I haven't thought about much for a while, but after reading my blog entries from five years ago, when I thought I was thinking, I realize now that I probably should stop thinking. Because I can't. Do it well. Remarkable, how long delusions can perpetuate.

I'll be adding to this blog. No one will read it. That's OK. If someone did read it, I'd be even more embarrassed than I am now, comfortably anonymous. Because dullards like me shouldn't attempt to be insightful.

Funny thing is, I tried to make a living at that. Fatuousness multiplied by ineptitude, equals such a nullity, it's bewildering.

Back I am. Am I back. Start with one word. Sentience. Unfortunate, that.

Jimmy Carter. American nebbish.

Not only did Carter put on a cardigan sweater and talk about "malaise" while Iranian theocrats held (and tortured, don't forget) our embassy employees, but under his administration, the US started its "tilt" towards, of all things, Iraq. So Carter is responsible in large part for the twin problems we face--the Batthists and the far more important problem of the rise (or, more accurately, the rebirth) of reactionary Islamic fundamentalism.

Jimmy Carter: worst American president of the 20th century, and with NO competition. (Bush is 21st century, and in all fairness, he's got a long, long, long way to go before he can match Carter's incompetence, which was transcendent at times.) And all Carter's holier-than-thou Habitat for Humanity crap is grating as ... well, hell. We want to put a deck on our house; maybe I'll write Carter and ask him if he'll do it. I'm human, I'm humane (well, to dogs and cats), and I want expanded habitat.

Billy, his late, lamented booze-hound of a brother, on the other hand, might have made a damn fine president. (His evangelist sister, Ruth Stapleton, who's also dead, would probably have made a better president as well.) I'm sure Billy would have flattened Teheran 48 hours after the hostages were taken, sucking down beer all the time. That's what we should have done; just told the Soviets what we're doing, and there you go. The hostages would have died, of course, but I'm pretty sure that would have saved 2,800 lives on 9/11. Nip it in the bud.

Jimmy Carter is the Mister Rogers of American presidents.

Speaking of religious nuts, why is even Fox new failing to focus on shithead Asan Akbar, the murderer in the rear, and his beliefs? Here's the US military spin:

"George Heath, a spokesman for the division's home base at Ft. Campbell, Ky., said Akbar had been "having what some might call an attitude problem." Max Blumenfeld, an Army spokesman in Kuwait City, said the suspect's motive "most likely was resentment."

Here's something a bit more pertinent:

"Akbar graduated from Locke High School in Los Angeles. He also studied at the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center, a predominantly African American mosque in South-Central Los Angeles."

Islam is a religion of peace, right Mr. Bush?

There's entirely too much focus on goofy anti-war protestors and "human
shields," and not nearly enough on whether this military action is the SMART thing to do.
I know we have smart weapons; I don't think those include some members of this Administration or its so-called brain trust..

The "embedded" reporters have been awfully silent over the past few days.

In lieu of three-day old CNN human interest stories, or Faux News cheerleading interviews with third-tier Heritage Foundation functioinaries, or MSNBC interviews with top brass who've been TV commentators since Kosovo, here's
some of what's going on:

According to a BBC reporter in central Iraq, "a large convoy of US marines remains stalled about a 100 miles south of Baghdad after encountering heavy resistance from Iraqi forces. Further shelling took place this morning,
aimed at Iraqi convoys, before the marines switched location. The warm greeting these men received as they entered Iraq has all but evaporated. The Bedouin tribesmen and their toothy grins have been replaced by tenacious and
well-armed groups of Iraqi fighters, seemingly determined to halt the advance on Baghdad."

Even in Shiite-controlled Basra, an area certainly not fond on Saddam, the city has not fallen yet. Some reports are attributing this to elements of the RG who are intimidating the local population. Could be. But the city is surrounded, and I would think that if the local population was really happy that we were there, they wouldn't be quite so intimidated by some Batthist thugs left behind; they'd be looking at this opportunity to get even for years of tyranny.Of course, they remember how we sold them down the river (almost literally) in '91, so I'd be reluctant, too. And this is the BBC, which didn't like the fact we went into Afghanistan, for chrissakes, never mind Iraq.

Despite our admirable policy of minimizing Iraqi civilian casualites (and possibly endangering our own guys in the process), the hearts and minds don't seem to be all a flutter at our incursion. All this talk about "liberation" fails to
take into account that we are invading another country. We are not invading Saddam's living room; from some of the admin shills, you'd think we were doing just that. One guy's liberation is another's threat. That's not moral relativity; that's reality. One that the right wing doesn't seem to get. There's been a great deal of debate on how righteous this is; there should have been more on how prudent it is.

BTW, Rumsfield's and Wolfowitz's confidence that shock and awe would cause the Iraqi leadership to cave belies their ignorance of military history. Bombing doesn't do it. We leveled every city in Japan with conventional bombing, and the Japs were still ready to fight. They were ready to keep at even after Hiroshmia and Nagasaki, but Hirohito knew the game was up, and because he was god on earth, when he talked, the Japanese followed, and the adverbly "timidly" soon followed.

Here's another report:

"British Royal Marines have moved into positions along the Iraqi border with Iran. It is the furthest east that they have deployed and is a sign that Britain and America are worried that Iran may try to exploit the chaos caused by the war. RAF Chinook helicopters dropped hundreds of Marines, many looking tired after days moving through the desert into the border region. We went with them into an area pitted with shell holes. They are not from the current conflict, but are the scars left by eight years of fighting between Iraq and Iran during the 1980s. Now the Marines are trying to make sure Iran can't exploit Iraq's current weakness. The Marines have complained already they've come under fire from Iranian machine guns, a charge denied by Iran."

This shouldn't be surprising. Iran is much more of an enemy to us than Iraq, since it is run by religious theocrats who are far more of a danger to this country than a tinhorn Arab nationalist dictator. Expect more of this kind of thing. I wouldn't be surprised if we were in a full scale (if undeclared) war with Iran with a couple of weeks. Who knows what kind of WMDs the Iranians might have. Certainly its military is more imposing than Iraq's. (What about those Silkworm missles?) The Iranians will feel that we are overextended and could try to take advantage, by embarrassing Uncle Sam and giving the Muslim world
a quick thrill. The optimistic scenario is that by this time Iraq would be "conquered" and Saddam and his gang consigned to the dustbin of history. It'd be nice if we had a coalition of troops from other countries who could serve as peackeeepers so that we could turn our military to use on any repercussions (i.e., any Iranian incursion) that results from this war. But
Micronesia hasn't offered its crack Tahitian divisions yet, as far as I know. And our "coalition of the willing" is mostly that kind of thing (the Brits excepted, of course.)

Meanwhile, Turkey moves against the Kurds to the north. Many supporters of this war thought we were going to somehow "save" the Kurds; now they are coming to the belated realization that this Administration doesn't give two
turds about the Kurds. And rogue Russian criminal (or quasi-criminal) elements are giving night vision goggles to the Iraqis. Bush is telling Putin to crack down. Bit of history here. Last year, Putin agreed with Bush on massive cuts on our nuclear arsenals and, at considerable domestic political risk, Putin went along with Bush on Star Wars. Putin, naturally,
felt Bush owed him one. In the run up to Iraq, however, the morons who run our administration took Russia completely for granted (I thought Condi Rice was a "Russian expert") and assumed the bear would line up behind us obediantly. Bears are not noted for obediance. (Read Theodore Rex, which I just got finished with, and you'll see how even Teddy Roosevelt, who
is to Shrub what a sequoia is to milkweed, had to handle the Russians with diplomatic nuance.) This hurt Russian pride; our Adminstration didn't seem to give a damnt. We don't seem to give a damn about anyone's pride but the Weekly Standard's.
Well, here's the blowback: Putin is not going to put himself out cracking down on unauthorized (we hope) arms shipments to Iraq.

This is making all the continued grumbling about human shields and Blimpie Moore a bit dated.

.

One of the princesses of the right, Peggy "Dolphins" Noonan, better hire herself a new editor.

A VERBATIM quote from her recent article in the WSJ (boldface mine):

It is going to mean, first, that something good happened. This sounds small but is huge. The West has been depressed since Sept. 11, 2001. It has been torn, riven. It has been a difficult time. The coming victory is going to be the biggest good thing that has happened in the world, the West and the United States since the twin towers fell.

Why is "West" capitalized and "twin towers" isn't? And then there's the matter of how this reads.

Whatta dimwit. And that's being kind.

Meanwhile, here's a guy blogging his ass off, breaking stories way before the cable channels or major websites are. Worth a long look.

Update on Farmer Wright. He was "distraught," and that included because his dog died. I got a lot of sympathy for people who grieve over their dogs. And, yeah, our right to protest, and it's under seige, possibly. Still, this guy did claim to have a bunch of explosives in his truck, so that separates him out from your run-of-the-mill protestor. And he drove it into the
reflecting pool, which I'm sure violates many an ordinance; I don't think you can get a permit to do that kind of particular
"protesting." So "nonviolent" is not applicable in Old McDonald's case, even though "violent" might be stretching things. There's a gray area in between.

While I agree there's more than a hint these days that anyone who dares to protest anything is an enemy of the state and subject to, at the least, summary execution, this hayseed was going quite a bit beyond the exercise of his First Amendment rights as well as anything that could reasonably be allowable under any standard of "civil disobedience."

Besides, it's personal. He's a religious fanatic (knock, knock), the type of guy always complaining others getting the
gummit handout when he's gettin' plenty himself, and he caused me to be late to an appointment. Red state/blue state, round 7646. If his f*****g farm is going up in smoke, he should go learn how to grow soybeans or something. Or move to
Iowa and get on the ADM ethanol gravy train.

Daschle's gotten a lot of grief for his remarks the other day, and it's probably deserved, but I'm much more interested in what is worse.

People have mentioned that Lott got a bit of the shaft, given that "Bringin' Home the Bacon" Byrd's resume includes a stint in the KKK. You know the ground is shakin' when Trent Lott becomes a object of relative sympathy.

I "weep for my country" whenever I realize Byrd (Lott, too, for that matter) is (still) a member of the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body."

Like the article says, it's just one guy, so it might not mean there's widespread disaffection. And it's not like the intelligence services deserve the benefit of the doubt, since they, like everyone else, are culpable in 9/11.

The money passages (b/f mine)::

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) -- The top National Security Council official in the war on terror resigned this week for what a NSC spokesman said were personal reasons, but intelligence sources say the move reflects concern that the looming war with Iraq is hurting the fight against terrorism.

Rand Beers would not comment for this article, but he and several sources close to him are emphatic that the resignation was not a protest against an invasion of Iraq. But the same sources, and other current and former intelligence officials, described a broad consensus in the anti-terrorism and intelligence community that an invasion of Iraq would divert critical resources from the war on terror.



This is a very intriguing decision (by Beers)," said author and intelligence expert James Bamford. "There is a predominant belief in the intelligence community that an invasion of Iraq will cause more terrorism than it will prevent. There is also a tremendous amount of embarrassment by intelligence professionals that there have been so many lies out of the administration -- by the president, (Vice President Dick) Cheney and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell -- over Iraq."

Bamford cited a recent address by President Bush that cited documents, which allegedly proved Iraq was continuing to pursue a nuclear program, that were later shown to be forgeries.

"It is absurd that the president of the United States mentioned in a speech before the world information from phony documents and no one got fired," Bamford said. "That alone has offended intelligence professionals throughout the services."

This loon shut down DC traffic for two days.

Two questions:

1/This guy's worried about tobacco price supports, or whatever, and creating a public menace, at a time of war. Where's John Ashcroft? I guess he's too busy opening people's mail. If we're going to start throwing around words like traitor, I've got the first name for the list: Dwight W. Watson.

2/What does this say about our ability (or inability) to respond to potential terror attacks

The difference between reactionary-right charlatans on the Supreme Court and those "f*****g Hollywood/leftist communists" who are so scorned these days--and I'll scorn 'em right along with everyone else, since I despise the celebirty culture in general--is that the Hollywood left has no real power, and anyone who thinks otherwise knows nothing about power. "Shaping the cultural climate" of the nation is just geek-speak of those with a social agenda only slightly less restrictive than the Taliban's.

So let's go after things that matter, OK?

Scalia, one of the most important men in the country, yesterday said that we should suspend, or amend, or otherwise traduce, the Bill of Rights. (I thought Scalia was a "strict constructionist." Tony S., by virtue of his membership in the USSC, is in a bit more of a position to do harm to the country than, say, Martin Sheen is.

So where are the libertarians on this one? Can Neil Boortz stop shilling for the Administration long enough to notice this?
And the "liberal" Washington Post, where is its editorial outrage. First Amendment is usually the first one to go, after all. That's why so many are so absolute about it.

Someone sent me an email by someone who had spent evidently hours tracking down the educational achievements of Susan Sarandon and Alec Baldwin and that lot, and compared that to the educational backgrounds of people in this administration. Funny, that, on many levels, not the least of which is that so many people spend so much time assailing academia, but then don't hesitate to haul out academic credentials when it "supports" their argument. (I'll leave aside for the time being that one of the educational titans this email listed was our famously intellectual President.) Funny, also, that this guy didn't look up the educational background of, say, Ted Nugent, or Reba McIntyre, or Charlton Heston, or any other celebrities who are Republicans Party supporters. {Being an actor didn't seem to disqualify Reagan from being President, did it?}. If Martin Sheen should shut up, then so the f**k should Little Teddyboy Nugget. At least Martin Sheen has made a couple of good movies.

Back to Tony Soprano. Don't think when he starts talking about scaling back individual rights in time of warfare (Has Congress declared war yet? How can it be wartime) that he's just going to limit it to Muslims. That would, of course, involve religious profiling, which I fully support, but which isn't going to happen any time soon. If the choice is casting a look at an organized monotheistic relligion or just de facto (and, eventually, de jure, no doubt) shaving back on a few rights, which option do you think Tony Soprano and Ashheap will pursue? That ilk has been gunning to do this quite a while; read Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" to get an idea of their agenda.

This crowd was looking with admiration, in fact, at fundamentalist Muslim societies, until 9/11 made such sympathities a bit unseemly. Remember Grover Norquist's advise to the Republican Party to actively recruit in mosques (so 1990s, but there it is.) Or Dana Rohrbacher playing Disraeli with the Taliban literally weeks before the Towers fell?

I tell you, if getting rid of Saddam means giving Scalia, Ashcroft, Poindexter, and that crowd carte blanche to gut our freedoms, it ain't worth it. Meanwhile, 150 billion deficits, the threat of turning Iraq (which had been, for that part of the world, a relatively secular society) into another maniacal bunch of Muslims (read http://this-- especially the last couple of paragraphs) ticking off the rest of the world (who'll we'll need somewhere down the line both to reconstruct and pay for the reconstruction of, Iraq, and to continue to pursue Islamic fanatics) and on and on and on. These are tough questions, and should make anybody ambivalent about this little adventure we're launching into. I'm not saying we shouldn't, and we have to now, we've come too far. But that doesn't diminish the gravity of these issues. But the right wing just lays the smackdown on the surrender monkies a bit, and laughs o' million, and over 50% of people in this country think most of the 911 hijackers were Iraqis, and meanwhile Scalia does his Machiavellian-cum-Capone act. With Clarence Thomas featured as the enforcer .... naah, that doesn't work. He's fat, but it's a pudgy fat; he ain't Clemenza, in other words.

Not all is lost. Here's something from a real libertarian and not that poseur Boortz down in Atlanta.

Yesterday, Tony "sopranos" Scalia handed down this pearl of legal legerdemain:


UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, Ohio (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Tuesday night that government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. "The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said at John Carroll University. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."

That's lovely. Compare to the Bill of Rights, which has generally been thought as superceding the random burblings of a SCJ.

Amendment IX: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

But after all, the French and Hollywood has-been Hollywood actresses are the REAL threat here, huh?

What's anti American here, that Dixie Chick (who are they, anyway?) saying that Bush is an embarrassment, or
this?
Where's Bill O'Blather now?
Where's Neil Bore-tz?

This country's gone through the looking glass. You'd think we were at war with Hollywood celebrities and
French-American citizens instead of Islamo-nuts.
This is every bit a "hate crime" as burning a cross on a black family's lawn. If we're gonna prosecute something as a "hate crime" (and I'm not generally comfortable with that whole idea, but that's another issue for another time) then these pr***ks should be brought to account. Make 'em sit in a room for a year and watch Jean-Luc Goddard films, and having nothing to eat but sweetbreads.

The yahoos who do this kind of thing take their lead directly from chest-thumbing cretins like Hannity and Mike "Savage," who define balls as the ablility to insult Barbara Streisand, and indirectly from Rumsfield, who defines balls as the ability to target Iraq the day the worst attack on American citizens in history. The former are evil scoutmasters manipulating their easily fooled listeners; Rummy is just increasingly dangerous to our national security.

Chirac is manipulative scum and totally irresponsible, but there are plenty of people of France who are worried about their own problems with Muslim Immigrants (look at how well Le Pen did) and we shouldn't be alienating them by spending taxpayer dollars debating whether the Congressional cafeteria should rename French fries "Freedom fries." What garbage.

Chirac, with his dunderheaded attempts at strong arming Eastern Europe, is alienating the entire world even more quickly than Bush, Jr.is, and he'll be consigned appropriately shortly. Meanwhile, we're alienating a liberal democracy with whom we've got a shared 200+ year history where we've helped each other out of several jams (usually because it was in our own respective national interests), while staying mum on our theocratic friends like the Saudis or our authoritarian friends (who are perilously close to become theocracies themselves) like the Pakis.

