics on Earth and similar planets finds that prolonged heating of the atmosphere can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet's crust to become locked in place.

Forget about that big quake in San Francisco! Party on!

Remember Americans, only YOU can prevent global warming! So be sure to recycle religiously, cram yourself into the smallest possible bicycle-powered car you can, use only one square of toilet paper, and change all your light bulbs to those crummy dull ones with a nice dab of mercury in the center.

China needs your help and hopes you are all just that stupid. Here's some China news by the numbers:

30: Number of nuclear power plants being built in China

500: The number of coal-fired power plants China plans to build in the next decade

97: New airports to be built in the next 12 years, bringing the total number to 244 by 2020

160: Cities in China with populations that exceed a million. In the USA there are nine; in the UK just two

0: Miles of motorway in 1988

30,000: Miles of motorway today

6.3 million: The number of passenger cars registered in 2007 (compared with 2.3 million in 2004). More than 1,000 new private cars hit the roads every day in Beijing alone.

Source: The dragon awakens: China, how did it happen? - Asia, World - The Independent

China knows all Americans with correct and compassionate thoughts will be glad to sacrifice for them.

Suckers.

Kids can be so cruel. Especially those kids in the cool kids' clique. Once they decide that somebody who was cool once is cool no more, there's no limit to what they'll do to get that person out of the clique. They'll shun her, they'll rank on her, they'll make fun of her pants suits, they'll even call her the baddest bad name they can think of -- "Racist."

Hillary was a cool kid once, but now she's cool no more. What made her cool -- "She's a chick running for class President! How cool is that?!" -- has been trumped by the coolest Democrat cool of all -- "He's a black guy running for class President! Dude!" You can't get cooler than that. There is no American cool cooler than black cool, especially if it shows up in sharp suits and talks smooth with only a soupcon of ghetto speak.

Obama is now the coolest kid in the Democrat clique. The clique, as cliques will, wants Hillary to butt out and just let him be Class President. They want her out before Democrat High gets together in the Denver gym to nominate their President.

After all, when everybody who's currently playing at Democrat politics was playing at high school politics popularity was always trumping real elections, real nominations. Why actually finish the race? It will only, so the polls say, underscore the real popularity and base that Hillary's won. It will only point up the deepening flaws in the Obama run. How uncool is that?

So Hillary should just realize she's now uncool and, well, "Just fuck off girlfriend!" She needs to get out before the cool kids have to do the really bad thing -- slap her with the Racist paddle, cover her with tar and feathers and ride her out of town on a rail. They're warming up the tar. It's at the melting point now. You can see the Racism paddle being dipped in the pot. Here comes the big smear. It's gonna leave a mark.

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In her 93rd year, this happenstance kitchen collage of my mother's life is growing both richer and deeper. The image above is of what once was a bulletin board. It is kept in my mother's kitchen in her apartment to the rear of an unassuming but decent collection of apartments in the small city of Chico, California.

It's too bad the image of it is so small here on the page. But no matter how much I might enlarge the image of it, it could never be as big as what it represents. Although small in scale it is larger than the lives it chronicles. It is the sum of all love.

You'd miss that. If I could show it to you in real time and at its actual size, you'd still miss it. It would remain much as you see it here -- just a jumble of clips, slogans, photos, handicrafts and images. Aside from its complexity, it wouldn't mean all that much to you. These icons of other people's private lives never do.

And yet, if you have anything that even resembles a functioning family, there's a bulletin board like this somewhere in the various dwellings of your family. If you're lucky, there's more than one. You don't know what this one means, but you know what yours means. You know it all -- for better and for worse.

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Served piping hot from Google this morning @ American Thinker: Hezbollah's Beirut Blitz

The horns of our illegal alien dilemma are simple to state. Those who oppose the illegals among us insist that the bulk of them, being Mexican, be deported forthwith from the soil of the United States. Those who support the de facto presence of these 17 million human beings assert that it is not only immoral but simply impossible to deport such a number. Both these propositions seem a bit extreme to me as well as unimaginative. Applying a bit of imagination to this clefstick yields an acceptable compromise.

While it is clear that allowing 17 million residents to break the law is unacceptable if you wish to continue a society based upon the law, it is also clear that sending anybody back into the global chancre that is Mexico against their will is immoral. Sending anybody to Mexico forcibly should be reserved as a punishment in our penal system, and not seen as a part of our immigration policy.

Indeed, most of the illegal and legal people of Mexican descent among us are here because their were both astute enough to see Mexico as it is, and resourceful enough to get the hell out of there. When all is said and done, the primary "cause" of illegal immigration is not that the United States is so great, but that Mexico sucks about as deeply as a country can and still not blow up. For the most part we benefit by receiving the cream of the Mexican gene pool any way we can get them. I present the wide availability of a decent mole sauce as exhibits A, B, and C. But still, the law is the law.

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Seen en route to lunch.

It does basically make you look fat and naked, but you see all this stuff." - Susan Hallowell (above), Director of TSA's Security Laboratory.

Proof that there is no airline service so cheap and shoddy that some bean-counter can't make it worse:

The woman checking me in informed me that Delta discontinued the use of the ticket jackets as of Monday in order to help cut costs!

Food goes, blankets go, seats get jammed in, pillows vanish, oxygen is reduced, peanuts change into tasteless "freeze-baked crunchy things with salt" which come two to a pack and you only get one. Don't even get me started on Homeland Security which is just biding its time until you will be required to fly naked after an anal probe by uniformed dwarf.

I know I am far from alone when I say that after years of flying many times a year, often on a whim, I am now at the point where only the most powerful forces in life -- love and death -- can get me on a plane.

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"Ye Olde Walk-In Seattle"

Where Lake Washington meets the ship canal at Union Bay, that's where Seattle has tucked in its slight, but somewhat interesting, Museum of Science and Industry. I'd been putting off going there since I seldom hear of anything interesting that the museum is exhibiting. It's a bit like the city thought it needed such a museum in order to qualify as a first-rate city. There's a lot of that kind of stuff in this town. It usually disappoints. However, having little to do other than avoid the rain last week -- and being in the general area -- I pulled into the road to the parking lot.

I had to stop and wait while a bus from a local old-folks home slowly unloaded its compliment of day-tripping seniors. You've seen these groups. They're the people that we usually store out of sight in one of God's proliferating waiting rooms. You know those places too. Somewhere ahead there's one of them with your name printed on a temporary tag and slipped into a bracket next to the door.

For several minutes the wheelchair-accessible van disgorged eight people. Seven women and one man. The women were all in wheelchairs with attendants. The man didn't wait around and made his way into the museum using a walker. Finally unloaded, the van closed its doors and pulled ahead to park. I followed suit.

After pausing for a smoke and a coffee, I went into the museum and paid the fee. The seniors were already inside. The women in the wheelchairs were lined up like so many ducks in a shooting gallery, waiting their turns for the three attendants to roll them briskly past the carefully set up exhibits and dioramas. Glancing around I noticed that the old man in the walker had made his way unattended to the upper gallery.

I wiled away some minutes looking into the dioramas that seemed designed more towards underscoring the Museum's sensitivity to the "diversity" of Seattle than filling in the city's history in any detail. For every exhibit noting the contribution of whites to the founding of Seattle, the museum threw up a trivial item celebrating the contribution of Asians (came here, worked cheap, did laundry, got ahead), Native-Americans (they fought and they lost) and African-Americans (one man starts a restaurant and dies rich). The thin exhibits of cheap artifacts on display merely underscore all the shabby cliches of diversity that have come to signify "we care about caring more than we care about truth." "Diversity uber alles," is the phrase that pays for curators everywhere these days.

Behind me the old women were being pushed from room to room; their keepers trilling to them in the kind, cooing tones used to mollify infants. I'd forgotten about the old man.

After having enough of the Museum's Diversityland exhibits, I made my way to the upstairs gallery I'd seen the old man enter. Unlike the rest of the museum, it was a large room with large historic photographs on the wall. I like the harsh content of old photographs. There's often a truth to them that all the careful curating of our soppy era cannot obfuscate. Things are as they are, not as some wish they might have been. Lovers stare without smiles. The hands charred by hard work and harsh soil are seen sharp. The child in the coffin is dead. What you see is what they had. What you see is what we've lost.

I was alone in the room, except for the very old man in the walker. He was stopped along the wall on the left looking searchingly at a large photograph of a street scene. He glanced up and gave me a long look as if to say, "What the hell are you doing in my museum?" Then he seemed to think better of it and beckoned me over.

I'm not used to very old people being assertive. When I encounter it I am almost always taken off-guard. For the most part, our very old people, when exhumed from their storage facilities and placed out in public, seem embarrassed to be there in their decrepitude. It is almost as if we have told them to just go away and die very, very privately. That way we don't have to be confronted with our own mortality made manifest in their frail infirmities.

This old man was having none of that and gestured to me again, almost like the Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." In this case, though, I was cast as "the Wedding Guest." I went over to him.

"I wanted you to see this," he said gesturing at the street photograph. He was bent forward in the walker, but his spotted hands were firm on the handles. He wore a plaid shirt, pleated pants and thick-soled walking shoes. He was grizzled around the jaws, impossibly wrinkled in the face, but he still had a full head of hair. He was very old, and clearly not that stable on his pins, but his eyes were still clear and his voice steady.