These French bashing jokes were funny, but it's getting old.

This sucks.

I don't much like celebrities or celebrity culture, and bad things if they happen to good people happen a lot more to anonymous ones. Bad things, when they happen to celebrities, I shrug my shoulders and if someone mentions that Former Heartthrob Simon or Lovely Princess Diana died, I let go with an insta-screed against our pop-drenched society

I suppose I'm no different though. I'm taking this kind of hard, and that's surprising, given what a hard week this has been on the emotions to begin with. Zevon was (well, still is; like Michael Palin, "he's not dead yet" and he'd probably appreciate the reference) the anti-celebrity, with a great warped sense of humor--already joking about his impending death, which is something I wouldn't have the mettle to do--and he was a hell of a songwriter. You put the two together, and you get "punching out Chryslers in the factory/breathing polymetalchloride in the factory." (Given this bad news, was Zevon priescient with this lyric?) I always thought Springsteen's song "Factory" from "Darkness" was moving; then I heard Zevon's take, and I could never again listen to Bruce's without thinking a wee bit, well ... sentimental. As in "Sentimental Hygiene."

One of my favorites, off the same album, is "Bad Karma": "I took a wrong turn/On the astral plane/Now I keep on thinking my luck is gonna change/Someday/Bad karma/It's uphill all the way." The idea of karma, the stuff of millions of phonies propounding on half baked metaphysics while fingering beads, bracketed by lines like the last, straight out of a C&W song back when C&W was sung by ... well, people like Zevon. Hearning Zevon sing about bad karma is kind of like hearing Celine Dion sing about seducing the milkman. The difference, of course, is that Zevon did sing about that stuff, and about a whole lot of other things few other people did, and he did it, to borrow from another memorable performer (two, if you count Sid Vicious, who was kind of like an untalented Zevon, I suppose), his way.

I've seen him three times; once, around 1990, in DC's Lisner Auditorium, he orchestrated (and that is the word, literally) the most memorable concert opening I've ever seen. No big laser show, of course, no fireworks, just synthesized music that was like the soundtrack from some movie like "Soylent Green," and this semi-modulated, disembodied voice, part haunting and part cranky, that spoke German over for a few minutes. It could have been directions on the Metro, it could have been a lecture in chemistry, it could have been ... well, it was German. I understand a little German, but I couldn't make much of it out, so maybe it was pidgin German. Well, anyway, what it did was, it drew you in, like a good opening of anything should, and in a way that surprises you, even in retrospect. My description doesn't do it justice.

Little Bennie Shapiro, in his little smug cocoon of right wing christianity and disdain of our amoral and godless society, should let his hair down a bit, get drunk, not waste his youth on being a scold, and learn a thing or two about living from Zevon. We all probably could.

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

I spend too much time brooding about the munchkins like Shapiro, and not enough contemplating the giants.

Like Melville. This from his poem, "The Martyr," on Lincoln's assassination. Quite apt for the Slaughter, though.


"There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand;
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand."

And then there's little munchkins like this . I've got more respect for the average Tailban. At least they've got the stuff to live in the desert and go through military training for their allah. This little derisive nonentity sits at home having intelligent conversation with Mother dearest. Hint, dork: real 18-year-old patriots are humping it in Parris Island, not bravely berating liberal arts professors.

Oh, and one more thing.

How should we go about "commemorating" today?

How about by disposing of these cretins.

How's that for introspection?

We've had days of sadness and reflection and crying, and it's all very edifying and civilizing.

Now it's time to start licking our chops again.

I read somewhere once that we write things down because it helps our thinking. I probably read it several times, ii fact, since chances are if I only had read it once, I wouldn't have remembered it. I've always been intimidated by those essays that begin by some multitasker braying, "once, thirty-seven years ago, when I contemplated at dawn the mulberry tree in my backyard while scratching my armpit and reading Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," I was struck by ..."

We write things down to tell us not what to think--christ, there are enough pretenders to that task among us--but to bring order to our thought, which invariably starts off chaotic and primordial, full of biases and little known facts and eddies of conversations and snippets of things we've read, and we have to sort through all this as we pursue the primrose path of logic (or Dianectics {sic) if you're a Scientologist.). And there's a lot of sorting out when it comes to the ... Event.

So one way I've -- and better writers than me -- have tried to do it, has been to put fingertip to keyboard, and pound away until the chemic of sense precipitates out of the volume of inspiration.

I remember Leon Wiestieler (sic) of the New Republic, writing even before the bellow of the towers' collapse had been silenced in our minds, "beware of attempts at fine writing." He's a fine writer, himself, and I'm never wary of him, but I thought this was a rather cheap or at least ungenerous sentiment. But I did remember it after having read it only once; the cuts closest to the bone are the ones that bleed the most.

So in writing about It ... well, that's the first thing. By what name shall last year at this time go by? 911? Convenient shorthand, but, in the end, a hotel room number. I stayed on the ninth floor in a Dallas hotel recenlty, and whenever I passed room 911, I looked at it, sure, but there was no essential revelation. Just a hallway with faux art and faux carpet; comfortable, I might add. But the gods or monsters of inspiration were not summoned. Not even in the city JFK was shot in, a city 230 miles south of where the Murrah building used to be and where McVeigh may or may not have had the help of Iraqi intelligence. A state that houses Waco, the Alamo, the Texas City explosion of 1947 that killed around 600, one of the great civilian death tolls in the 20th century.

These threads can lead the unbalanced mind anywhere.

So what other name do we name these dreadful things, other than, say, "Dreadful Things," which could be nightmares or cancer. "Attacks"? "Attack" implies something that was being defended at the time. We weren't defending ourselves; the nature of these ... events ... is that they won't, can't occur to something that's defended. "Terrorist attacks" is, to me, an oxymoron, if you buy a certain meaning of attack. I'm sure think tanks citywide are full of people who'd disagree, and some who'd say that's a dangerous way to think. Well, fine.

And, then, "terrorism". That's a weasel word here; this isn't the IRA or Basque Separatists, as many have pointed out. It's radical Islam, and maybe a lot more of Islam--it's up to them to prove that to me, and not incumbent upon me to apologize for that. That's a debate that should be over, unless of course you're on the campus of SFSU or in the Bush Administration. Such strange bedfellows there are in these times.

How about "slaughter," then? Yeah, that'll do. But even that implies a crime. Well, it was a crime, the biggest one ever perhaps, but it was much, much, more, and anyone those who say, like the National Review, that if we look at it as a crime we respond to it with legality and not war have a very good point. Me and the National Review; another strange partnership. But then against, Christopher Hitchens is being published by Front Page.com, so up is down and black is white

But writing it down helps, and its therapeutic, and the need for some kind of reflectiveness shouldn't be lost even though I'm grinding my teeth at hearing 60s peacenik anthems as background music for some 911 memoriums. Writing it down, grappling with the immensity of the horror, is probably most of the reason blogging has become such a phenomenon. Lots of folks were doing it before, of couse, just like lots of people had cars before World War II; but the automotive age didn't start until afterwards, and the Blogging Age, if there is such a thing, will be marked from September 11th. All the sudden, there were these shattering, horrid events, ravishing symbols and killing thousands (and this in a country where only four times in its history had more than a thousand civilians been killed in a single event); being thinking, rational people, we turned to this wonderful creation the I-net, which allows us to explore the very nether regions of opinion which exist because every fact can be turned inside out and refracted, and it allowed us to learn much more and much more quickly about this than any other like minded group of people have ever assimilated a similarly arresting event.

But thinking is not and never should be just a means to an end, even if that end is opinion. Opinion is necessary, of course, if we are to order the world and not have it simply reflect our internal chaos. But some are taking that too far, and demanding certainty everywhere, iron bound and commanded by some smoldering Diety whose traditional values, and by the way, Eminem in jail and post the Ten Commandments in every public place in the country and block any website that has a naked breast on it. Uh-huh. Remember all that jabbering about postmodernism, and the decline of the west, and feeble academics? They're the ones shilling hardest for the march on Baghdad now, even with al Qaeda's top leadership still lurking in the shadows of the Karakorams.

And what about this? Everyone is screeching all Chomsky, all the time, how feckless he and Sontag and Fisk and a lot of other people no one had ever heard of before last September were so warped, and very good sport at the time it was. But now, what about this -- while Noam was manufacturing dissent, that shining star of the American patriot right, Representative Dana Rohrbacher, was hobnobbing with the Taliban two years after their house guest Osama had called for the slaughter of Americans. Type in "Fisk" or some of those other names in Google, and you'll get web page listings that crawl with invective, and for good reason. Why doesn't that happen when you type in Dana's name? Katha Pollit gets her panties up in a bunch at the idea of flying the American flag, and she's zinged for being a creepy-crawlie leftie, and she should have been. Lots of people, myself included, who'd never flown a flag in their life put one on the 11th and have left it and will leave it up ... well, forever. It's called taking back love of country from the demogogues like Whorebacher who've made it unappealing in the first place. Well, the left is in sorry disgrace; will Whorebacher be sent packing?

But these opinions, whether from the left or the right, it's just hobnobbing with the demogogues, and are just slightly less worthless than a plunger in a port-o-john. Besides, on any given topic, in any given lifetime someone will usually change their opinion on the margins, and might even rip their opinion out by the roots once or twice and think something else. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds; another bromide that can sink a thousand arguments.

This is an issue so vast, so inclusive, so transmogrifying in so many ways, that the habit of what the gloomy might call introspection or the precise call scrutiny should never conclude. My wife got me five books on it for my birthday, which I'd pointed out to her just a week before; all of these have been already supplanted on the best-seller lists. We think we have a lot to assimilate now, just wait a few years.

Some sharpie might say, if you think there's no argument about how huge this Slaughter, this Crime, this Act of Sadistic Insanity, then doesn't that right there kind of dent the edifice of my theory, which is that real debate should never end. Yet here I am, proposing the end of debate, saying no one should ever stop thinking about it. And so on this can go -- you can see where it will go -- into an infinite regression of dialectic, which invariably brings up postmodernism and them thar hateful libs, and then j'accuse from the libs who complain how they're being suppressed, and there it is, the Free Republic v. Media Whores Online, round ninety-eight, blue v. red, Bush caused 911 to get oil for his buddies v. the only thing Clinton did was send over a few rockets to get people's minds off that slut Monica. The extremes are always entertaining but, Christ, sometimes, I get sick of all that hooey.

I keep thinking to the scene in "Casablanca"--all right, it's a cliche, fuck it, it's always been a cool movie, and now more relevant than ever--right after Bogart sends Ilsa off with Lazlo, and Louie, no slouch in panache, says, "well, Rick, it seems you're not only a sentimentalist, but you've become a patriot," and Rick replies, "well, it seemed like a good time to start." Shrugs his shoulders. Damn right. Good a time as any, lefties. But, righties, before you start gambolling in ultimate victory, it's worth remembering that Bogie was called a commie in his time and haled before the House Un-Americans Activity Committee. A sign of someone who's not thinking is someone who doesn't see some unsettling parallel betweens Joe McCarthy and John Ashcroft.

've always believed it's a good thing if you talk to yourself, not to mention unavoidable, and if you move your lips doing it, so what? I remember being told when I was kid not to do that because people would know you were crazy and they'd scorn you and make fun of you. Well, they did that anyway, until I got to be bigger than them; then I could move my lips and if anyone looked at me funny, I'd glare back at them, and that was that. Of course, the lesson took, in its own way; I'm always finding myself humming some idiotic tune, like the old "Batman" theme, instead of thinking about whether the Islamic world is salvagable, or what if any blowback there was from our support for the mujuhadeen in the 80s to al Qaeda today. So, yeah, hold the opinions, and defend them, but remember it's usually not a bad idea occasionally to question them, to yourself if to no one else, and if you put all down in a blog, even if no one reads it, it's part of the record, and we're all part of that.

So does this mean the journey is all, not the destination? (Another shopworn phrase, uh-oh, but I've been bureaucratizing over the past two weeks, and I've got the fever but good.) Then think back to last year on this day and, in that case, it was the destination which was important, tragically so. How nice it would have been, after all, if the planes had just kept flying, or just landed where they should have, and the 11th would have gone down as just another noneventful pleasant late-summer day, and not the defining act of our times.

But then I'm reminded that if Al Qaeda or some other group of god fearin' loons had kept its powder dry a few more years, so to speak, they might have obtained some bad-ass biological "agent" or some horrible toxin or a nuke, and then we'd have had a six-figure death toll. Not a flippant rumination if you do it five miles from the White House. Would we have woken up to the danger of Islamic fundamentalism without a 911 occurring? You say "yes," but the evidence is sparse, if not non-existent. There's were the Iranian hostages, fatwas against Salman Rushie, the first WTC, the African embassies, the destruction of the Buddist temples, the USS Cole. None of those were the "tipping point," in the popular parlance, that the 11th was.

But you say "no," and that's ... I don't want to go any further down that path of inquiry. Not today.

Scrambling up mount oracle (as in the Greeks, not Larry Ellison's), trying to revitalize my blog. Too much depressing stuff going on to attend to call of egocentricity. The stock market collapsing (yeah, yeah, up month in August, beware September, the meanest month), corporate crooks everywhere, Ann Coulter advocating blowing up the New York Times (some wit said that the NYT is now performing the role Clinton's member used to, the ... er, thrust of all evil), and the Saudis, the SAUDIS, the GODDAMN SAUDIS. I feel like Matt Dillion's character in Drugstore Cowboy after he sees the hat on the bed.

Plus this month harbors my birthday, which is always a rank event that leads to dangerously lugubrious ruminations. When the highlight of the past fortnight was a business trip to Dallas to report on meetings regarding federal government workman's compensation claims --- I therefore lay claim to the informantion bidness crown of Extreme Esoteria -- you know the days I've fallen on have been particularly fell.

So, in keeping with the creative advances I've achieved this month, I'll recycle a few emails here.

You know what that patriot, Ari Fleishcher, said the other day about Prince
Bandar?

"He's a very charming guy. He speaks very good English, better than most
Americans do."

Prick. Here we have, as Matt Welch points out, have the spectacle of the president's press secretary condescending to and rankly INSULTING
Americans in order to genuflect to the people who sponsored the murder of 3,000
of us.

Can you imagine the reaction if Clinton's press secretary had said
something like this? Yet nary a peep from the established media. So much for
Bernie Goldberg's thesis about the "liberal" media. Maybe they are
individually, but they treat this administration like ... well, this
adminstration treats the Saudis.

If the Bush Administration kissed any more Saudi ass, even Hustler wouldn't
publish the pictures.

Welch grits his teeth and gives us the latest rundown of American genuflection before the Soddies.

Like I said, I just got back from Dallas, covering meetings regarding workman's compensation. Pure adrenal excitement. 13 breakout sessions, each one trumping the previous one in dash and flair. A man cain't stand too much of that lest he go BLIND!

Oh, well, I always like going to Texas. I got there a day early and tooled up to Oklahoma. Texans are nice; Okies are mean. Sorry to any Okies reading this, but I'm plain spoken (easy to be that way, 1000 miles from Oklahoma City) But there's this national wildlife refuge outside of Lawton called the Wichita Mountains that rears up off the plains like, as Cormac McCarthy might write, the backbone of some great spined creature of myth. I went hiking up there, up Last Resolution Mountain, or something like that. I also stopped by Archer City, Texas, a little piss of a place where Larry McMurtry was born. McMurtry still keeps a lplace there, and the entire downtown (well, what there is of it, it really is out of the "Last Picture Show") is more or less a used bookstore that he runs. He's a big collector of used books. Anyway, I pull into town about 5 pm Saturday evening, feeling like Hud ("did you have trouble here last night?" "I had HUD in here last night, is what I had" -- Hud the movie was based on McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By) -- and who do I see getting out of his big black Caddie, wearing a bolo tie, and looking like he'd just stepped out of a John Ford western? I walk by him, say "hello, Mr. McMurtry," and he said, "O'Grady, ah yes, even though I've won Pulitzers and National Book Awards and made shitloads of money, my life is incomplete, because I know I'll never be in the running for one of your Nonachievement Awards!" I shook my head sadly and in sympathy, musing all the while on the fickleness of fate and on man's desperate attempts to deny his own.

Driving around Texas reminds me of the P.I. in Blood Simple: "Now in Russia, they got it figured that everyone pulls for everyone else; at least, that's the theory. Well, I don't know about Russia, but this here is Texas, an' in Texas, you're on your own." That got me to thinking of Jeff Skilling and Sullivan and that crowd, and how the tax 'n spenders are just drooling in anticipation in launching an assault on Fort Lassiez-Faire, and how we're no longer going to be on our own. Even though it's been my experience you're usually better off when you're on your own (which, actually, is one of the hidden meanings of the movie, come to think of it).

Dallas reminded me of Don DeLillo's "Libra," a (somewhat) fictionalized account of the JFK assassination. T.J. Mackey. George de Mohrenschilt. Shadowy figures lurking on the fringe, hiding between the neon-lit corridors, brooding over that bastard who sold us out to Castro. Dallas is still like that. It thrusts its glamour and wealth (or what's left of it), but in between the seams, there's this sleaziness of industrial parks and liquor-on-the-go shop and robs and strange bedeviled looking characters who've spent too much time in urban wildernesses living beneath underpasses selling the odd LaRouche newsletter. I was last in Dallas six years ago on my American trauma tour, when I went to Oklahoma City as well as Dallas, and also almost got myself killed wandering around Waco asking where the Branch Davidians complex was.

In Dallas, there's this main arterial road, the Stemmions Freeway, that approaches downtown from the northwest. Lots of budget motels along it back in the mid 90's, I stayed in one. And strip joints to the galore. Industrial section, with lots of long low buildings that could hold massive amounts of contraband and, in the winter, illegal immigrants. But now, in true Dallas fashion, the area's been totally redone as a convention epicenter. Trade marts, skyscraper hotels. The convention was in this swanky place called the Wyndham Anatole. They done put in me up in style, goldurn it, for a govmint type. Complimentary cocktail, bathroom phone, towels the size of comforters, a bed so wide you could scout across it. (Only problem was, the friggin' air conditioning didn't work well, so there I was, trying to sleep in this 300 dollar a night room, sweating.) The lobby could have held a roundup of steers (I learned that a steer is really a castrated bull, which gives a whole 'nother level of meaning to the "steers and queers" Texas jokes.). Cavernous, overwhelmingly capacious. As they say, "Texas-sized." At a restaurant called Pappas Bros., I got me one of them there 28 oz. ribeye steaks one night and chewed it all up right there on the premises. Then I left the gal who served me a PETA brochure on the evils of slaughterhouses, instead of a tip.

Excuse me, Shrub? You're calling the 90s an "economic binge?" I thought you were a Republican, and favored economic growth and the increase in individual wealth. Now you're saying it was nothing more than a wild party that we have to suffer for.

You (or that ghastly Karl Rowe) are choosing to play politics with the stock market collapse. A Republican. A Texas bidnessman Republican. This is astonishing. Somewhere, Calvin Coolidge is crying in his scotch and soda. Good God, Shrub, you're bashing people doing well in the stock market? Just to keep fresh in everybody's mind how miserable your predessor was and how Clinton was such a baneful immoral devil that even the healthy economy that supposedly he could take no responsibility for has now been rejiggered as nothing more than a bachelor party in a seedy strip joint, and now all of us who aren't big campaign contributors have to take our medicine. Er, where's Skilling's medicine, Shrub? Where's Fastow's? Where's Bernie's?

Oh, I see. They weren't the ones who elected Clinton. That noxious, scheming, murderous, licentious scoundrel. That thieving rapist, that leering trianguist, that husband of Lilith. We, the American people, did, and now we must be punished by losing our investment savings. All that wealth creation, since it occurred simultaneously with the Presidency of the most foul President since ... well, ever, must be taken away from us.

This is beyond farce, beyond tragedy, beyond outrage. This is surreal: a Republican president is ostensibly trying to assuage the capital markets by saying, it's all right, all that wealth that has evaporated was a chimera, and immoral at that. Your 401k which is now a 101k, your portfolios, the grand experiment of the democratization of investing in the 1990s, is akin to one of the drunken binges I went on while forgetting to inform the SEC about my Harken transactions. Those trillions of dollars y'all have lost in the market? The equivalent of Bill Clinton's fondness for interns and their panties, a sordid overindulgence.

Keep your mouth shut, Shrub. Every time you open it, Americans lose more money. Someday, all these defenders of Shrub who take seriously the idea of the accumulation of individual wealth will stop making excuses for him.

It's a shame the Republicans have turned out like this, because the Democrats ... well, it's back to the class warfare, myriad and omnipresent legislation to clog up the works we've spent over twenty years trying to fix.

And Jesse's in the hospital, his political career evidently over. Boy, we need him, or someone like him, now.

I might be the closest blogger to the explosion that's just occured in Northwest DC, so here's a thumbnail sketch.

Around 2 pm this afternoon, a man was seriously injuried in an explosion in a parking garage about two blocks from me, in the 5200 block of Wisconsin Ave. The DC Chief of Police Ramsey just spoke and said that there were indications that a pipe bomb went off. The parking garage is underneath a restaurant. For those familiar with the area, Chevy Chase, the incident happened near the Mazza Galerie complex.

The whole panoply of authorities are here: police, ATF, FBI. So it was a deliberate act, evidently; from what I heard, the individual who was injured just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn't an earth-shattering explosion; I heard a muffled thud, but at first I just thought it was a car wreck on Wisconsin Avenue, which is only two blocks from me. I hear those every now and then. There was no smoke and, in fact, the police have re-opened the street up to vehicular traffic.

Still, a pipe bomb in the backyard. One thinks of the inevitable context. The weather today is similar to what it was on the 11th: pleasantly warm, no humidity, a virtually cloudless sky. That's a similarity.I compare Wisconsin Avenue right now, bubbling with activity, to the way it was on that dreadful September, when the emptiness was eerie. The shared sense of the jitters was unavoidable and proves that, in DC at least, we know we're still at war.

"Religious controversy is better than none" -- Augustus McCrae, "Lonesome Dove"

To paraphase something John Candy once said in the movies, the yahoos are on pins and needles regarding this Pledge business.

Let's review for a minute the state of the nation.

We are at war with religious fanatics who perpetrated nine months ago the great mass slaughter of Americans in our history. Their motiviation was as simple as pie and old as the hills: religion, specifically theirs. Yet in the world of the dull reality, we, the infidel, (sounds like a book Nabakov would've written) stomp their medieval keisters with our free markets, free women, free speech, and free pizza delivery. So the Islamists decide to attack us, kill us. The strategists among them fear most our economy (free minds being something they can't envision and therefore cannot even fear).

And they're right; it is our best weapon but, unfortunately, one we are undercutting through our own spasms of panic. The backbone of that economy, the stock market, has lost trillions of dollars in net worth over the past few years, and has recently seen a harsh (and I believe unwarranted, but then I didn't go to Wharton) panic selling by investors who, in so doing, are playing right into Bin Laden's hands. We are into the third year of the most wrenching bear market in four generations, and anyone who doesn't think that this kind of market collapse will have serious repercussions in our overall economic well being (and to the war effort) is deluding themselves. The stock market tanking is not just a bunch of callow telco whiz kids getting their greed and ambition handed to them, it's people's retirement accounts, faith in markets and investing, and all that. And as soon as I'm tempted to think that it wouldn't be much of a sacrifice for Americans to hold onto their stocks and not sell them, along comes World Con to take up residence next to End Con as a house of financial ill repute, and all of the other properties on the Street take another plunge in value.

So here we have two issues, war and the economy, that conservatives have always claimed to define themselves on. They love these issues, or so they claim. And I'm with 'em on both; I believe in prosecuting the war (in fact, a hell of a lot more than we are doing, and I often find myself agreeing with, of all people, the National Review here) and I believe that the health of the stock market is one of the most important things to our country, vital to our economy, and therefore vital to our success in the war against Islamists.

But what are conservatives doing? Declaring war on Michael Newdow and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who found on Wednesday (in case you've been on, say, a religious retreat) that the phrase "under God" is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion by the government.

Oh, the fur flies. Our nation is in the hands of Beelzebub, thunder the pulpits. Our President, who can no longer hide his sundry and endless ineptitudes behind the patriotic response to September, mustered more vitrol over the Ninth Circuit than he did over Worldcom. Paleoconservatives are gidder than they've been since Lewinsky, itching to fire up the culture war and not at all bothered by the unseemliness of so doing when we've got a real one going on. Their more established neocon bretheren are also panting with anticipatory glee, as a break from turning the tinhorn two-bit despot Saddam into HItler II. Stentorian in their rhetoric and apocolyptic in their warnings of what will happen if we don't invade Iraq, they're finding the that the charade of taking out Saddam has less and less resonance and versimilitude, not to mention urgency, especially as the revelations about the real garbage over there, the ghastly House of Saud, keep piling up. This Pledge issue is a ... er, godsend to 'em.

Let's blow one canard out of the water right now; the phrase "under God" has no business in a pledge of allegiance to our nation, that is if you take the Constitution not only seriously, but literally. The Constitution -- yeah, yeah, the Declaration of Independence says "our Creator" but that's not a legal document, guys, and so therefore irrelevant, not to mention Jefferson was a Deist who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ -- says that Congress will make no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. That's a quote and, like a lot of the Constitution, pretty easy to understand. But in 1954, the Congress passed a law establishing "under God" as a part of the Pledge, and since schoolkids are made to recite (at least I was) the Pledge verbatim, then this act of Congress has the actual intent of establishing a religion. When you start about God, you are axiomatically talking about religion. A religion without a god is called philosophy. It's not an accident the Congress didn't amend the Pledge as "one nation, under John Locke." Of course, back in the McCarthy era, John Locke was probably considered a commie.

Ah, yeah, the commies. It almost always boils down to them, at least over the past half-century or so. In 1954, to distance ourselves from them thar pernicioius reds as much as possible, the Congress grafted "under God" to a perfectly servicable Pledge that itself has its origins in a socialist tract around the turn of (last) century. Everything old is new again, the saying goes, and this 1954 bit of Congressional buncombe was in the same tradition of brainless demagogery that we saw on display with such fecundity Wednesday when the Senate rushed to bash the Ninth Circuit's ruling. Mucking up the Pledge with this "under God" business was intended, back in '54, tthat most conformist of times, to indoctrinate all the little ones out there with the only possible antidote to communism: God. Funny how it was business, its tools (such as fax machines and video tapes) and rewards (private property, working for yourself) that brought the commies down. God didn't have much to do with it; Bill Gates and Vaclav Havel, take a bow. If we wanted to put the names of Locke, or Havel or, hell, even Bill Gates into the Pledge, at least we'd be keeping to history and to the facts.

This is what is so unsettling. The commies were godless, and so to prove that we weren't commies, it was all-God, all the time. All righty. Now, however, our enemies martyr themselves, define themselves, as being more godly than we are.
They wants to kill as many of us, whether we believe that Jesus is our personal savior, that Moses came down with the Tablets, or that the moon is made of Lindburger cheese, as possible.

So it's clear that the phrase "under God" was put in the Pledge to establish a religion, in this case the only religion that was acknowledged in the US in 1954, which was monotheistic Christianity. To hold otherwise is a violation of common sense, and any attempt to elide it is sophistry. So the issue is whether government should be in the business of establishing religion, which would trash the First Amendment and, basically, turn us into the kind of society al Qaeda could probably vacation in without looking to take flying lessons.

That's playing dirty, you say? Here are a few more facts, then, to muddy the sandbox. The "Allah" Atta mentioned 8,000 times in his goodbye letter is another name for "God." We've learned over the past six months that for the past sixty years, priests have been doing little boys on a fairly regular basis, all over the country. So we've got the two most blatant examples of the two most heinous crimes imaginable -- mass murder of innocents, and the violation of children. Practiced ... well, not by those like Michael Newdow or Madeline Murray O'Haire. And then there's Bernie Ebberts, former Worldcom CEO's who presided over five quarters of his auditors listing 3.8 billion dollars' worth of expenses as investments; guess what he is? Born again.

Yeah, that's playing dirty, and so what. This kind of crap was irritating before. Now it's dangerous. What's really playing dirty is the hundreds of people, good Christians all, no doubt, who have phoned in death threats to Michael Newdow. What's playing dirty -- and, much more importantly, acting irresponsibly -- is the Congress of the United States, with what you could call a fairly large agenda, rushing off and wasting time on Wednesday to pass a resolution 99-0 (kudos to the lone Senator who didn't bother to waste time on such idiocy) slamming the decision.

Some are saying that "under God" is more or less innocuous, and there's a lot of banter justifying it using the newly minted judicial standard of "nondemonationally monotheistic," whatever that means. I said earlier that when you talk about "God" you're talking about religion, but the inverse is not necessarily true. When you mention "religion" in vast areas of the world, you're not talking about the Yahweh. Most religions in this world are not monotheistic, and you don't have to be a brain-dead worshiper (pun intended, the far left and the far right coalese in the realm of the silly) of poliltical correctness to recognize that someone is really showing their parochialism on matters of religion when they toss around the phrase "nondenominationally monotheistic." Tell it to followers of the Buddha statues of whom, I'd remind the reader, were blown up by the full-court press of monotheism that is the Taliban, thereby bringing their unique worldview to the attention of the most of the world for the first time.

What's really important here is what the Circuit Court didn't say; it didn't say that someone could not recite the Pledge of Allegiance with "under God" in it wherever he wants to say it. There' s no law at all against someone reciting the Pledge, or for that matter the singing the Song of Solomon or shouting out the Ten Commandments or preaching the Book of Revelations. This ruling didn't proscribe the free exercise of religion one iota. But to these people, the free exercise of their religion means imposing their dross on the rest of us, by claiming the moral high ground. It's a zero-sum with these bastards, and I'm fed up with them.

It's rare when I stand with a mass media opinionmaker. Most of them are cloying, or idiotic, or gutless, or just irrelevant and not worthy of my time (not that I'm worthy of their, either. But, hey, this is my page, not TimeWarner/AOL's.)

That conglomerate, in fact, employs Lou Dobbs, who's kicked up quite a ruckus, evidently, by his decision to refer to the War as one on Islamists and not on Terrorism. Dobbs irked me last year. He had received a letter from some MBA type who was lamenting his lack of job opportunities, and Dobbs, from his six or seven-figure perch, lambasted the letter writer for a wanton sense of entitlement and advised him to go work for a ice-cream stand to learn the true meaning of "work." This is the kind of attitude I can't stand; the writer probably went into serious hock getting his MBA, worked his tail off getting the degree, and is totally entitled to lament the fact that he couldn't find a job in his chosen profession, after going through all that time and expense to pursue it.

By this act, however, Dobbs has completely redeemed himself (even though Hitchens nailed the enemy as Islamofascists months ago). Religious extremism is exactly what the enemy is, and to try and elide this issue by throwing out "Terrorism" like it's some great beast we have to slay, is not only nonsensical, but sophistry. Bush just doesn't want to go to war against religious fanatics, possibly because religious fanatics make up the base of his Republican party. How else to explain why Ashcroft, instead of Muellar, isn't the one being made to fall on his sword about the intelligence lapses of last year, particularly since Guiliani is tanned, rested, and ready to assume the A.G. slot and do what he did prior to being mayor (and what Ashcroft never has done): go after the bad guys.

We'll never make the kind of progress we need against al-Qaeda and that ilk unless we're willing to call it what it is. What Dobbs is doing, therefore, is not only admirable, but exemplary.

There's a new Rasputin at large in Russia; you can read about this bunco artist here. (Link courtesy of More Than Zero).

I'm charitable when I call this guy a charlatan. If he were one, I'd actually have some respect for him because I have precious little time or fools for those who chuck away the conveniences of modern society to pursue development of their "spiritual" side. That's silly behavior, and people who do that disqualify themselves from consideration as anything other than self indulgent. I'm of the opinion that, if you're going to throw it all away and ruin your life, shoot heroin. The high's probably better, and you'll get to your precious heaven quicker anyway.

More later. A rant is aborning.

Chandra Levy's remains have been found, and so as regular as the proverbial Capistrano birds, the media is returning full tilt to the story. I have been more forgiving of last summer's media obsession over her disappearance than have a lot of people who seem to think that if the media hadn't been covering Levy and Conduit, it would have been training its collective eye on al-Qaeda operatives. That's doubtful to say the least, especially given the recent discovery that our Administration, which we pay to do this stuff, didn't, or couldn't. Some smart agent in Phoenix paints the entire picture, and his memo flounders around in the Great Interstice that is the bureaucracy. Then there's Minneapolis, and who knows how many other dots that weren't connected. (I only used that shopworn phrase because I saw it three separate places in last Sunday's New York Time. The grey lady needs a thesaurus.)

At this time, however, crime-lab-to-Modesto, all-Chandra 'n Gary-all-the-time is unwarranted and irresponsible. While some bimbo from Talk magazine more or less compares the tragedy of Levy's disappearance to the events of September 11th (equating the two as she did, insultingly, last night on bubblevision), India and Pakistan raise the rhetorical roof, mass troops, and ascend to ever higher levels of def con. Read about it (if you dare) here.

Nuclear war has always been considered unthinkable (which is a nonsensical observation anyway, since to consider nuclear war "unthinkable" in the first place is to think about it). Whatever. Last September should have proved that the "unthinkable," or, more accurately, the "impossible," is no longer either. Considering nuclear war to be impossible or unthinkable, for one thing, dulls the edge of vigilance. It's like trying to quarantine a virus by putting a police line around a house whose inhabitants are sick.

The Indian subcontinent is a long way off, true, but a nuclear weapons exchange there could kill hundreds of millions of people. We should be blunt about that possibility and blunt about that number, and not be precluded from talking about this situation in those kind of harsh terms simply because some people might think it's fear mongering. It might be in order to have a little more fear mongering about this South Asian situation, and a little less coverage of how or why Baretta killed his wife (or for that matter, a little less fear mongering about Nonspecific Disasters from the Executive Office to cover the significant swath of Administrative butt revealed by recent events)--especially now, when nations, or particularly cultures and religions with death cults and death wishes, with great gobs of WMDs seem to be in a collective march off the short plank of reason into the deep end of medievalist fantasy and idiocy.

Between I and P, they have an estimated 100 nuclear weapons -- mostly Indian -- and the populations of those countries are increasingly concentrated in huge urban centers like Dehli, Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Ahmadabad, and of course Bombay, all fat targets within range of the other side's delivery systems. (I suppose "fat" is not a word to be used lightly in that part of the world, but I digress.) It's doubtful whether Pakistan could reach such Indian cities as Hyderabad or Calcutta, much less Madras or Bangalore, the two main cities in the south. Radiation from any bombings to the west surely would, however. It is entirely feasible that an India/Pakistan nuclear french kiss (I know that's an absurd metaphor, but I can't resist it, as eros and death are often considered two sides of the same coin and whatnot) could result in the kind of wholesale slaughter of a percentage of the human race as hasn't happened since the Black Death of the 14th century. Who knows what the ramifications of such carnage would be, geopolitically, economically, environmentally? Many a brain in many a think tank in DC is probably churning through these scenarios right now.