"Pleased to meet you, sir," I said, the manners my mother taught me making an appearance.

"Don't worry about that," he said. "They'll be coming to get me soon and I just wanted to show somebody this picture."

I looked at it. Then I read the label to the left of the frame: View Along Pike Street from the Corner of Second Avenue, ca 1909

It was taken from a high vantage point, perhaps a third or fourth floor window in some building, and gave a sweeping view of Pike Street in the sharp and clean afternoon light you still get in Seattle when the sun comes out. In the way of these old photographs it was taken with a large box camera and, accordingly, a large negative. When things hold still for these negatives they soak up an amazing amount of detail. Click and you can count the wires woven above the street that afternoon in 1909.

Where things don't quite stand still, there's a slight blur to moving objects than always imparts some hint of the fleeting moment in which the negative was exposed. Click and the man who is late dashes for the passing trolly, his left foot a blur against the cobblestones for an instant on that afternoon in 1909.

"It's a great picture," I said, not really knowing what else to say.

"1909," he said. "I've lived here all my life. Was born in a house on Denny. I'm going to be 100 years old next month. 100 years."

"Congratulations," I replied. "I have to say that you seem to be doing great."

"Yep, 100 years old and here's this photograph taken the year after I was born about a half a mile from where I was born."

"That's true," I agreed.

"You know," he said. "Everybody you see in that picture is probably dead. Except one."

"One?"

"Down there in the corner," he said pointing.

I looked down and saw, in the extreme lower left, an out-of-focus couple on the street, slightly blurred by the fact that they were walking when the exposure was made. Just blurs, just barely discernible as a man and a woman, as husband and wife. In front of them you could, just at the limits of visibility, see that the couple was pushing a stroller with a child in it.

"You see that?" he asked. "You see that? Everybody in that picture is dead, except maybe the kid they're pushing along. Do you think it could be me? I think it could be me. That feather in the woman's hat. My mother had a lot of hats with feathers."

You couldn't tell. There was no information beyond the blurs that vaguely resolved into a couple pushing a child along a street in Seattle sometime around 1909. "Don't know," I answered. "Can't tell. Nobody can tell."

"Time to get started back, Frank," said the attendant who stood at the door. "We need to get you people in the van for dinner."

Frank ignored him. "But it could be me and my parents. It could be us, couldn't it?"

"Yes," I allowed, "It could be."

He shuffled a bit and worked his walker around. He pointed it towards the door where the attendant was waiting and then started off.

" 'Could be's' all I need," he said. "Nice talking to you."

They dream about themselves.
They dream of dreams about themselves.
They dream they dream of dreams about themselves.
Splash them with twilight like a wet bat.
Unbind the dreamers.

Poet,
Be like God.
-- Jack Spicer, Imaginary Elegies III

Click to Enlarge

Catalina

Dawn at Avalon

Koi Dreams

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Now that global warming has been sent to its room for a ten-year time out, things are getting back to normal up north.

If you go out in the arctic today
You're sure of a big surprise.
If you go out in the actic today
You'd better go in disguise.

For every bear that ever there was
Will party there for certain, because
This decade's the decade the polar bears have their picnic.

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Having seen it all, I don't wanna see no more. I spent decades in the Palace of Kink and don't need to do any more hard time. Suffice it to say, with the poet, "sex without love wears gay deceivers." No matter, the grey sponge helmet of Seattle's unceasing reign of rain drives its inmates to greater and greater heights of insanity and "celebration." And there is no refuge since the clinically insane are so compelled to "share."

Tonight's chapter of Seattle's Psychopathia Sexualis is the Forbidden Fashion Show. Here is how the producer is describing the event:

The amazing opening of the show will feature the talented dancers of DassDance,. The extravagant display will be a fusion of contemporary dance and northern Venezuelan drums (tambores), as the dancers cavort and whirl, donning colorful authentic Venezuelan masks.

What breathless excitement will waft over the audience! One can only imagine the tingles and the thrills as the "drums (tambores)" kick in, and the crisp snap of poppers is heard throughout the room. Then the "colorful masks" will be deployed.

But wait, that's not all.

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On offer at my local butcher this afternoon.

Communism is alive and well on the streets of Seattle....

Illustration by RapierWitt

THESE DAYS its not often that you see a member of the Despairing Classes being seduced by classic Communism on a city street, but it does happen.

Sidewalk Snapshot: It's a warm Spring evening on Pine Street in Seattle. Lengthening shadows and brightening light brings everything into sharp relief including the random collection of lay-abouts, short-order poets, tattoo artistes, and students a decade between degrees that take up the tables outside the Cafe Laddro on Capitol Hill.