The Indian air force has deployed its Jaguars at forward (read: aggressive) positions; the Jaguars are ground attack aircraft that can be fairly easily adapted to carry nuclear weapons. All of Pakistan is easily within the range of these planes. India also has ballistic missles, the Prithvi and the Agni but, according to the Federation of American Scientists Military Analysis Network, it is unclear whether these can be easily adapted to a nuclear use. Pakistan's nightmare arsenal is much smaller, which, perhaps paradoxically, means the situation is more unstable, because there is such an asymmetry of force strength between the two nations' nuclear (and for that matter, conventional) capabilities. Pakistan's major weapon appears to be a Chinese-made jet, the A-5, a ground-attack type. Pakistan also has a few squadrons of F-16s which were not furnished with the requisite equipment to carry nuclear weapons when the U.S. sold these to Pakistan back in the 80s; these planes can be adapted, however.

This leads to the question of the survivability of the weapons systems, and particularly the impression of that survivability.Our concept of nuclear brinksmanship is invariably predicated on the history between the US and USSR. Big differences between that conflict and this one. The India-Pakistan face-off has a lot more inherent instability than did the US/USSR rivarly. The superpowers constructed their nuclear forces, and the strategies for their possible use, to maximize the survivability of those forces after a surprise first strike by the other side as an attempt to preempt the other's ability to strike back. This led to the element of deterrance that, for all its madness, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction helped sustain. This in turn kept the superpowers more or less at arms length and the overall situation stable, because both sides knew they could not take out the others' delivery systems in one fell swoop.(The fact that neither side had suicidal leaders -- not even the manaical Stalin, who never hestitated to sacrifice millions during World War II -- certainly helped here.) India and Pakistan's nuclear forces, however, do not seem to have this kind of built-in survivability. So there's a destabilizing "use it or lose it" mindset prevailing, which necessarily makes the decisionmakers trigger happy.

With all this in mind, a renewed national obsession over the Levy case, fueled by a media addicted to celebrity scandal, is not exactly warranted. It all reminds me of one of the great ends to one of the great movies, "Bridge on the River Kwai," when the doctor at the POW camp looks down at all that has happens and mutters "madness, madness."

UPDATE: Joe Katzman at his blog "Winds of Change" has an alternate, and far less worrisome scenario regarding I&P. He backs it up with reasoned analysis, too.

STOP THE PRESSES! The Pope has found a way to put to rest the scandal dogging the Roman Catholic Church, by forgiving the sinners. Boy, I'm relieved.

That crazy guy who trumpted the "end of history" in a book a while back, Francis Fukuyama, has now launched a crusade against cloning. Another neocon strikes up the band for government control of the individual. Ain't it funny how often that is happening? (I'm embarrassed to admit that old Frank has settled into a comfy academic perch at my alma mater, Hopkins). I'll take his article down later, for my own good. But I'm not going to do as well as a good man called Brink Lindsey has. In his blog, Lindsey carves up Fukayama's petty idiocy perfectly. Quoting a conservative friend who observes that "the essence of human nature is the desire to improve your condition, (and) you can''t oppose that" Lindsey writes, "But Fukuyama does -- in the name of defending an imaginary, static "human nature," he sets himself against the essential dynamism that defines our humanity." Exactly.

Because I spent, oh, about a half an hour of my time on the subject, I'm going to recycle here an e-mail I recently wrote. I'm generally a believer that more is better, and that while quality is subjective, quantity is objective. In this spirit, I'll never hesitate to lard up my blog with random bloviating taken from any context that can be wrenched into this form.

Quality is fine and a wonderful thing, and useful when assessing an Italian restaurant or a painting. But the true measure of net worth is a number thing and nothing but, just as the true measures of bodily strength and horsepower and a daisy cutter's destructive impact on some Islamic fanatics can all be captured in a number. Maybe the true worth of a blog, in fact, is not the quality of the posts, but how many of them there are. If only I could get my archives to work, I could really gild the lily, since I have an evidently limitless capacity for jabbering away. (Somewhere in here, there's a Borges short story; or at least a good puzzle: if 500 bloggers post continually, how long will it take before two of them post exactly the same thing, in the same words.)

The e-mail in question revolved around this Bob Brinker chap, who is, I suppose, a commentator on the stock market. He has a radio show; some think he is a "guru." He's got the requisite eponymous website, wherein he invites those who surf by to partake of his market wisdom. Mostly fee-based stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that; at least his site does not launch Night of the Popups. My love of fees, however, is in direct proportion to my ability to charge them, so my enthusiasm for his site is tempered by my reluctance to credit my Visa. Brinker's site does have a "sound money" audio freebie, but my surge protector, like my credit, has inherent limits -- only so many outlets -- so my computer's multimedia potential has not been fully realized. My speakers aren't up, and there's nothing more worthless than an audio file without speakers. I realize I'm missing out on the whole broadband experience, which makes me something between a Luddite and a neophyte, I suppose: too plugged in to be the former, too old to be the latter.

Back to Bob Brinker, and he's calling for a "secular" bear market. I suppose that, first off, I should be pleased that he's calling it a "secular" market instead of a "religious" one. Actually, this is a usage -- "secular" to describe long-term trends in securities markets -- that seems to have acquired a lot of ... er, currency, over the past few years in the biz press. (It was a secular bull market a couple of years ago, that was going to go on and on and on and on ... ) One of the uses of this word is to describe a thing occurring once in an age or a century, or to describe a period of time lasting ages or centuries. Or to characterize, at least, a long interval of time: longer than, say, a year or two, which is as far into the future as anyone can reasonably, accurately, and responsibly predict the future course of the stock market.

Brinker is calling for a "secular bear market" lasting 10 years or so; I guess that 2002 is Year Three, which means we have to hump it for seven more years of this stuff. Question is, why should anyone heed this call any more than, say, Miss Cleo calling for a spiritual antelope of a market? Bob Brinker: I thought at first he was the guy with the white hair who hosted the "Price is Right" who hugs the fat contestants and then beds down the blondes who model the camping equipment dressed in the height of Brownie short-shorts fashion. No, this is Bob Brinker, market guru, who evidently "called" the bear market back in January of 2000.

What was that call? That month, he advised his listeners to reduce their exposure to stocks to 60% of their total portfolio. I'm not sure what percentage he had advised investors to have in stocks prior to that; it would be helpful to know if he had been advising investors to be fully invested, or to be 65% percent invested. If the latter, going from 65% to 60% is not exactly the kind of market call that would register on the Richter scale, at least in my opinion. It's always been a big deal in the biz biz when, for instance, Abby Cohen, one of the heavy hitters of the Street, advises a "rebalancing" of a portfolio. That rebalancing is never anything I'd consider to be real dramatic; she'll go from 65% to 60% in stocks, for instance. But, boy, does that make the Street sit up like it's just heard a banshee in its collective ear. Clocks stops, tides fail, earth stands still, and a few pacemakers are strained. Not to bash Abby, who's as legit as they come and always worth listening to, but these numbers don't exactly rivet my attention, when the Nasdaq market loses 70% of its value in 18 months (from March of 2000 to September of 2001). In that context, an asset reallocation from 68% to 65% is something less than a tectonic shift on the order of the Loma Preita earthquake; it's more like dust motes stirred up by the slamming of a phone on the receiver after your broker tells you to sell a stock at an 80% loss which he had recommended six months ago.

All this is not to say that Mr. Brinker does not know his stuff. No doubt he does. Evidently, he's very good at describing the nuances of the market to the individual investor, and anyone who can, and is willing to, provide the average Joe or Josephina copies of the keys to the gates of investing is performing a public service. With the duplicity and conflicts of interest of so many brokerage firms open to such display now, it's more than ever important for an investor to make his or her own decisions, and not to rely on Henry Blodgett and company. That means they have to learn something about what they're doing and, to the extent Mr. Brinker is willing to teach, he does a valuable and good thing. Whether that translates into taking his advice, and especially hewing to it all the time, is another thing entirely.

I'll give credit to Brinker for "calling" the market top in January 2000 -- although I'll bet he wasn't at the time calling it a "market top," but probably something like a "prudent reallocation of assets away from a market we think has become slightly overvalued." Still, in saying that, Brinker comes out smelling like the proverbial rose. And perhaps it's unfair to hold him to the standard that he needed to say at that time, this is a bubble and get out now. Few, if any, did, and the legit people in the business all admit they were burned in one way or another, because they all were. If they had been any kind of significant skepticism about the market bubble, it wouldn't have bubbled up to the levels it did in the first place. Only in retrospect does it seem obvious that the index was at an unsustainable level, just like only in retrospect is it obvious that barbaric religious lunatics would want to use planes as weapons of mass destruction against innocents in skyscrapers. In the winter of 1999-2000, when everyone was worried about what would happen when the clocks turned that left-most digit from "1" to "2", every disaster, it seems, was being predicted, except the two which eventually happened: the stock market collapse and September 11th (and, please, I'm not equating the two here, I'm just making a point). In other words, there were very few people then calling for Nasdaq to be brutalized by a 70% decline; if all the people who claim now to have seen that kind of collapse coming had acted accordingly, then the Nasdaq would never have gone much above 3000, much less topped out at 5000.

So Brinker was better than most. When we gauge the effectiveness of services in our culture, however, "better than most," when the "most" are atrocious, hasn't, historically, cut it. In the 1970s, when the American auto industry was, by most accounts I've read, punching out absolutely wretched stuff, does anyone commend to fond memory now the odd 1970s car that might not have been as bad as the others, for any reasons other than sentiment or esthetics?

I would credit Brinker's call a bit more if I knew more about its specifics; a quick "Google" search of newsgroups such as misc.invest.stocks, however, didn't turn any up. Since January of 2000, in fact, some stock sectors -- health manitenance organizations, consumer nondurables, some industrials, precious metals -- have done quite well. It's the technology and telecommunications sectors, and to a lesser extent, all big captialization names -- in other words, the companies held by the vast majority of retirement plans in this country and which make up (or at least made up) the "stock market" in the public's mind -- that have been eviscerated. The relative weighting of these companies on specific indicies has directly influenced these indicies relative performance; the Russell 2000 index made up of companies with small captializations, or market values of five billion dollars or less, has done far better than the aforementioned Nasdaq composite index.

For a fair analysis of Brinker, his admittedly prescient January of 2000 market call should be placed in the context of other market-timing calls he's made since. One was to buy the Nasdaq (in the form of the so-called "triple QQQs", basically a stock that trades the Nasdaq index) in the autumn of 2000. At the time, the Nasdaq was struggling to hold around 3500 (I can't believe I just typed that: "struggling to hold 3500"). Then there was the election, and the ongoing Florida drama (which, at the time, seemed like the event, or at least the controversy, of a lifetime; have times ever changed). The Nasdaq couldn't handle the Saga of the Chads, however, and it plunged through the 3000 level (I'm not sure of the exact number) that had represented the bottom of the April of 2000 selloff, when the tech/telecom investment bubble first burst. I'm not sure where Brinker's call came, but if he suggested buying the triple-Qs after that support level of 3000 had been broken, then that's a clear violation of any rule of technical analysis known, and it would have been almost irresponsible of him to recommend buying the Qs, to an audience that by definition is probably not that sophisticated about investing and probably does not trade. Perhaps that's being too hard on him, and I'm not sure exactly when he made that call, anyway, so I shouldn't reach such a conclusion. But from what I've read on Google -- not the final word, I know -- whatever Brinker might have saved his listeners by getting them out in part earlier in the year, he lost a lot of that when he made that autumn call. How so? The percentage loss on the Nasdaq between March of 2000 and November of 2000 (from 5100 to 3400, approximately) was
33 percent (actually, very close to the 31.8% figure beloved by practitioners of the Fibinacci method). A similar point loss has occurred between then and now (the Nasdaq is, as of this writing, about 1700); that is a 50% loss, however. I'd be interested to hear whether Brinker was one of those pitching the "new tech" names in the fall of 2000 -- the JDSUs and CIENAs and AMCCs -- when they were all priced to the stratosphere and when so many of the commentariat were pitching them like the real estate salesmen were pitching Florida in Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross."

I haven't heard Brinker's show, but "financial genius" is a term I'd be hesistant to employ when describing him. These media financial touts get one call right, and their suddenly the Oracle of Omaha (Warren "nu'cler" Buffett) if not of Delphi. What is often obscured by the dust raised when these panegyrics get tossed around is that expert's subsequent performance. Joseph Granville is a classic example; he said in 1981 that the stock market was historically undervalued and that it represented a great opportunity. He was right. Since then, however, he's made one bad call after another.

Brinker, after all, is first and foremost a market commentator. That's what pays the freight. I'm sure he invests and does well. He probably wouldn't have gotten his perch in the commentariat if he hadn't had some kind of track record. But these guys are in the business of making dramatic, which usually means contrarian, calls. There's nothing wrong with being a market contrarian; in fact, that's a sound investment strategy to be employed. Whenever everyone's ecstatic, you sell; when the blood's on the streets, you buy. That's generally hard for human beings to do, however, since we are instinctively creatures who find security in the herd. To be a contrarian on a consistent basis takes a lot of discipline psychologically, and psychological discipline is the hardest of all to instill. And if you are not a contrarian on a disciplined, consistent basis, then you're probably better off just rolling the dice.

The market commentariat has been exploding in membership over the past few years, and will probably continue to do so, since more and more people (and especially in the light of the Merrill Lynch scandal) are going to be tempted to invest for themselves (that is, if they invest at all; plenty have left the stock market, never to return, and that's a shame). A whole herd is out there, waiting to be led, and the market commentariat sees a lot of opportunity. How to get noticed? Make the dramatic calls, say the melodramatic things, use terms like "secular bear" and scare the hell out of everyone.

One of the best investors out there, I believe, is Bill Miller. He oversees a couple of Legg Mason mutual funds. His returns have beaten the S&P 500 average every year for the past 12 years. That's simply phenomenal, and no accident. No lucky throws of the dice there. That's particularly impressive in that his record has been established during a period that encompassed every kind and extremity of market environment: grinding bears, strong bulls, bubbles, markets going nowhere, markets going haywire. There's a guy I'll call a genius; to have a record like that, he must have mastered both the psychological and fundamental aspects of the market. Miller's not always appearing on television or radio, however. Why? Because while Brinker and James Cramer and all these other "geniuses" are popping up all over the media, Miller is putting in serious time analyzing companies, analyzing markets, analyzing psychology, and making his clients money, not making himself a reputation. Evidently, he's buying technology and telecom right now: AOL, for instace, which if you listen to most people is going the way of Westinghouse. Meanwhile, the Janus funds, which were buying AOL in the 50s, are selling it now down here at 19.

Brinker might, like Cramer does, provide a good service, in that he explains the nuances of the market, and I suppose he's pretty good at that. Assuming he's ethical as well, that makes him probably superior to 75% of the commentariat. That doesn't mean he's right all the time, however. He could be right about being in a "secular" bear market, although again I'd like to know exactly what he means by that. Does he mean that the major averages are going to continue to go down over the next decade? Or just that the Nasdaq
will not get back to 5000 in the next 10 years? Or something in between? He could very well be right that Nasdaq will not get back to 5000 in the next 10 years. But -- and, again, I emphasize, in the absence of any external event like a catastrophic terrorist attack of Buffett's nightmares -- there is just no fundamental economic evidence to suggest that the stock market is going to continue to tank for the next 10 years; in fact, there is a preponderance of evidence suggesting otherwise. The economy is strong and getting stronger, inflation is, in the short term at least, a nonissue, the cost of money is historically low, productivity continues to increase (and act as a brake on inflation), and the technological revolution that everyone seems to have forgotten about (which prompted, in a way, the bubble in the first place) is still going on. Against this background, we're well into our third down calendar year in the stock market, which hasn't occurred since the Great Depression. Even the most pessimistic bear would not even try to compare the fundamental economic conditions of today to those prevailing duirng 1929-31.

Brinker doesn't really have much of an idea where the market will be going in 10 years. Obviously I don't. For that matter, Bill Miller doesn't, either. No one can predict things 10 years out. Too many variables, and too much time for any one variable to launch a chain of events that no one can possibly foresee with any degree of accuracy. Does anyone know what the status of the war will be in 2012? Will there even BE a Wall Street or a New York City in 2012? Assuming the Apocolypse doesn't happen, what will interest rates be in 2012? What will the growth rate of GDP be? What will inflation be? What will the dollar's relative strength
verses the Euro be? No one knows the answers for these in 2003, much less 2012. To try to predict where they will be 10 years from now, or what might happen over the next 10 years, is throwing the dice.

And the dice are loaded, but not for bear. In the absence of any real facts, when you throw the dice, the best thing to do is use history as a guide. And history suggests that the stock market goes up, and that you're better off having your money in the stock market than anywhere else (that is, if you believe that more-is-better when it comes to money, which is what captialism is all about, anyway), since it is the asset class that has consistently outperformed all others: precious metals, bonds, cash, real estate, the mattress. This is a generality, of course, but when you're going out 10 years into the future, generalities are -- and I'll say this in keeping with Sunday's merciful end of the X-Files (a show that should have ended five years ago) -- the truth that is out there.

Weather nurd alert: the NWS is calling for snow flurries tomorrow evening in the Maryland mountains. Lows in the upper 30s in DC. That's about 20 degrees below normal. As aberrational in its way, if not as dramatic, as last month's La Plata tornado (which was downgraded to an F4; that's a rant for another time.)

Where was this frickin' pattern in February, when it could have been put to good use fomenting paralyzing blizzards?

Next time some Bible thumper prattles on about how sordid and blasphemous our popular culture is, direct them here. I particularly liked the handy ratings scheme. Finally that NPAA garbage has been put to some good use.

While much of the world, under the auspices of the marvelous and unbiased United Nations, is excoriating Israel for a Jenin massacre that never occurred, the human capacity for brutality has been on rather horrid display in many other precincts of the globe. Most of these locations are countries -- Algeria, Uganda, Sudan -- that always seem to be the most strident in the aformentioned U.N. in their denunciations of "Zionist terrorists," "American hegemonical imperialism," and other such bogeymen.

Here's a long yet also interesting article about distinguishing speech that is volatile, unnerving, perhaps even omnious -- yet nonetheless Constitutionally protected -- from common and vile threats that should not only fall outside of First Amendment protection, but should be legally actionable. I just read the article's beginning and the conclusion, so I might not being doing it full justice ("full justice" and "blogging" are usually, and perhaps inevitably, exclusive of one another). The author's premise is that --

"To determine when speech is protected by the First Amendment, and therefore not punishable as a threat, most circuits have adopted either a reasonable speaker or a reasonable listener test. Both these tests essentially boil down to an evaluation of whether or not a reasonable recipient of the statement would believe it constituted a true threat.[16] The Supreme Court has never reviewed the differing circuit court tests to determine their constitutionality ... "

This is necessarily a pretty subjective and contextual basis for delineating "you're a &%$#@ who doesn't deserve to live" from "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse." I wonder how adequate it is as a standard for defining how far the right to free speech (about which I am, for the record, more or less an absolutist) goes to protect the sponsors of the online, so-called "Nuremburg Files," which lists abortion providers names' and home addresses, advocates punishing them for "crimes against humanity," and celebrates their assassinations by drawing a line through their name of those who are murdered by anti-abortion zealots. This is the kind of test case that drives people like me nuts: to defend what I consider to be the most fundamental right there is, and to be consistent in that defense, I have to look the other way when people who would make the Taliban look like the editorial board of Playboy magazine start in on their blood and thunder tirades against modernity. But when should that kind of vitriolic talk be considered a criminal threat? (Needless to say, this kind of thing goes on with the extreme "left" as well, as when African-Americans who refuse to abide by a boycott of Korean grocery stores are threatened with physical harm by the other blacks who have instigated the boycott.)

The author's intent is to try and distinguish "warning threats," which are allowed, indeed protected, by the First Amendment, from "true threats" that have nothing to do with expression or First Amendment protection of even unpopular and unpleasant speech, and everything to do with intimidation and coercion. She proposes appending the preexisting tests of what makes up "free speech" (about which there is no consensus anyway) withh another measure for distinguishing between the two classes of speech: "actor intent," or whether the speaker and/or associates intend to take action to manifest the threats they make.

Her proposal makes good sense, but it seems to me it still does not completely address the problem. The speaker's intent to back a threat up with action can really only be fully determined after the fact; the intent of violence which would disqualify the threatening speech from First Amendment protection can only be proved after the violence itself occurs. Otherwise it's just supposition, no matter how many tests of intent are applied. It's one thing if some guy who's got a conviction for breaking and entering threatens, upon his release from jail, to kill the owner of the house where the criminal had been caught. That would be a "true threat." But if some loudmouth in a bar with too much to drink but no criminal record starts blathering away about how some public figure should be shot, does that constitute a "true threat"? There'll be a lot more in jail if they do. Look at most any bulletin board thread about some controversial subject, and you'll find posters throwing around all kinds of imprecations and blood oaths.

The law here is mirky, and I agree with the author that there needs to be some kind of clarification, lest any strong speech is eventually rendered taboo, if not illegal, by what would be in effect government-mandated speech codes masquerading as prevention of "true threats." If the test of what is a "true threat" is left up to, say, those who currently oversee the implementation of "speech codes" in universities, then we might as well all just yank out our vocal cords now, be done with it, and learn how to sign.

Of course then they'd go after that.

Hitchens, as usual, gets it right. On the excesses in zeal that characterize both the Palestinians and the Israelis:"September 11, more than anything, marked the opening of a culture war between those who believe that god favors thuggish, tribal human designs, and those who don't believe in god and who oppose thuggery and tribalism on principle. That ought to be the really historic and dialectical sense in which it "changed everything.""

This is as perfect a summary as I've read of what the great danger of our times is: the worst instincts of the species for flocking together coupled with, and driven by, petty, theistic rationalizations that are directly contrary to the traditions of secularism and rationality that have been the strengths of Western civilization and, in fact, the real Saviors of the human race.

My natural inclination is to support the Israelis, for two reasons: (1) it is a secular democracy surrounded by hostile enemies and (2) I still remember, AND WILL NEVER FORGET, those cheering Palestinian bastards on September 12th. My support for any Palestinian cause is directly contingent upon the level of mortification in that community over the Atrocity. If that reaction reflected how most Palestinians feel, the hell with them. But I'm not sure that it does.

The old bromide--that there are two sides to most issues--cannot be put aside here. To acknowledge this is not to indulge in sophistry and moral relativity. No matter how offensive Palestinian behavior has been, and no matter how legitimate (not to mention measured) the Israeli response, it remains that, for the past generation, ultra-Orthodox Israeli "settlers" have been moving into the West Bank as an occupying force, with a concomitant degradation of the rights of the Palestinians there. This has further poisoned an already toxic environment, and the redress can't just be catering to these territorialists who employ the same logic, if not to quite as base ends, as do fundamentalist Islamicists: that their behavior is a reflection of their god's will, that their god is the true god, and that all other considerations are not only inapplicable, but blashphemous. "Blasphemy": the greatest expletive in the language.

I hadn't heard of Sharon's Minister of Internal Security Mr. Landau until reading about it here, but a cabinet minister who advocates the gassing of adjacent populations, no matter how hostile, cannot really be borne in a country which wants to claim (and has, generally, the right to claim) the moral high ground. Sharon and the ultra-Orthodox reactionaries who support him, intent as they are in making real their Old Testament fantasy of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, is not the Israel I'm supporting. It's rather unfortunate that such an unsavory group like Sharon and Likud is heading up the country right now, and that we have to, in supporting Israel's right to defend itself against homicide bombers, end up tacitly backing a bunch that considers the West Back their "God-given" backyard with the same fervor that the gangsters of al-Qaeda prosecute their despicable jihad on the Western infidel. This is not moral equivalence; I'm asserting that the motivations (and from motivation to act is still a ways to go, especially for those operating in the secular democratiic tradition of an Israel as opposed to the medieval environment of a Saudi Arabia) of the ultra-Orthodox settlers of the West Bank and of the minions of OBL are equally alien to me and equally offensive.

There really is no choice but to support Sharon's hard line against the PA and Arafat, whose duplicity and bile is unarguable, but that doesn't translate into backing the Israelis' own fundamentalists.

On the other hand, Charles Krauthammer, in his latest jeremiad against cloning (one no different from all the others he's written over the years) reminds me why I've always been ambivalent about him. He gets it all wrong on the issue. Granted, he steers clear of the cheapskate prohibitionist argument based on personal religious belief, where prohibitions on behavior are functions of a cadre of individuals' fervency in accepting what are, at bottom, unarguably mythologies. That just makes Krauthammer's whole position even more nonsensical.

His whole basis for wanting the government to ban theraputic cloning is that to sanction cloning would be to sanction "the creation of a human embryo for the sole purpose of using it for its parts." It is "commodification" of the human embryo. (Why, it's a "Bridge Too Far"! I'm waiting on the movie. I hope it stars the clones of Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, and John Wayne; I'd much prefer them to Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, and Bruce Wills.) Krauthammer tosses around other various third-rate tropes from the Brave New World playbook, a style of argument unworthy of the man who quite accurately has said (and was one of the first to say) that the War on Terrorism must ultimately go through Riyadh, and will not be effective if it simply ends with corralling Saddam.

Krauthammer's argument begs the question, naturally, of what exactly it is about the blastocyst--the thing being used in the cloning--that makes it "human." Arguments that try to define "humanity" as occurring at one instant, instead of recognizing that the evolution of a random accumulation of cells into a human being is a complex process, don't work. For one thing, as a legal matter, to enforce the "humanity" of a blastocyst means society will eventually have to give the sperm 'n egg (sandwich?) the same rights that, say, you and I have. (That's what the ludicrous "Human Life Amendment" would do.) Reductio ad absurdium, indeed. I'm quite offended by those who believe a fertilized egg has the same rights that I do, and anybody who is concerned about individual rights should be, too. This smacks of--dare I say it, and ain't it ironic?--moral relativity on their part on the part of cloning opponents, who are usually so quick to accuse others of that. They are assigning the same rights that you and I have to a random agglomeration of cells at the very instant the ol' sperm slithers into the orb. Talk about the excesses of identity politics; it is particularly silly when there is no real identity to politicize about. I don't know when life "begins" -- for some people, I'm not sure it ever does, but that's another issue -- but I know when it doesn't, and that's in the nanoseconds after fusing of the sperm and egg.

Krauthammer's argument basically boils down to the nonsensical "slippery slope" fear: that somehow theraputic cloning will lead to all kinds of Frankenstinian horrors. That's been thoroughly debunked here. I'll add a couple more, however.

For one thing, cloning will occur, if not in the U.S. then elsewhere (already biotechnology companies are preparing to move out of the country to a less restrictive location, such as the U.K., if these prohibitions are imposed). Why should the U.S. concede worldwide leadership in something like this simply because of some byzantine conception of personhood by a bunch of people who if they had their way would never let us read anything other than the Book of Common Prayer?

Second, say theraputic cloning is banned and criminalized in this country, as would happen under the Senate version of the Human Cloning and Prohibition (key word there) Act of 2001 already passed by the House. The Senate version is the brainchild of Senator Sam "Mullah" Brownback of Kansas, who would find a worldview complementary to his in many of the madrasses between the Nile and the Indus. This little piece of legislative legerdemain, in criminalizing the process of creating embryonic stem cells to regenerate lost organs or repair damaged cells, mandates fines of a million dollars or more as well as criminal penalties of up to 10 years not only for the practitioners of this devilry, but also for the patients as well. You can see where this will go: another War on Drugs, complete with vast sums of Federal dollars wasted, systematic violations of civil liberties, the aforementioned loss of U.S. leadership in scientific research, and on and on. All because some dandified right-wing kooks are worried that everyone will start wanting to clone themselves into perpetuity. (Or maybe it's because some of them just like it when human beings suffer, suffering so often being what compels people to the church and keeping its coffers full and its priests endlessly supplied with ... well, do I have to spell it out?)

Even if theraputic cloning doesn't turn out to offer 90% of the benefits its proponents claim (which is a dubious proposition itself, given that scientific research often leads to benefits that aren't forseen by even its most active supporters), how would the prohibitions against cloning be enforced? The Bill, of course, doesn't specify, and that makes it all the more ominous. Another open-ended invitation for the government to gut individual freedoms, to arrogate to itself yet another set of perogatives to monitor and proscribe individual behaviors that harm no one but seem to offend the ass-backward worldviews of some well-connected wowsers. It's easy to envision a future where, when you go through Customs, you'll have pass genetic muster with an INS officer or some other government type (who recently have so distinguished themselves in securing our borders against malicious foreign nationals). These functionaries will be staffing entry points in international airports, taking random passengers out, extracting cells from them under duress, and seeing if those cells have some telltale blastocystical characteristics. You think airport searches are intrusive now? Wait until they start sticking needles in your noggin.

I can't think of anything more idiotic, but never underestimate the power of the Brownshirts ... er, Brownbacks of the world.

Since the Great Outrage of September 11th -- I want to avoid the increasingly shopworn "9/11" usage, which additionally is too close to "7-11" as with the Stores, the thought of which elicits unpleasantness for a variety of reasons too ridiculous to go into here -- I've been depressed by the feckless and puerile reaction of much of what passes in this country for the intelligensia, in particular those in the liberal arts tribe. It's nothing new that great writers often bungle it horribly, almost unforgivably, when they sound off on the great issues of their times. Evelyn Waugh, the great English novelist and satirist of the early 20th century, was a reactionary racist and misogynist perpetually at war with the profane world he thought he lived in; Ezra Pound was an apologist for fascism who ended up turning traitor during World War Two and was lucky to find his end in the loony bin and not facing a firing squad. More recently, Harold Pinter, who years ago before he became political was one of the great playwrights of our time -- go see "The Birthday Party" or "The Homecoming" if you don't believe me -- has embarrassed himself by calling the United States a plague on mankind for doing things like stopping Milosevic and blasting the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

I always used to defend the academy against the wanton charges of "political correctness," which I always thought was just another rhetorical excess employed by the reactionary monotheistic virtuecratic right, which I despise. The horrors of last autumn, however, have prompted the parsing, I believe, of some of the opinions we had somewhat carelessly wielded prior to that event. I know I've gone through my sock drawer of opinions, throwing out the ones with holes in them.

One of these opinions, or more accurately habits, was my gusto for sticking up for the liberal arts departments of universities, and for the tribe of humanities in general. Because I studied the humanities in college, slaving my ass off writing 30-page papers as an undergraduate while most people my age were beer bonging and feeling each other up, I thought that investment of time meant that my sympathies should lie with, must invariably be aligned with, the academics and the eggheads, and never mind whether the opinions marinating in the academy made any sense to, or much less benefited, me. But I've been doing less and less of that recently, and the reaction of some of these people to last autumn's Zeitgeist-shattering events, and my reaction to their reaction, made it clear to me how little I had in common with these people, and how little I ever really did have in common with them, other than a fondness for literature.

Still ... I've always considered myself something of an intellectual, or a wannabe intellectual, or someone who liked to call himself an intellectual, or at least someone who was most comfortable dissenting from what was popular at the time and which I called being a deep thinker. Dissenting always came easily to me. I was forced on the defensive rather early in my life; additionally, to paraphrase Churchill, setting yourself in opposition to society is something that anybody with any heart does when they are young, and anybody with a brain stops doing at some interderminate later age. So maybe I'm just developing a brain and losing my heart now that I'm beyond that indeterminate later age, or maybe I've just discovered that the brick road is forked and that neither path goes anywhere near Oz, but that the trick is just picking the one that avoids the Wicked Witch. Whether that path is Frost's road less traveled doesn't close the deal the way it used to.

Maybe what I'm doing is not just setting my shoulder against society, trying to push a car stuck in the snow (a hopeless enough task), but setting my shoulder against the world, hoping to make it stop rotating, which is such a hopeless task you don't even think about doing it, except in the abstract. I readily admit I do this, and often that everything is more or less hopeless on a fundamental level, given the nature of the universe. Such is not the stuff of politics, however, but metaphysics and, like most metaphysical conundrums, it contains its own abnegation: if you are part of reality, it's axiomatically impossible to set yourself against it. And if there is any hope for the human race, it rests in the system of liberal, secular democracy and captialism which may be imperfect but, to paraphase Churchill again, is far better than anything else out there. Case in point, the Muslim world.

What I've found is that a lot of intellectuals -- members of the academy, perhaps, is a more apt, if more unwieldly moniker -- don't seem to get this, even though they are prime beneficiaries of it. I doubt they could do much of what they do in, say, modern-day Iran. These memebers of the academy scorn the United States as an imperial, colonial power to the exclusion of any kind of realistic critique of, say, Saudi Arabia, where girls burn up in schools because male firefighters aren't allowed in there to fight fires.

What a lot of intellectuals don't like, then, is the reality of their place in society, and therefore they scorn that society uncategorically. They have the right to speak their mind, but that's not enough for them. Perhaps they aren't listened to as much as they feel they should be, or perhaps they never had the artistic or academic success they feel they should have had. But to admit that these discontents transcend the nation they live in, would be to admit that perhaps they were not talented enough to do what they wanted to do, or perhaps that the breaks didn't go their way, or perhaps that we live in a random universe that is as heedless of our petty little ambitions and desires as we are heedless of a mote of dust.

So they throw their lot in with those who they think are the dispossessed of the world. They equate their personal dissatisfaction with a sordid, racist/sexist/imperialist country (which doesn't acknowlege their genius, either) with the perceived hardships of those seething vast multitudes in the "underdeveloped" world who toil nobly and selflessly while we in the U.S. sop up fifty percent of the world's resources (never mind that we contribute considerably more than 50% of the benefits to mankind). The solidarity with the masses and all that hooey that any real thinking person jettisoned oh, say, sixty years ago.

Like Cassius, they believe that the fault is not in the stars but in themselves but only in that they are underlings. That they aren't Caesar, or at least that they aren't participating in the flow of the national discourse to the extent they want, is maddening. When Noam Chomsky blathers on about "manufacturing consent," he's just peeved at the fact he isn't present at the manufacture, that he is not only not Caesar, he's not Brutus or Marc Antony or even First Messenger.

Therefore, when the American "masses" assert a 90% approval of something, these people like Chomsky, who had nothing to do with what they are convinced is the artificial development -- the manipulation -- of that consensus, must be reflexively opposed to that something. That's perhaps a bit simplistic as analysis, but only a bit, and therefore still valid.