Capitol Hill is one of those neighborhoods in Seattle that compiles a mainstream lifestyle out of alternatives. Even though it is indeed a hill, it has suspended the normal laws of gravity and everything loose in Seattle rolls up to the top of it. That includes, on this evening, me.

I'm stepping out of your "one-every-block" Seattle espresso slop shop with my machiatto when I notice the odd couple at the table just outside the door. That's not too odd since odd couples, like spiked bright blue hair, are pretty much the norm on Capitol Hill. I notice them at first because the youngest is wearing a Motorhead t-shirt with the mantra "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" on it in that faux German Black gothic font that got old when Auschwitz was in flower, and so had to be made new again back when heavy-metal was a fresh idea.

Glancing over Motorhead's shoulder I note that the man across from him is giving him an ideological lap-dance complete with a whole raft of tracts, papers and books being brought out and waved about and placed, with a muffled thwang, one after the other on the thin black metal of the table: Trotsky's "Marxism and Terrorism," (thwang!); the ever-popular Marx and Engels "Communist Manifesto," (thwang!); Lenin's greatest hit "What Is To Be Done?," (thwang!), Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks," (thunk!), Zinn's "People's History of the United States,"(clunk!).

One by one, they come out of the worn back pack and pile up on the table. All in all, a larger pile of ideological dung would be hard to imagine, and harder to handle even with meat hooks and thick rubber gloves.

The man making his pile of "roadmaps to a more perfect world" is quite a bit older than Motorhead with a slim, somewhat furtive look to him. There's the vibe coming off him that you sometimes sense when someone old is trying to pick up somebody far too young for him.

In the intense light of the evening, you can see a faint cloud of dust motes rising from him as he keeps slapping the tracts down. Greying hair in moist ringlets covers his head except for a monk's tonsure on the back of his skull. He's got a mustache and a beard that, with a little care, could be brought to a Van Dyke point. He sports small round rimmed glasses in front of thin blue eyes. His eyes, although they never waver from his prey, carry within them a permanent 1,000 yard stare -- as if he's always looking outside of the present moment at something in the distance that never gets nearer. Overall the face reminds one, as these faces so often do, of a watered down Leon Trotsky, the Christ of Communism, crucified with an ice axe but still twitching in his tomb.

Trotsky is resurrect this evening on Capitol Hill though, and I linger at the table next to them writing down a few notes about their conversation. Except it is not exactly a conversation so much as a monologue as my Trotsky keeps, in smiling and soft tones, returning to the subject at hand which is the inevitable collapse of the evil American Empire ("Long past its expiry date..."), and the inevitable rise of world Socialism ("Everyone will have more than enough, but nobody will have it all.")

Trotsky's sporting, as all good Trotskys must, a collection of slogan buttons and a sheaf of free tracts and newspapers. The button that is the largest is pinned to his faded plaid flannel shirt and proclaims him to be a member in good standing of the ISO (International Socialist Organization, good Latter-Day Trotskyites all. )

He passes the tracts and newspapers over to his intended, "Free, all free," and points out the more salient injustices they outline: eternal racism, eternal slavery of women, eternal repression of the working man by capitalists, eternal imperialism by the United States -- the whole catastrophe. He underscores that the only escape is through the ever-imminent but forever delayed Rapture of the Left, The Revolution.

After several minutes of his soft chants, Motorhead is nodding like the drinking bird over the glass. He's looking a bit dazed. I wonder if Trotsky has slipped a roofy into Motorhead's machiatto and is just waiting for it to kick in.

Trotsky's tales are the sad sotto voce sagas that underscore all the old nightmares of the Gulag, the Killing Fields, and every other massacre done in the name of the Marxist Utopia. It's a litany proving, once again, that there are some lies that lodge so deep in the hopes of man that they can never be killed no matter how many are executed to make the lie true.

Today's fresh lie is that if only Motorhead will attend the "event" tomorrow, Trotsky will be pleased to take him to the exclusive "Cadre" meeting that follows so he can meet the "Comrade of Honor," one Ahmed Shawki.

In soft tones salted with a quick twinkling smile that comes and goes like the red queen in three-card monte, Trotsky continues his spiel, his seduction. Motorhead is "obviously a man of no little intelligence" -- even if his five facial piercings (ears, left eyebrow, lip stud and nose-ring) might make one wonder.

Motorhead "needs to live in a system where social justice is the rule for all, not just the rich." Given Motorhead's ripped black jeans, worn black boots and general air of someone not likely to be hired by any business whose work involves meeting the public, this is probably more true than either of them realize. Motorhead nods again to this last proposition, and observes that he yearns for a social order that is more just to his lifestyle than can easily be found outside the subcultural hamlets of Seattle.

Much has been made of Hannah Arendt's phrase, "The banality of evil," and I suppose I'm witnessing a small satori of that kind here on the sidewalks of Seattle. But it seems to me to be a more insidious event than that.