What all of this has meant personally is that I now realize that the validity of any kind of idea does not stand or fall in direct relationship to how that idea deviates from the public consensus: that critical thinking, in other words, is no longer predicated on an a priori dissent from that public consensus. I think that's the problem with many so-called intellectuals in this country; they don't credit the worthiness of an idea unless a huge majority of the country is opposed to it; only then will they embrace the idea.

There's nothing really wrong with occasionally feeling as if everyone else is a moron, and you're the only person with any sense in the world. I believe we all, at one time or another, are infuriated by our fellow citizens' embrace of something that we find to be nonsensical or incomprehensible. It happens to me on an hourly basis. But I don't create a creed around it, and I acknowledge that people have come to those conclusions more or less on their own, and not at the behest of some vague yet omnipotent cabal of tyrants clothed as fellow citizens. A certain breed of academic, however, does think this way; these people, in fact, make a fetish out of dissenting from their fellow citizens' beliefs in things like private property or lower taxes in the same way a certain breed of fundamentalist creates a fetish of brooding over how millions of people in this country rent and enjoy adult films in the privacy of their own homes, yet pay their taxes, don't blow up buildings, and don't sodomize little boys after rehearsing the Eucharist.

This fetishness over despising things that most people like, or at least that they don't dislike, often finds its expression in what is called "political correctness." I was having a discussion recently over exactly what "political correctness" is; we decided that it is a conviction about something that is patently absurd and, even more importantly, about something most people consider to be absurd. One such absurdity is the PC belief that most men are irrevocably sexist, and that therefore it doesn't matter if he believes in, say, equal pay for equal work; he's a sexist anyway, and if he believes in equal pay for equal work, he's merely a hypocrite looking to be let off the hook for his sexism. This kind of thinking is the direct, linear decendent of how communists used to (and, in a few benighted precincts of the world, still do) think about rich people who give to charity. The Reds used to think that the charitable rich were merely buying off the poor to alleviate their misery; if they didn't do this, the logic ran, then the masses would rise up and take their fair share from the "leisure class."

This is not to say that groups of people are never driven by ulterior motives; you see this in, for instance, the royal Saudi family spending untold sums to fund the spread of evil Wahibism to pay off Islamic fundamentalists so that the princes can go cavort and gambol in Monaco. The PC types might agree with this, but they would consider it an irrelevance, and that, in bringing it up, I am just trying to divert attention from the fact that I'm a white man and therefore awash in all of the associated evils of that tribe. This is, in fact, how they look at the entire War on Terrorism; it's a deliberate misdirection on the part of that evil junta of whitemen who run this country (forgetting entirely about Rice and Powell, here, but they're just "tokens" anyway) to scapegoat and ravish yet again the Third World so that Texas oilmen can make their umteenth billion. Or something like that.

Well, this is all utter nonsense, and most people, men and women both, know it and moreover are insulted by it. Some wacked-out gender-studies intellectual, however, would point to that huge majority who are so offended and say, "see, that's proof that all men are virulently sexist, in that they've been able to coerce or manipulate or manufacture that consent!" Ah-ha! So the cabal is not only evil, but hugely manipulative of the sisterhood, and so subtle that only the deep thinkers who have spent a lifetime studying gender politics can see through their deviousness! Well, this is as nutty as anything Lyndon LaRouche ever came up with. All that's missing are the secret handshakes and the black helicopters.

It's really an embarassment, then, that these academics (and their acolytes in the public at large; they don't all work in universities) oppose a war against a faction that hates everything these people ostensibly cherish and work for: a secular society, gay rights, women's rights, to name a few. (One wonders how much these people really want these things.) To these people, it was more important that a vast majority of Americans support a war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (and that is what this war is all about, make no mistake) than it was that al-Qaeda pulled off the greatest mass murder in U.S. history and the worst act of terrorism (by far) ever. Dissenting from popular opinion was more important than anything else. That's warped.

So, to close this circle, maybe I'm not an intellectual. Come to think of it, I've never been very comfortable with a lot of the newer ideas, primarily because I didn't think I understood a lot of them. Now, however, increasingly I think it's the fault of the sponsors of those ideas, that I didn't understand them (their ideas and the advocates both.) I've read more than a few essays about deconstructionism (although, I confess, not recently), and I'm not unfamiliar with the names of Derrida and Michael Foucault. I always stuck up for the concept of deconstructionism, and that there is no Meaning, because I always liked (and still like) Walt Kelly's line: that there's entirely too much search for Meaning in this world. I found that those who always got so apoplectic about these Frenchmen were always advocated for a restrictive Meaning that I couldn't stomach and that was buncombe anyway. If you were to ask me what's more silly, the works of Jacques Derrida or the Book of Revelations, I'd go with the latter in a heartbeat, although for that reason it makes for much more entertaining reading.

Meaning is three-quarters interpretation of meaning; the reality we perceive is mostly a function of the biases of our environment ... blah, blah, blah. That kind of argument used to matter to me, but now it doesn't. I'll let the believers in the French deconstructionists, or their nemeses on the wacko right, brood over that stuff. If they're lucky, they can go on "The O'Reilly Factor." I really don't think they are the threat to the republic that al-Qaeda is, however.

So, while I was never comfortable with ideas, I've always been a sucker for their presentation. What is called the "superficial" has, IMHADCO, always been underrated. Why did Germany, the home of Goethe and Beethoven, follow Hitler and the Nazis? Because, fundamentally, they (or he, Hitler) put on a rip-roaring show. Aesthetics can be a dangerous thing.

I digress, but then again, novels digress. What a good novel does (and to go back to the original point of this little essay) is not help us to escape from our lives, but help us to enlarge our lives, expand what we consider permissible intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically. Novels allow us to discover parts of ourselves we otherwise wouldn't, because when you read a novel, you're putting yourself, in a way, at risk. You never know what might happen when you turn the page. Your ultimate fantasy, your ultimate nightmare, might be realized. Your most embarrassing moment might be described fully, your moment of greatest pride might be denigrated. Your inner self might be revealed to yourself, and you might not like what you see. Or you might.

When we pick up a book, we want escape, but we want it on our terms, and our terms are in our interpretations of that novel. Great novels, great works of literature, therefore, are those that both present us with a fully realized re-creation of reality, and are robust enough to allow us to impose our own, possibly but not necessarily complementary, reality on that novel. That takes artifice and also a renunciation of the dull and choking fog of ideology. Ultimately, ideology and aesthetics don't mix; they can't mix. Why? The part of the human brain that wants to learn is different from the part of the human brain that wants to transcend all that it's learned. That's what great literature does. Literature helps to expand what it is possible to think, and it should be, as much as possible, free of cant and of the tired arguments with which stern and boring conviction almost always foul liveliness, originality, humor, and most of the things that make life worth living.

That's not the way literature is handled today in the academy, and that probably makes me sadder than most people who read this, who probably don't consider literature to be that important. So many humanities departments today are such ghastly places becuse these boil everything down to ideology, to politics, to group identity. I think that these academicians are, increasingly, distrustful of fine literature because it allows the reader to create his or her own world, and these academicians don't want that to occur. Reading great literature should not teach you what to think, but it can certaintly teach you how to think, which is a lot more dangerous than any dismal dialectical argument in favor of this or that. That's an old argument, but there's still life in the old girl; now, perhaps, more than ever. (Oops, there I go showing my sexism again. Oh, well.)

This essay was going to be about Faulkner (well, it will be when I get around to it), but the best line in American fiction, I think, is when Huckleberry Finn, torn between rescuing his "nigger" friend Jim or letting him be mistreated by a society Huck increasingly realizes is rotten, backed by a smarmy religion that ordained that blacks were, by God's will, slaves, decides to risk his life to help his friend Jim out. The line is, "all right, then, I'll go to hell." That is excellent in multiple ways, and all the more because the P.C. crowd want to ban the book because of the "n" bomb, as it were. That shows how ghastly those people are.

I was reading a bit of William Faulkner this evening, while boozing. Good combination. He's a bit tough to read, but he's like riding a bike; once you get the hang of it, you'll never forget how to do it. His style has been criticized as wordy, as showing off, as style for style's sake. I once knew an arrogant Brahmin from Dehli who was a SERIOUS intellectual, spouting Kant and all those other German dialecticians. When I'd say how much I thought of Faulkner, this guys, synapses hyperactive, would sniff, oh, but he's so provincial, does he have anything, really, to say above and beyond the American South? I always wish I'd said (since this was in Baltimore) that your pompous candy ass was more or less in the American South, so don't be so friggin' denigrating. Sure, the American South is provincial. Sure, it had (certainly at the time Faulkner was writing) a caste system. Reminds me of India, in fact. But I never said that; I just never spoke to the twerp again. He's probably in the academy now, lecturing about the evils of American imperialism. Meanwhile, Muslims slaughter Hindus on a daily basis. The world is full of ironies.

I came to realize that how you say something, whether in literature or painting or music or whatever, is really a lot more important than the ideas that every creative artist almost always, at one time or another, screws themselves over trying to shove into their artistic vision. Ideas can be endlessly recycled, and that there's really nothing that knew under the sun, but how you express those ideas will always stop the clocks, get the girl (or boy, or dog), and make them sign on the line that is dotted. The biggest hindrance to creativity is to lard it up with a bunch of fatty, half-assed ideas straight of Derrida, or Dinesh D'Souza, or the Brain From Planet X. Just write the damn book, or paint the damn painting, or compose the damn music, and don't put the meaning front and center. Otherwise you might as well just write for The Nation or The Weekly Standard.

In the Coen brothers' great movie "Barton Fink," an earnest and quite boring playwright, who seeks to create a "theater of the common man," full of Marxist ideas about the dignity of labor and the evil of capital and other such tomfoolery, puts in a stint in Hollywood as a contract scriptwriter. The movie is set during the late 1930s. The writer, who is patterned after an actual playwright (whose name escapes me) who won all kinds of acclaim and prizes from academics THEN, and whose reputation has been going downhill since, in the movie meets up with a character patterned after William Faulkner, who actually did write a few screenplays. In "Barton Fink," this character is called W.P. Mayhew. Anyway, the eponymous playwright (played by John Turturro, who's great as usual) blathers, all self-important and tortured, that "great art must come from a great inner pain." Mayhew has a great riposte: "well, I just like to make things up."

Make things up. That's what, for instance, al-Qaeda or radical Islam (maybe -- ALL Islam?) doesn't do. Their mindset is, you make things up, you're commiting some kind of blasphemous act. (Of course, they are capable of causing -- not creating, causing -- great pain.) They HATE creativity, I believe, more than they hate sexy girls in miniskirts (it can be said to be the same thing, anyway.) Well, I live for two things: aesthetics and the means to enjoy them.

This essay got way out of hand. So I'll make my point brief; look at the first couple of pages of Faulkner's "LIght in August." Simple demonstrative sentences, nothing too abstruse. That comes later (in a page or two, actually; that's when I put the book down and began to bang this out) Faulkner's introducing possibly the most important character in the novel, Lena Grove (the novel is not really about her, but she puts everything in motion). Faulkner writes "After she got to be a big girl she would ask her father to stop the wagon at the edge of town and she would get down and walk." You don't realize how important that line is until you've read the entire novel. The narrative goes on: "She would not tell her father why she wanted to walk in instead of riding. He thought that it was because of the smooth streets, the sidewalks. But it was because she believed that the people who saw her and whom she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town, too." Nothing fancy there, but I could go on for about 15 pages about how damn good, how evocative, that is. So could anybody else who'd read a lot of Faulkner, or who'd read "Light in August" more than once. That one snippet, I believe, encompasses most of what we consider to be human motivation: envy, shame, pride, willfulness, initiative. The desire for community, the desire to be an individual. At least a couple of the seven deadly sins, and a couple of their opposites as well. That one paragraph has more wisdom in it than the collective works of Noam Chomsky. Our society will be healthier when more people in the liberal arts study Faulkner, and fewer study Noam Chomsky or Andrea Dworkin.

As promised, here's my little stock market game.

A few disclaimers first. There's little doubt in my mind that the Nasdaq index, at least, is bound to test the lows of September 21 (interday low of 1387, closing low of 1423, both occurring on September 21). That's the Nasdaq Composite Index's newest technical support, since it's broken the old one of 1666, which represents a 61.8% retracement of the rally from off the September lows to the early January highs. The 1666 level was important because of a fella called Fibinacci who lived in 13th century Italy, which is important for reasons I won't go into now. It's moot now, anyway; the retracement level did not hold, and that means the next technical support zone is where the rally began: in the 1387-1423 range. This is the level where buying pressure should begin to exceed selling pressure. The 1387-1423 range is the support zone where, theoretically, demand for Nasdaq stocks will become strong enough to stop the price from falling further. Now, if the Composite Index were to break that support zone, however, that would indicate something ugly, which requires an equally ugly term to characterize it: a new paradigm. In other words, a break below the 1387-1423 range would signal yet another downshift in pessimism: that sellers are willing to get out at even lower prices, fearing still lower prices, and that buyers would lose their incentive to buy at that level, since they would be anticipating even cheaper prices in the future. This is very elementary, and very much based on psychology, which is why psychology is 90 percent of investing.

Most people who bought technology in the late 1990s have been washed out of the market, perhaps never to return; now, they're actually bragging about being out of the market with the same gusto they bragged about being in it in 1999 (that right there could be a bullish sign, just as you knew it was time to short Amazon.com when Time magazine named its CEO, Jeff Bezos, as Man ... er, Person, of the Year). These people have lost their shirts, their undershirts, and a good part of their skin. They're gone. Now, if the Nasdaq were to break below the 1423-1387 zone, that would represent a real moment of truth for longer term investors, who started investing in Nasdaq stocks in the mid 1990s or earlier. This is a hardier breed of investor, who probably realizes that we are coming up on four-year cycle upgrades for personal computers and software, that the telecommunication four-year cycle will be coming up in 2003, and that these are upgrades that will by necessity require increased information technology spending. These are investors who realize that the economy is growing very nicely at three to five percent per year, who realize that the cost of money is absurdly low, who realize that inflation, even if there were a temporary cutoff in Mideast oil, will be a nonissue for the forseeable future (since labor costs are low, and labor is far more of a component to inflation than any one commodity), and who realize that stock market sectors that do the worst in one year will tend to do the best in the next. These are investors who realize that the last time there were three consecutive years when the stock market was down was in the 1930s, where the economic backdrop was the Great Depression, 25% unemployment, labor unrest, and breadlines. Not quite that bad now. These are investors who are telling themselves that investing is not a review of the past, but an anticipation of the future, and that valuing technology stocks on the basis of their performance during the technology recession of the past couple of years is as absurd as was valuing technology stocks (as these were in 1999 and 2000) on the basis of rampant Y2K spending.

Still, the reality is brutality, at least in the short run, and the patience and endurance of these investors will continue to be tested. Meanwhile, the herd shills for smallcaps and midcaps with book values slightly smaller than that of my 1988 Mustang, or for paper-pushing health maintenance organizations hated by everyone, or for restaurant chains which serve up second-rate Italian dinners, or for donut distributors, or for stores priding themselves on only selling stuff that's less than a dollar.

Anyway, on to the portfolios. This is a representative sample of the herd's favorites, along with their closing prices as of Friday, May 3: Trigon HealthCare (TGH), 104.84; St. Jude Medical (STJ), 82.73; Ryland Homes (RYL) 115.91; Sysco (the food company, not the networker) (SYY), 28.75; TRICON Global Restaurants (YUM) 62.84; and two iShares, which are basically closed-end funds, to serve as proxies for the smallcaps and midcaps: the S&P SmallCap Value iShares (IJR), 127.10; and the S&P MidCap Value iShares (IJJ) 100.70. I'm being very fair to the herd here, in that I've chosen companies which are well run, and which are still reasonably priced compared to their historical averages, even after their significant run ups in price. That's Portfolio One. Purchasing one share of each of these companies, at the aformentioned prices, comes to 622.87.

Portfolio Two will be a modified version of my old tech-name portfolio from the last contest, absent MCI-Worldcom, which has completely imploded and might not be a going concern for much longer. These companies, on the other hand, will not be going out of business anytime soon (well, probably). Here these are, along with their Friday closing prices: Applied Materials (AMAT), 22.17; Apple Computers (AAPL) 22.81, Cisco Systems (CSCO), 13.14; Dell Computers (DELL), 24.32; Intel (INTC), 26.56; and Microsoft (MSFT), 49.55. To give Portfolio Two a roughly equivalent dollar amount, the Portfolio purchases five shares of CSCO (65.70); four shares each of AMAT (88.68), APPL (91.24), DELL (97.28), and MSFT (198.20); and three shares of INTC (79.68). This gives this Portfolio an aggregate value of 620.78. Close enough

Portfolio Three is the critical list; these are companies NO ONE wants to buy now, companies that most people feel will be either out of business soon or will struggle to stay in business for the forseeable future. Here they are, along with their closing prices on Friday:
Lucent Technologies (LU), 4.40; MCI-Worldcom (WCOM), 1.78; Quest (Q), 5.05, Sun Microsystems (SUNW, 6.77); Oracle (ORCL), 8.43; and, back for a return engagement, CIENA (CIEN), 6.90.