After all, there's nothing evil in speech that argues for ideas that have proven, without exception, to be evil. It is, after all, only speech and the strength of the American system is to protect all forms of speech, especially the idle blather of a coffee house revolutionary. There's nothing, really nothing, in this overheard conversation that threatens the existence of the United States. The mere fact that it can be had, five years into the First Terrorist War, underscores just how strong this nation adherence to its founding principles remains. Here on Capitol Hill dissent of even the most egregious sort, is not only tolerated but celebrated.

The conversation bothers me at the same time it fascinates me. It strikes me that what I am auditing is not so much "the banality of evil," but "the banality of sedition;" a banality we see acted out daily on our television screens and on the op-ed pages of our newspapers.

The banality of sedition is now so well established that it is, well, banal and goes forward without a great deal of remark or trouble. In the last few years, the phrase that has arisen to describe this phenomenon is "The Culture of Treason." I'm not sure who originated the phrase, but its use is proliferating across the Internet for the reason that all such phrases proliferate when the time is ripe; it somehow rings true.

Of late, it iseems that large sections of the better educated and the most privileged among us have decided that the Constitution is, after all, a suicide pact and have determined to preach this death gospel to us all:

"This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up into the van carrying you all away into the perfect freedom of the perfect world. Don't worry about those canisters of gas dropping in through the top. It's just to delouse you of your old, traditional ideas of what being an American is all about.

"In just a few painless minutes you'll all be, as we are now, citizens of the world. And in that world to which we are all going you'll forget the old dream of America. You'll forget, at the last, everything that was good about America. You'll also forget the true and the beautiful. In the end, you'll forget about God himself.

"All those old dreams and visions will fade into a gray sameness. And then you'll all be, at the last, perfect citizens of our brave new world. We've breathed deeply of this gas before you and find it is the perfect blend of platitudes, freshly roasted, for the killing of your soul. After all, you weren't using it much. So step right up. First ride's free."

The long evening light was fading down into a warm dusk outside the coffee shop on Capitol Hill. Motorhead, in a moment of awakening, said, "Well, I should probably get grocery shopping."

Having gotten Motorhead's assent to attend the "event," Trotsky the Comrade becomes Trotsky the Closer and skins twenty bucks out of Motorhead's wallet for Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" ($14.95 at Amazon). The tracts and, of course, the newspaper are free. Such a deal.

The threadbare backpack is repacked with Trotsky's portable library. He and Motorhead set off up the hill and, turning the corner, move out of sight.

I fold up the scrap of paper on the back of which I've made my notes of their meeting. The front side invites all and sundry to a "Solidarity Gathering" at the 45th Street Overpass: "We Support the Rape Survivor at Duke... and the Countless Others Everywhere. Come and join us in solidarity to bear witness to this terrorism against women." I make a mental note to, somehow, manage to be elsewhere.

Walking back to the Century Ballroom, I notice a large flyer that announces the "event" that Motorhead has agreed to attend. Ahmed Shawki, editor of the International Socialist Review, will speak, it seems, on "Black Liberation and Socialism."

Shaki's image dominates the flyer and looks, for all the world, like a Malcom X returned to life. The look is, of course, a carefully studied one since black socialist saints are hard to come by these days. The Clenched Fist logo is in the lower left hand corner of the flyer. There are other details but I have a hard time making them out. It is, I discover, hard to read a flyer that is lying in the gutter. Especially when the light has failed.

---

In "Celebration" of May Day, 2008. HT: Cynr who created the art.

I don't know about you, but I'd pay folding money to see more of this sort of bitch-slapping preening and "gotcha" obsessed reporters.

[Ed: By the way, can we also revist the "Bush is inarticulate" canard again? Seems to be doing fine here.]

See also Gay Patriot's Why I like George W. Bush (and some people hate him)

"It is entirely fair when people take issue with his policies and/or his governing style, but to impugn his character as so many have done seems more a projection of their own demons onto the President of the United States than legitimate political discourse. They seem to derive their theories of his evil or greed not from actual facts about the man, but from their own prejudices about men of his class."

Via "The Green Report"

Measured the so-called 2x4 at a Home Depot lately? Have you even eye-balled one? Either way you know that there is no way either dimension reaches 2 inches or 4 inches. Nope, the "2x4" was struck long ago by the shadowy "shrink ray" of modern manufacturers who daily prove the rule that, "No matter how shoddy and cheap a product is, there is always some business somewhere that can make the same thing shoddier and cheaper."

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Yet another reminder from the EU European penal colonies that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a government will not regulate and criminalize.

Under a new Swiss law enshrining rights for animals, dog owners will require a qualification, anglers will take lessons in compassion and horses will go only in twos.