To assign a equivalent dollar amount of 620.00 to this Portfolio, we might have to sop up most of the float in the shares of some of these companies. Anyway, the Portfolio purchases 19 shares each of LU (83.60), WCOM (33.82), Q (95.95), and ORCL (160.17); and purchases 18 shares each of SUNW (121.86) and CIEN (124.20). This gives this Portfolio a total of 619.80. Close enough.

For the record, none of these are recommendations. Especially Portfolio Three, since these are companies which are hated for good reason; they have company-specific issues with their managements. (One wonders when WCOM trades 85 million shares a day, as it did last Tuesday, trades between 2.05 and 2.75, but opens and closes at the same price, 2.47, just who is buying those shares.)This is, as they say, for amusement purposes only. It will be interesting to see where the values of these portfolios are, say, a year from now. Here they are again:

ONE: TGH, STJ, RYL, SYY, YUM, IJR, IJJ
TWO: AMAT, AAPL, CSCO, DELL, INTC, MSFT
THREE: LU, WCOM, Q, SUNW, ORCL, CIEN

Of course, if you believe Warren Buffet's recent apocolyptic prediction, none of this will matter much as we're all being triaged after a terrorist nuclear attack.

Back in October of 2000, just when the bear market was really taking hold, I indulged in an exercise which at the time I thought was just a bit of frivolity, but in retrospect turns out to have been kind of prophetic. At that time, every teletubby analyst or mutual fund manager was horning in on the potential of "new" technology stocks, issues that had already increased about six-fold over the past six months or so. These were companies in burgeoning industries with unbridled potential: telecommunications (including fiber-optic and networking manufacturers), Internet security, and business-to-business and e-commerce software and applications. "Applications" was a big word back then, along with "solutions" and "network".

Meanwhile, these analysts, when asked about the tech stocks that had become household names in the 1990s -- the Intels and Microsofts and Dells of the world -- would heap endless scorn and derision on these "old" technology companies and the investors who were going to ride them down to zero unless they sold them immediately.These companies' prices had already started to crack; they were companies that were primarly centered on the personal computer, or who had blazed the trail in networking and telecommunications but had become wallflowers doomed to be outshone by the sexy new names which were always "taking market share." No mention, of course, of what would happen if that market evaporated (which is what happened) and there was no more share to take; such ideas were absolutely beyond the ken of these sophisticated stock pickers. They considered the PC-centric companies about as wise an investment as investing (in another overused metaphor of those days) in buggy-whip manufacturers after the introduction of the internal combustion engine. I had always thought that the enterprising buggy-whip manufacturer could have gone into the business of adult toys and S&M "applications" and "services," and done pretty well. But I digress.

Anyway, I decided to do a little test one day. I created two fantasy portfolios, one of 20 new-tech names and one of 7 old-tech names: I "bought" one share of each new tech in the model portfolio at the COB on October 17, 2000 (I know, this is REAL ancient history) and 11 shares of each old tech, so that I would be commiting the same amount to each portfolio, $2832.

The new tech portfolio consisted of the following stocks, some of which you might have heard of or (if you're unlucky) invested in: Applied Micro Circuits (AMCC), Ariba (ARBA); BEA Systems (BEAS); Broadcom (BRCD);
Brocade Communications (BRCM); CheckPoint Software (CHKP); CIENA (CIEN); Commerce One (CMRC): I2 Technologies (ITWO); JDS Uniphase (JDSU); Juniper Networks (JNPR); Network Appliances(NTAP); PMC-Sierra (PMCS); Purchase Pro (PPRO); Redback Networks (RBAK); Sanmina (SANM); Sycamore Networks (SCMR); Siebel Systems (SEBL); VeriSign (VRTS); and Veritas Software (VRTS). The old-tech names were Applied Material (AMAT); Apple (AAPL); Cisco Systems (CSCO); Dell Computer (DELL); Intel (INTC); Microsoft (MSFT); and MCI-Worldcom (WCOM).

The thing to do, of course, would have been not to buy any of these companies at any time since then. But given that there are seven levels of hell, and that some choices are unwise, some disasterous, and some fatal, here is how these two model portfolios have performed since.

DATE 10/16 3/30/01 5/2/02
NEW-TECH PORTFOLIO VALUE $2832 $480 $225
OLD TECH PORTFOLIO VALUE $2832 $2259 $1834

Speaks for itself. I'm not surprised at what's going on at Merrill Lynch right now; I've known for a while that the business of stock "analysis" is three parts grift to two parts luck to one part science. A few hundred thousand people "lost" several billion dollars in Enron, and we have Congressional hearings and a soap opera rivaling the Chandra and Gary Show. Millions of investors lost seven trillion in the telecommunications and Internet charnel houses, and we hear very little.

So, now that the bear continues to range across the investing prairie, mauling any brave soul who tries to drive bulls on it, I thought this exercise might be worth doing again. Analysts now are flocking, like the sheep they are, to a whole new bunch of names in a whole different set of industries: HMOs, homebuilders, restaurants, retailers, consumer nondurables. While these names are no doubt far more fundamentally sound than the new tech names were, they've run up an awful lot recently, and are setting up for, I believe, a fall. Maybe a hard one. .

Tomorrow (or maybe the next) I'll come up with a model portfolio of these hot new names which are lusted over by (one would hope) a whole new breed of mutual fund managers who are, however, proving to be as callow and herdlike as their predecessors who shilled for Ariba at 131 and CIENA at 135. Some names I'd put in there include Trigon Industries, Ryland Homes, St. Jude Medical, Wellpoint, Quest Diagnostics, Sysco (the food company), Kohl's Department Stores, and Darden Family Restaurants. Then I'll see how that performs against not one, but TWO model portfolios: (1) tech stocks that have been punished for going on two years now, but still are accepted as going concerns (INTC, MSFT, IBM, CSCO, DELL); and (2) tech stocks that are on the critical list, laden by bad management, debt, and a general paralysis in information technology spending -- the very worst things you can possibly invest in, according to most analysts: Lucent (LU); WCOM; Quest (Q); JDSU, and, based on their performance the past couple of days, Oracle (ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW). There is, obviously, a whole other universe of companies such as railroads and paper products makers and energies, which are probably the best sectors (if there are any) to be in over the next few months, since these are the sectors of the stock market that tend to do the best in the part of the business cycle we're in: coming out of a recession.

We'll follow these three portfolios, and see how they do.

Yep, name change. "Rant" has been expropriated by every durn blog down in blogville, the tall and the small, and I can't stop it from happening. I'm not comfortable with the name anymore. All these tyros, they might have the best of intentions, but they don't really know what ranting is. After all, I was ranting while most of 'em were climbing through sandboxes or dodging the advances of Brother Bicarbonate of Soda at St. Medicine Cabinet's. So I dove deep into Roget's and came up with "dilettante." I kind of like the juxtaposition of "citizen," with its populist slant, with "dilettante," which implies aristocratic. Since I've got the calm temperment of the former and wield the competence of the latter, "Citizen Dilettante" is adequate as a sobriquet. And if anyone starts using that, I'll just keep reaching deeper into Roget's until I've gone through every ten dollar noun there is.

Here's a hilarious article, in the gotcha tradition, about newer, stronger, and better jounalists, now that we have the technology. It's from an outfit, The New York Press, that calls itself "New York's Free Weekly Newspaper." Usually when I see a tagline like that, I prepare to gag on stories about how gentrification is ruining the essence of inner-city communities, or on how Sir Haight Psychotic's civil rights have been violated after police arrested him for blowing his nose at tourists. But my fears were unfounded. Still, I'd advise them to change their tagline; free weeklies have never been known to have much of a sense of humor, unless it was directed at suburban white men ages 30 to 50.

And, no, I'm not indulging in self pity. I live in the city.

What a wild day yesterday.

When we talk about our enthusiasms, it is easy to hitch ourselves to hyperstatement and lose perspective along the way. Someone who lives for the outdoors takes a river rafting trip, and comes back talking about huge rapids straight out of "Deliverance"; then someone asks about the gap-toothed mountain men, and the point of the story is lost. Another builds a shed behind his house and it becomes a grand enterprise as if he was building the house itself, or a community of them, and then someone starts asking about zoning regulations and the builder wonders whether he's breaking any of them just to build a place to store his shovels and peat moss in. Someone who loves violent weather experiences a day like Sunday and watches huge supercell thunderstorms develop and then keeps saying how unprecedented it all was. And then someone comes along and equates your excitement over severe weather with pathological tendencies, or at the very least with insensitivity. This is particularly likely to occur when that severe weather exacts the kind of toll the violent tornado in neighboring La Plata, Maryland did yesterday.

OK, I stand accused, and I'll even acknowledge the charge of crassness. But that's all I'll plead guilty to. Sunday was a wild day, and unprecedented in Maryland meteorological annals. Weather hobbyists were burning up Internet bulletin boards (and had been for the past couple of days) in anticipation of a severe weather outbreak. No apologies in this corner for thoroughly enjoying the excitement, nor for being thoroughly disappointed that the best look I got of this once-in-a-lifetime event was from the rear and 20 miles away. My "chase" of the tornado was more or less aborted before it even began. A tale for another time, one perhaps best summed up by Franklin's quip: "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the battle was lost." In this case, for want of an uncongested road, for want of a fully fueled and trustworthy automobile – hell, let’s face it, for want of personal initiative at that moment -- the chase was not only lost, but didn't really start.

The tornado that hammered La Plata, a small town 25 miles southeast of Washington D.C., was a tragedy, and no amount of hand wringing about the inappropriateness of getting excited over severe weather will restore the shattered lives in Charles County or will rebuild the town. In another nod to overstatement, La Plata can be fairly described as "destroyed," even though large parts of it were undamaged, if not untouched. With rare events such as F5 tornadoes, such exaggeration is forgivable.

So are other tendencies. Like I said, from a weather hobbyist's point of view—my point of view—Sunday will be long remembered. It's my nature (no pun intended) that I remember in uncharacteristic detail the days when extreme meteorological events in my life have occurred. I remember those days with the same clarity that I remember the day I got married, or the day I got a play produced, or the day Intel cracked 80. I suppose the great mistake of my life was that I didn't go into meteorology, rather than quixotically pursuing (is there any other kind of pursuit, particularly when it fails?) a playwriting career which, like yesterday's tornado chase, ended rather abruptly and unceremoniously, and then deposited me on the sands of bureaucracy where I feebly struggle, like an overturned sand crab, to right myself.

A bad poet with a lamentable command of metaphor might well ask--well, I did ask this, that's my problem--what is the theater of the atmosphere compared to the theater of the human condition? I went interchange on that one a long time ago. The theater of the human condition is mostly farce, and a poor and deteriorating one at that, but the theater of the atmosphere is a grand and ongoing drama, and to learn more about it is to make it all the more compelling. No wonder the Greeks peopled the heavens with gods who had such human characteristics. So I went for the art, and came belatedly to the conclusion that the artists these days are scientists, since those who call themselves artists now are, more often than not, mere dogmatists who are to art what alchemy was to science; as we regress in the one, we progress in the other. From such choices as these, I suppose, are the fates of individuals cast and, when aggregated robustly enough, the destinies of civilizations determined. That is especially true if you believe in the butterfly theory of chaos, which is that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil causes a supercell tornado to ravage Maryland. All the more reason to save the Amazon, then; I want more of those butterflies flapping their wings. I want scads of them, clouds of them, to flap their wings in such numbers and with such vigor as to nudge ever increasing numbers and sizes of air parcels, laded with tropical moisture, northward to interact with the jet stream, itself energized by the quiet yet ultimately apocalyptic beating of butterfly wings from, say, Alberta.

And anyway, could differential equations have been all that hard?

Well, to business. The La Plata tornado appears now to be the strongest and most damaging in Maryland history. That the death toll is only three from an F5 tornado on the ground for 30 miles through a rapidly growing D.C. suburb, is not a miracle. It's a tribute to science and building codes and public education and good common sense. It's a tribute, also, to the survivors I heard interviewed that there was precious little of the kind of God-was-looking-out-after-me sanctimony I've so often heard from disaster survivors when they are interviewed by the avatars of bubblevision who descend on Pea Brain, Tennessee, or some such place where these kind of tornadoes usually do their worst. As if God wasn't looking out after the residents of the doublewides one cul de sac down. When people ask why I so disdain evangelicals, I usually cite this kind of thing. That's one of the reasons why I live in this area rather than in, say, Alabama, where tornadoes like this are much more frequent, or in, say Oklahoma, where they are even more frequent than that (and much easier to see, and therefore chase, to boot).

People who are above ground and who survive the effects of an F5 tornado—260 mile per hour winds—are the exception rather than the rule, no matter how well built their homes are. Those who live in Calvert County (east of LaPlata, where the same storm, perhaps the same tornado, tracked) report a great deal of damage there as well. F5 tornadoes are rare in Oklahoma (in fact, the last one in the country was the Oklahoma City tornado of May 2, 1999, which killed about 40 people and was the most damaging tornado in history); in Maryland they were, until yesterday, unheard of. It's estimated that Maryland had only experienced two F4 tornadoes (which have winds between 210-260 miles per hour, enough to flatten most homes) in the last 100 years. Even the College Park tornado of last September, which tore up the University of Maryland (and, in a little-known proof of chaos theory, led to the Terrapins’ NCAA basketball championship), was but an F3 on the Fujita Scale.

Ah, the Fujita scale. Every spring, we learn all about it, and then forget what it is until the next season's tornados level shopping centers and trailer parks. The Fujita Scale goes from F0, assigned to the weakest tornadoes that do less damage than a severe thunderstorm's winds, to F6, a theoretical level of "inconceivable" damage which, however, is never assigned (I'm reminded of the scene in "This is Spinal Tap" when the lead guitarist is asked why the levels on his amplifier go up to 11, instead of 10, and he answers, "well, they wouldn't go up to 11 then, would they?") There are probably more people now in the Washington DC metro area who can describe the Fujita scale authoritatively than there are people who can name all of the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, even though, given the war, it’s probably more important for us to know a vague something about all those unstable Islamic ‘Stans over there than it is for us to know about the nuances of the a means for measuring cyclonic (and in rare cases, anticyclonic) wind speeds as a function of observed damage. That says a lot—but not necessarily anything bad—about what sparks people’s interests.

There are some interesting things about the eponymous Ted Fujita, who taught at the University of Chicago and passed away a few years ago. Professor Fujita is a revered figure in tornado-hobbyist circles, and with very good reason. His effective yet practical protocol for ranking tornadoes revolutionized and codified an invariably subjective exercise. He introduced the concepts of tornado families and thunderstorm architecture. From his surveys of the infamous 1974 tornado Superoutbreak (always capitalized, by the way, for the same reason that "Hurricane Andrew" is), he discovered that the most intense tornadoes often have multiple vortices that spin around an axis within the general circulation of a tornado, and that these "suction" vortices, when added to the forward speed of the tornado and to tornado's own spin, create swaths of pronounced and especially phenomenal damage. These suction vortices account for the much-remarked characteristic of tornadoes for "skipping" across the ground, leveling a brick house here while leaving a tent 30 yards away standing. That actually happened in La Plata.

Anyway, Fujita survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing -- hell on earth, so to speak -- and yet had a boundless enthusiasm for both violent weather and, obviously, for his work that necessarily put him in countless situations where he observed human misery. I doubt he had much tolerance for those who would say that such fascinations with violent weather reflect a ghoulish character. Put simply, Professor Fujita loved tornadoes, he survived an atomic bombing, and I'm sure he could readily tell the difference between a fascination with the agents of the destruction and a lust for the destruction itself. (Ironically, he went almost his entire life without seeing a tornado in person.)

That love of tornadoes, and the equivalent love of tornadoes seen with many other scientists, engineers, meteorologists, and even ordinary citizens who are called upon as spotters across the nation (I'm a lapsed one myself), has saved countless lives over the years. The research of these people, as manifested in the Storm Prediction Center's warning system, in the heightened public awareness of what to do when a tornado approaches (even among citizens of Maryland, not known at least until now for its tornadoes), is directly responsible for the fact that, as of this writing, only three people have died. Or, as they say in official statements, only three fatalities have been confirmed. (There's a research issue in linguistics that perhaps the good Dr. Chomsky can pursue once he gets his America-hating out of his system; a good blog can't go on this long without bringing him into it one way or another, can it?). Three is a stunningly low total of deaths for a storm this violent, and more than answer necessary to those who would carp that excitement or appreciation of violent weather is a sign of an insensitive or warped personality. Severe weather happens, and the warped ones here are those who would use the same invective against those who get excited over tornadoes as they would use to describe suicide bombers.

The great ongoing scandal, instructive here, is with the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church, which now appears to be what some have been saying all along—rife with putrid types who, literally, used the robe and the chalice and all the gaudy and consecrated trappings of that Church as a shield behind which they could practice their black arts of seduction and sodomy against children. Yet these degenerates—and they are truly degenerates, and not those consenting adults attending an S&M convention in St. Louis who were so blasted by these weedy “decency” groups always popping up in the fertile soil of American opinion—were considered morally superior and "good" and entrusted with people’s children to an astonishing degree simply because they were considered “men of God” or some other such nonsense. I’ve found that those who most unquestioningly fell for this ruse—apparently more or less codified (or at least stringently ignored) at the highest levels of the Catholic Church—are often the same people who bash those who get a kick out of the spectacle afforded by tornadoes or floods or other acts of nature. That is, when they are not bashing advocates of cloning, abortion-rights and euthanasia-rights supporters, those who prefer freedom of speech over sanctimony, and those who don’t feel it’s necessary to have the Ten Commandments posted in every public building in order to prove their virtue.