From guinea-pigs to budgerigars, any animal classified as a "social species" will be a victim of abuse if it does not cohabit, or at least have contact, with others of its own kind.

The new regulation stipulates that aquariums for pet fish should not be transparent on all sides and that owners must make sure that the natural cycle of day and night is maintained in terms of light. Goldfish are considered social animals, or Gruppentiere in German. - New Swiss law protects rights of 'social' animals - Times Online

Government control over the citizens does not come about just through the legislation of the large issues a la the Canadian Hate Speech Tribunals. It also happens -- and much more frequently -- by the assumption of the government by fiat of the right to control all manner of little things. The recent best seller, "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff," has it exactly backwards. The small stuff is what has to be sweated. All the time.

If you are of a certain age you'll remember the arguments against seat belt laws and motorcycle helmets mandates. In general it ran, "If they can do this to these things, they can do it to bigger things and everything."

Nonsense, was the rejoinder, this is simply "for your own good." An extension of this rationale was, "It is for the good of the children." Fast forward a few decades and take a searching and fearless inventory of all the things you simply cannot do that are just things that involve you own personal behavior. You'll find that they are numerous and growing. The new argument for laws and regulations that diminish your freedoms and liberty centers around "saving the planet." This one is perfect since, simply by being alive, there are many things you do -- such as exhaling carbon dioxide -- that threaten the planet.

The new improved "Thou shalt" seems to run like this:

Change your light bulbs because you must save the planet for your own good and the good of the children. And while you are at it, quit breathing.

Smoking is the ground zero of this kind of creeping control of the individual. In a way, it is the perfect issue to regulate since it combines forcing you to do something for "Your own good" and forcing you to behave differently "for the children." When it began, some said that the government would be coming around to tell you what you could or could not smoke in your car and in your home. Nonsense, the proponents said. It will never come to that. And yet, of course it has. And it will continue.

The compulsion to control that drives this new Puritanism is rooted in the convicton that somebody, somewhere, might be doing something the regulators think is evil or just bad. And those people must be stopped. First seat belts, then helmets, then tobacco, then drinking while pregnant, soon drinking while not pregnant, next they are coming for your goldfish. "Do it for your own good and for the children" is the code of the new creeping behavior police. It stands for, "Do it because we say so. Or else." And they are legion.

We can see it today at its most absurd and yet most pernicious in this regulation of the very small, very granulated behavior out of the most regulated of the European countries, but it is alive and well here in the US as well.

In a way, it is a symptom of a civilization that has just ground to a halt. The Swiss have simply run out of rational things to regulate and so they move on to the world of compassionate bullshit. How boring it must be to be Swiss. How utterly lacking their world must be in challenge and vision. How much do I love the smell of burning civilizations in the morning? A lot since, sooner or later, it all goes over the edge and from small fires large conflagrations are born.

HT:Zooillogix

Race hustling and black racism goes mainstream.

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs. - Booker T. Washington

"In comparing African-American children and European-American children, we were comparing apples and rocks."

"Different is not deficient," is the theme of this speech by Obama mentor Wright. That and a crash course in black eugenics and phrenology that would make a fascist blush.

It would seem there is a profound difference between the black brain and other brains after all. At least according to Reverend Wright. According to this shining exemplar of Barack Obama and his deep "scholarship," is vast learning concerning black liberation theology, black people are right-brained, white people are left-brained. and never the twain shall meet. Asian people don't make the discussion since that would be, well, unfortunate.

If you're like me you've probably been wandering about the world babbling something about racial equality in America that affirms, "There are no differences except differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference." You could also say, "All men are created equal." How left-brained of you.

Now comes Reverend James Wright to set us all straight. He notes in passing that the right-brain of black people is somehow descended from the griots of Africa. The griots were people who could remember long, very long, poems; proto-rappers if you will. White people had something like that too, but then they invented ... writing. Or was it the Asians? I forget since, alas, my griot genes are slim to none.

At any rate, being descended from griots seems to me to be a lucky win in genetic lotto if you get one of the 100 top rapper slots in the world. It will probably be a bit more problematic if you want to get a job that involves actual analytic skills.

Reverend Wright's mindset is indeed fascinating. You can see the brain in fervid action above.

Full speech @ Rev Wright NAACP Speech (Video). Four segments including singing and dancing.

---

UPDATE: In the comments, Steve Marmer sums up what is deeply wrong and disturbing about Wright's racial theories:

Wright basically asserted that there is inborn biological difference between those of European stock and those of African stock that culture and education cannot overcome.

I believe that biology is important. I believe that culture -- deep culture -- is important. I believe that education is important. The balance among these elements is even more important. But the consequences of the view that there are innate biological differences that trump culture and education is very dangerous.

I do not believe a civil society democratically constituted can withstand such a view. Democracy as we know it in America, that goes beyond mere plebiscite and extends to freedom of speech, of association, to reliable contracts, fair courts, rule of law, and the notion that no one should, on the basis of biological characteristics alone, be excluded from full citizenship rights, cannot withstand the notion that there are innate biological differences between races that trump our common culture and our universal standards of education.

Some images from Saturday at the market.

Give Seattle one (1) beautiful day and.... here comes everybody.... get pickin'.

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The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead. -- Proverbs 21:16

WATCHING AN ANCIENT DEMON RETURN to take control of someone you love, and begin to kill them slowly with euphoria is a hard witness to bear alone. They'll all tell you you have no power to stop it, but that cannot be true.

Surely somewhere in the mountainous library of studies written about the Demon there's a magic spell, an incantation, a potion, a pill, a recipe for rescue. You find yourself, as you always have, turning to books where, most certainly you've told yourself, all answers lie. But this particular library is, you will find when you go there, vast, unmapped and illuminated in the manner of Milton's Hell,
     A dungeon horrible, on all sides round,
     As one great furnace, flamed; yet from those flames
     No light, but rather darkness visible,
and the card catalogue has long since been ripped from the drawers and scattered madly about the floor by others seeking the same secret. Still, I stumbled about blind in this dark place which held no braille, nor could I have read it if it had.

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It seems like only yesterday that a New York Sun reporter noticed that purchases of huge bags of rice were being limited at Costco.

Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World | The New York Sun

Wait! Wait! It was only yesterday, or the day before, or just before that... It is so hard to tell when doom knocks on our door everyday.

Well, as usual, when you've got a little bit of freeze-dried bullshit excreted into the media well, it quickly expands to fill the well and then the collective media brainpan.

Here's the Wall Street Journal chiming in:

You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.-- R.O.I. - WSJ.com

I recall thinking when I first saw the rice/Costco item, "Doesn't that reporter know that people who run small businesses and restaurants use Costco to get their supplies whenever their own suppliers cut them short or gouge them?" Evidently not.

The backstory comes in from here:

Peak Oil News Discussion -- Food Rationing across NYC!

the main reason for the rice shortage(s) is that largely desired jasmine rice variety has been limited in export from thailand so they can feed their own people, which in turn affects the supply worldwide, so there has been a rush to buy what little supply remains. Then, of course, the price doubles for the remaining average rice, which in turn prompts the thrifty buyer to purchase some large bulk bags now to avoid any more price increases.

this has a domino effect. one event leads to another, then another. also, small businesses have tried to rush Costco to save some money by side-stepping their regular rice, wheat, flour, etc vendors. If Costco didnt limit purchases then there would be many people trying to corner the market on rice by backing up a flatbed, then selling the extras for a crazy high price and/or shipping them overseas to relatives for use/re-sale.

But will that blunt fact stop the "Food Shortage in America" wave of bullshit currently sweeping through the media. Not at all.

The media knows, first, last and always, that:

"In America you never outgrow your need for bullshit."

Bon appeitit!

UPDATE: Yes, Walmart joins the "rationing." Customers limited to 200 POUNDS of rice at a time.

Walmart Rations Rice

Shoppers at Sam's Club discount wholesale clubs will be limited to four bags of rice per customer. Wal-Mart "working with our suppliers to address this matter to ensure we are in stock, and we are asking for our members' cooperation and patience." It's not as bad as it sounds, the bags are still 50 lbs each.

What is driving this? Not hunger or fear, but speculation, "[Costco] had a two 50-lb limit on rice purchases as well to keep people from hoarding and reselling the rice."

The article also notes the "shortage" is for premium imported brands of rice such as Jasmine and Basmati. Standard American rice is not affected.

But, should the bullshit continue, it might well be since nothing drives speculation as much as bullshit. Especially from those invested in the speculation.

An item in my RSS feed that vanished on the site it came from:

"We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.

"On one side, you have a b*tch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a b*tch who is a lawyer.

"On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.

"Is there a contest here?"

Update: Originally seen at The Anchoress.

There are actually two (2!) people in this photograph. If you look carefully you can see the politician. Might have to stare and then squint and then look away. But it's true.

UPDATE: Now with a possible, if x-rated explanation, after the jump. You have been warned.

UPDATE: The New York Times report -- CNN Reporter Faces Drug Charge - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog -- omits the sex equipment and partner details. Commenters are clueless as a result.

"CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said. Quest, 46, was arrested at around 3:40 a.m. after a cop spotted him and another man inside the park near 64th Street...."Mr. Quest didn't realize that the park had a curfew," lawyer Alan Abramson said. He was simply "returning to his hotel with friends." -- KINKY NEWS NETWORK - New York Post

Meanwhile, back at the hotel:

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The Abortion Project "Artist" bending over in studio. Plastic sacks of her dark fluid on the wall behind.

Jack Ryan: "Where are you taking me, Marty?"
Marty Cantor: "It's you who have taken us, Jack... "
-- Patriot Games

Yale said her project was a "hoax." She says they lied.

"Shvarts said her project would take the form of a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Holcombe T. Green Jr. Hall. Shvarts said she would wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around the cube, with blood from her self-induced miscarriages lining the sheeting." -- Yale Daily News - Shvarts, Yale clash over project

"...would wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting..." Ah, how cutting edge. How avante-garde! How 21st century!

In the period of 1969-1971 I lived in a two-story green house in Berkeley, California, with a sculptor. I was, or so I claimed then, a poet.

The house had four small apartments. Ours was downstairs and in back. In the front apartment, a painter had reproduced Motherwell's Elegy for the Spanish Republic #110 at full size on his bedroom wall as a mural. Upstairs in the front, a couple would, from time to time, bring in a trunk and produce tens of thousands of LSD hits for sale throughout the bay area. Upstairs in back, an old gray man known as "Mr. Smith" would pursue his long affair with heroin. It was, by the standards of the time, a house fraught with art.

In a way I don't now recall, I'd come into possession of many end-rolls of clear industrial plastic. The rolls were some 7 feet tall and each had hundreds of feet of unused sheeting on it. During a long evening with the painter and my sculptor, we decided - in reference to the then obscure artist Christo -- we would wrap the entire two-story house in plastic. Which we did. I have, somewhere in my endless boxes, photographs of this "Happening" -- as it was then called.

Here's a photograph of the house that I took passing through Berkeley in 2005. As you can see, wrapping it in long plastic sheets 7 feet tall would not be a trivial exercise, but we managed it in an afternoon.

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[Note 1: Yale now claims this was all a hoax. See below.]

[Note 2: Yale Advisor removes video from YouTube. See below.]

[Note 3: Then again, perhaps, not so much of a hoax after all:
Yale Daily News - Shvarts, Yale clash over project

"In an interview later Thursday afternoon, Shvarts defended her work and called the University's statement "ultimately inaccurate." She reiterated that she engaged in the nine-month process she publicized on Wednesday in a press release that was first reported in the News: repeatedly using a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself, then taking abortifacient herbs at the end of her menstrual cycle to induce bleeding. Thursday evening, in a tour of her art studio, she shared with the News video footage she claimed depicted her attempts at self-induced miscarriages."

[YouTube video removed April 18,2008]

VIDEO UPDATE: Like cockroaches running for the den when the lights go on: Shvarts' advisor Pia Lindman chickens out by removing the You Tube video above originally at Lindman's Soapbox Event. Ah, the courage of our "artists!

Teacher's Pet, Aliza Shvarts, who saved her abortions for art, ( Yale Daily News - For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse) rants on about speech at her teacher's performance Soapbox Event. Sample:

"And you know we are conditioned that way, and why are we conditioned that way, and you know... Because we have this huge fucking institution ... it's these patriarchal heteronormative trappings of a right to speak.... "

Rousing applause for this person. I'm sure her exhibition of her abortions will also be applauded. You can't help wondering what her parents -- who raised her and who no doubt paid for her "education" are thinking.

After all, she went in looking like this:

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USA: Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

According to readers of Freakonomics

Update: Reader (and writer) Morgan Freeberg suggests an even shorter motto should we ever feel we need to advertise for more immigrants:

USA: Our Poor People Are Fat

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't seem like a good plan to me.

In fact, upon reflection, it occurs to me that the entire thrust of both these Democrat campaigns is to obscure the fact that the primary and most immediate power of the Presidency is to draw and use the sword. The usual sheaf of tax, health, educational promises and policies depend on congressional review and approval. Those processes take up an inordinate amount of time to unfold, and are usually subject to endless equivocation and compromise. They might make your tomorrows brighter or darker, but they don't really have the power to make or ruin today.

Not so the use of the sword. It can be drawn and deployed within 15 minutes.

Let's review:

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• The Olbermann Counter: Media BJs Given to Barack Obama to Date
• Clear History
• "There Will Be Bamboozling"
• Dirty Jobs: A Position in Science Worthy of Al Gore
• Your Job's On the Line
• There Are No Adequate Words
• The Perpetual Motion BS Generator: Democrat Propaganda for the 21st Century
• The Republican '08 Slogan? Jesus, Mary, and Ronald Reagan Wept!
• The Friends and Family Voters of Kentucky
• The News Is There Is None
• Oh 8!
• You Can't Make This Shit Up, But Science Can!