It’s funny how the two great taboos of our time—the slaughter of innocent civilians and the rape of innocent children—have been practiced on a rather consistent basis by those who are acting in the name of God. While secular agnostics and atheists, who are considered by among others Joe Lieberman to be axiomatically incapable of ethical behavior, have been … well, not doing those things.

Damn, this turned into another rant against organized religion. I suppose I'm just like Chomsky, so obsessed over one thing that I can't write about anything else without launching a tirade against monotheisms.Oh, well, as the other characters in McMurtry's great novel Lonesome Dove kept saying of the stern and haunted Texas Ranger, Woodrow Call, "someone's got to take the hard seat."

And regarding that last post, and just for the hell of it ...

Never mind.

HERE WE GO AGAIN?

A "small tourist" plane has hit the tallest skyscraper (32 stories) in Milan. It happened around noon EDT, so it's late afternoon in Italy. There are reports that an SOS was received at local air traffic control prior to impact, but there's nothing definite. There are also reports that some people on a ground saw what appeared to be a Piper Seneca which might have had smoke coming out of it circling around the downtown area prior to the incident. The Seneca is a two-engine plane with about 2200 gallons of fuel and a wingspan of about 40 feet, but it did leave a gaping hole that more or less spans the entire width of the building. Some experts are saying that the hole is too large to have been made by a plane of this relatively modest size.

There's no point, however, in automatically assuming that this isn't a terrorist attack. It might very well be an accident--the Italian authorities are saying it is an accident--but advisories against "jumping to conclusions" have been rendered, after September 11th, moot. That's the kind of world we're in; that's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. I'd argue, in fact, that it is irresponsible not to intially assume it's a terrorist attack, and then rule the possibility out subsequently, rather than the other way around. I would imagine that the identification of the pilot would solve a lot of the problem.

Some speculation. A couple of characteristics suggest that this incident could be a terrorist attack, or at least something else than a tragic accident. It's a clear bright afternoon in Milan today, so reduced visibility would not be a factor. The plane hit very close to the top of the building and dead on; from the footage of the damage footprint left behind on the side of the plane, it seems that the plane was not that large, but that it hit the building squarely, and not a glancing blow. The Pirelli skyscraper is the largest skyscraper in Milan and, from the looks of it, one of the few buildings in the city worthy of the name. If the plane was in distress, why would it hit a skyscraper; pilots, even private ones, are trained to find an open area to land their plane in if they find themselves in distress. Even in the event of a serious mechanical failure, the chances of a plane plowing directly into the only tall, standing structure in the vicinity, seem to be rather long.

If this does turn out to be a terrorist attack courtesy of Muslim fundamentalists, maybe some of those Europeans who have been so quick to find fault with the U.S. will realize that they are in this war with us whether they like it or not, that these religious fanatics don't just hate the U.S., or Israel, but they hate the Western secularism and rationalism that is our strength and the hope of mankind.

One more thing: Milan is a famously cosmopolitan city, a characteristic despised by the al-Qaeda and that ilk. So even though the Pirelli building has nothing like the symbolic cachet of the Towers, the city itself would have symbolic value.

The resurrection of Citizen Ranter is upon you. It doesn't have quite the ring that "the word of God commands you," or whatever it was that the priest yelled at the devil within Ms. Blair in "Exorcist"--a seasoned blogger, which I ain't, would have googled until they found the exact quote, but I'd rather just introduce the word "google" into the language as a verb. Watch it catch on. Nor would "the resurrection of Citizen Ranter is upon you" make a catchy refrain to a song, like, say, "the eyes of Texas are upon you" does.

The Texas reference is not accidental. There's a theme all over blogdom right now that Bush is going all flaccid on terrorism since he sent Powell over to the Mideast. Warbloggers and neocons concur in slamming Bush for acknowledging that the Palestinians, despite their lamentable choices in leaders and methods, have at least the rudiments of a case for some kind of homeland. Peacejunkies and PA apologists and others who see every issue as an exercise in dialectics and nothing else, think Bush should be plotting Sharon's downfall and think Arafat is the reincarnation of Che Guevarra (who, unlike his compatriot Prof. Castro, had the good sense to get himself killed in the 60s before the Cuban experiment in la liberation turned into statist skulldugggery). Many an outraged cry from this quarter this morning about yesterday's pro-Israel rally down on the steaming Mall. No, the Texas bit has to do with tornadoes.

We're approaching prime tornado season, and the country is overdue for an outbreak; there could be one today. Occasionally, when I've started getting excited about tornadoes and their beauty and power, I've found myself opposed by some righteously indignant type who castigates me for wanting bad things to happen to people. I respond that of course I've wanted bad things to happen to people at times in my life, and so has everyone else, and anyone who doesn't admit they haven't is lying to themselves in the most insidious manner. Then I ask them what they mean by "bad things." Do they mean atmospheric processes and fluid dynamics and temperature differentials, the absence of which would make life on this planet more or less impossible for anything larger in size than a retrovirus? "Well," they reply, with their dudgeon levels skyrocketing, "I love humanity, and that's not the same as loving tornadoes which cause people so much suffering, have you ever been in one, have you ever SUFFERED?" And I realize I'm dealing with a member of the tribe of the Righteous, who sees in every errrant act and misfortune the hand of some self-indulgent vulgarian who is certainly morally unfit and, quite probably, an imperialist as well.

OK, shoot me. The Oklahoma City tornado killed one-seventh as many people as McVeigh did, and September 11th killed more people than have been killed in all the natural disasters in this country since World War Two. Anyway, this is the latest in the year, in recorded U.S. weather history, that the country has gone without suffering a tornado-related fatality. So to all those Muslim fanatics out there who are awaiting the terrible hour when allah smites us during this Clash of Civilizations, maybe it's time to reevaluate your worldview.

But as regards the return of the Ranter, the only question is whether it will be noteworthy, notable, noisome, or (I'd bet on this one) noneventful. (Somewhere in the neocon empyrean, a crewcutted apparition is haranging about "nattering nabobs of negativism"to the thunderous applause of Freepers. Boy, has Safire come a long way.) See, if this particular Phoenix of a blog were to ascend with too much zest, my Lifetime Nonachievement Award might be revoked by the Powers and Dispositions who give out such things, and I'd have to fill that great big gap on my wall with something else, like a clock or a cheesy picture of a sunset. If I were a real American and man of accomplishment, I'd be optimistic and expect things to always get better, and for this blog to not only become a going, paying concern, but to launch issues into the zeitgeist like the Soviets launched Katyusha rockets at the Nazis, and that I'd end up on the cyberpodium with the Sullivans and Welchs and Reynolds and Postrels of the world. But since I'm just a run-of-the-mill jingoist who's greatest achievement will be that someday I will, like them, be a Dead White Male (oops, fact-check my ass regarding that last name), the ramparts of pessimism will still be ... er, manned.

I'd be in good company, though, if my Nonachievement Award were to be revoked. The Norweigians, for instance, are threatening to strip Shimon Peres of his Nobel Peas Prize. ("What's all this fuss about the Nobel Peas Prize, anyway?" the late, great Emily Letella is saying in another, higher-rent section of the afterworld.) with all the posthumous gusto their finely honed ethical angst can muster. I've got a real soft spot for Scandinavians because of Ibsen and Strindberg and saunas and blondes and the midnight sun and cross-country skiing (well, elliptical trainers that mimic cross-country skiiing), but this ... is ... sad. 'Sides, I thought it was Sharon who was the bully boy here, lumbering into the peace loving city of Jenin with his thuggish Israeli army that is just so damn good that they don't give the poor al-Aqsassassins a fighting chance, forcing them to strap Semtex onto kids too young to be in Webelos and then sending them Zion-ward. I guess our Scandinaivan ethical superiors don't bother making a difference betweeen Sharon, who is a bit of a thug (even though it's hard to fault his response) and Peres, who presided over Israel's withdrawl from Lebanon when he was P.M. (which, in retrospect, is not looking like a good idea in that it was too dovish a move and prompted Arafat and his goons to their conviction that terrorism works.) Of course, Sharon doesn't have a Peas Prize to strip him of, so therefore the Zen Masters of Morality and Propriety, who prosper in such environments as the Nobel Committee and the Catholic Church and who specialize in symbolic gestures, have decreed it is their duty to speak out against the injustice by stripping Peres of his. At least Peres will still be able to say that he pulled off Entebbe; which accomplishment would you rather have on your tombstone?

Or maybe it's this, Vidkun: that all these Zionist warmongering belligerants just look alike, hm? Points to he or she who can guess which Isben character I'm echoing here.

END-RON PART ONE

Oscar Wilde famously said that a cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. It stands to reason, then, that cynics should have been well represented in the investor base of Enron, as they pushed to the moon the stock price of a company that in retrospect had no real value other than as anchorage for an astonishing collection of ninnies and frauds. But cynics, of course, would never have bid ENE to the 90s in the first place. Cynics generally are not welcome in the bidness, as they call it in Texas, world; in bidness (as opposed to business) you gotta be blue skies all the time, and skeptics are commies or worse. Ken Lay epitomized this, in the incessantly cheery and patently false corporate reports issued by Enron in his name up until this past summer. .

Well, Enron’s blue sky—one evidently unmarred by the accountant’s green eyeshade to boot—has not only clouded over, but is raining down a storm of recrimination and scandal so fierce that it’s booted the war right off the front page. Corporate fraud and duplicity can only go so far in explaining such a stunning and ongoing misapprehension of reality on the part of so many people involved with the Enron debacle as employees, employers, investors, analysts, accountants … the list goes on. The story is now embracing even the Indian subcontinent. The full measure of the Enron disaster and the blame for it can only be attributed to an optimism that was dangerously, almost seditiously, unchecked by any sense of … er, cynicism. So maybe we need to stand Wilde’s observation on its head: it is now the cynic who, in the wake of first the technology stock-market bubble and now the Enron disaster, will need to take the lead in determining what the true value of things are, since the seduction of price has shown to be keenest not with the cynic, but with the optimist.

The names of the players are rapidly becoming well known. One imagines somewhere a fantasy scandal league is holding a draft. There is the position of corrupt honcho [chairman Ken Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling]; there is the position of document thresher [David Duncan of Arthur Anderson is the obvious first-round pick, even though he looked pretty hapless up there taking the Fifth, so counsel Nancy Temple, with her mantra of “To the best of my recollection …” is a sleeper choice here.] There are elected officials who are impressively outraged [Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, who looked great in the combine on Thursday, January 25th], and predictably inept [Joe Lieberman, who invariably will start with the same kind of old-maid scolding that he directed at Hollywood during the election]. And the big prize is the most likely Big Fish to fall. Will it be Karl Rove and his $100,000 worth of ENE that he sold before Bush took office? Or maybe Cheney and that mysterious energy cabal that either caused or didn’t react to (I forget which) the California energy crisis? Or maybe it will be Dubba himself, longtime friend of fellow Texan Lay

As Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow both have noted on their CNBC cable show, “America Now” [look for Enron to do for that show what the Iranian hostage crisis did for “Nightline”], this really is the new Watergate [Enrongate does have a certain clunky ring to it], complete with document destruction and mirky financial transactions. All we need now is to learn how E. Howard Hunt is connected to it, or to hear about an Enron middle manager who offers, a la G. Gordon Liddy, to be shot on a street corner in Houston so that everything can be covered up. [Speaking of which, this just in. Truth really is stranger than fiction.]

Now that both the national media and the independent blogtocracy has seized on the Enron matter, a thousand different angles have been launched. Some should, and maybe even will, flounder. The most predictable and dispensable one is the attempt to politicize Enron and serve it up in the grand tradition of Conduit/Levy and Clinton/Lewinsky. It is fortunate that the company spread its cash over both parties, which should forestall this from becoming too much of a political circus. Nevertheless, wise heads are shaking in earnest, and as the Congressional hearings grind on, I can envision a manager pointing to his boss, who then fingers her boss, who then fingers Skilling or Lay, who then fingers someone in the Administration, and there you have it. The noxious nexus of corporate power and government greed always makes for a rippin’ good story—it’s certainly more interesting than discussing the failings of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)—and even for a Pulitzer or two, and the opportunity afforded by the Enron blowout will no doubt inspire many a wannabe muckraker.

Someone cleverer than I am recently noted that Big Media, having so thoroughly botched their reputations in their collective prediction of a military morass in Afghanistan, is just itching to get the nation’s attention focused on more familiar ground where the stink comes from rotten consciences and not rotting bodies, and where it can win back some measure of credibility. Enrongate, then, is a godsend, affording the Fifth Estate the opportunity to bring to bear the skills honed during the 90s when it read the entrails of O.J. and Jon Benet and Paula Jones. The more sophisticated, meanwhile, will brace themselves against the framework of James Stewart’s books and, going back a bit to the 80s, of Drexel Birnham Wood and Dusinane, and make hay over various questions about business ethics and government’s responsibility to rope in the bull of Mammon when it gets too rambunctious. The wisdom of government involvement in a situation that in all probability will be self-correcting is an issue generally left hanging in these analyses--until, that is, the blowback (to use a phrase now popularized in a different context) of the new government intervention has warped yet another business cycle.

What is rather surprising is the newfound zeal demonstrated by some conservatives for government oversight. Some of this is disturbing, some good. Conservative godfather George Will advises Republicans that they have a responsibility to “police business outlaws” in the same way as Democrats have a responsibility to ride herd on the “ditziness of the cultural left.” It says a great deal about Will’s brand of “conservatism” that he thinks his crowd needs to “police” business but not the idiocy of their cultural right intent as it is on proscribe our individual freedoms with Saudi-like zeal. Kudlow is more sensible, calling for the Security and Exchange Commission to promote reform of accounting guidelines and corporate reporting while, appropriately, prescribing the hoosegow for Lay and Company for their flagrant violations of the ethical standards and practices that are essential to the proper functioning of capitalism. In fact, Kudlow advocates greater regulation of the accounting profession (I assume he means for the government to be the one to take up the cudgel, if necessary), which is surprising coming from such an outspoken free-market advocate. But then you consider that Arthur Anderson, Enron’s accountant-cum-advisor whose name grows muddier with each passing news cycle, practiced similar chicaneries in a case involving Waste Management years ago.

The problem is, once it starts, the press for government regulation can quickly become irresistible. Already you hear the call to arms of the class warfare crowd, like the inimitable Al Sharpton. Some think the Administration was lax in allowing the poor, ignorant, white-collar Enron shareholder to exercise their power of choice and invest in a company that was headed down the tubes. This puts the Democrats in the curious position of advocating for white-collar, affluent Texans, among whom there were probably precious few Gore supporters. This is the kind of crowed that doesn’t believe in government intervention no how, no way, unless of course it's when their blue skies turn gray.

It was quite the noisome spectacle a couple months back, when the scandal first began to go critical, when Congress gave a hearing to Enron employees bitching and moaning over losing their entire 401k’s in ENE’s disintegration. I'm sure these are the kind of people who are always keen on the need for taking "personal responsibility" for one’s actions, and that too many people want the government to save them from themselves. No doubt most of them thought it a good thing that so many high-tech and dot.com investors lost their shirt in the Nasdaq meltdown, since they weren’t really doing anything important like trading computer-bandwidth futures and establishing partnerships in the Cayman Islands.

Well, to all those 30-year Enron employees who suddenly woke up with their 401’s ko'ed, I say welcome to the club, keep a stiff upper lip, and don’t go blaming others for the fact your retirement savings have been wiped out. Buck up and get a job at Wal-Mart. After all, there was only a month-long lockdown period starting October 17th (before which any reader of the regular business press, not to mention Enron employees, must have known that something was rotten; Fortune magazine, for instance, raised serious doubts about it in its March 5, 2001 issue.) when employees could not sell their company stock. The reason why no one had complained over the years that Enron only matched employee contributions with company stock was that during that same time, the company’s stock price was violating all reasonable laws of appreciation, gliding to stratospheric heights on the back of revenue streams which were not only too good to be true, but which didn’t exist at all. Once Enron’s edifice began to crack, and all that debt leveraged on a stock price that was collapsing faster than the Taliban army was suddenly and unavoidably there, it was only a matter of time before grandmothers and other socially acceptable Enron investors and employees began to be paraded in front of Congress as “victims,” when what they were really victimized by, arguably, was their own greed and lack of skepticism.

Whether or not you buy my rather harsh judgment, it remains that the Enron situation is precious little rationale for the government to start going around to companies telling them how to run their retirement plans. Dot-comers and tech investors who were burned in the Nasdaq bubble of 1999 and early 2000 received little sympathy from the public; neither should these Enron investors. Investing in markets implies risk; if you don’t want to take it, there's always government bonds.

RALL DEAL

I've an engagement later this evening that I've got to get prepared for, and instead of posting over lunch I was going to go to Armand's pizza buffet and line my stomach with carbs. But I just couldn't let this piece of nonsense go.

I know Rall's latest bull has already been detected by other bloggers -- notably the estimable (except when he bashes the Humane Society) InstaPundit -- who've given it a one-line mention as just more nonsense from this guy. But I just had to get on the record about a few things.

Primarily, there are so many good writers out there with so many interesting things to say; why does Ted Rall get a special link on Yahoo's daily news page? (Come to think of it, Ann Coulter and Maggie Gallagher get linked there as well, and both of them are second-rate, though Coulter's good for a unintentional hoot every now and then.) I recently purchased Yahoo's stock, thinking I'd turn a quick trade; now, I'm tempted to hold on until the next shareholder's meeting, and go there and raise a stink about who it chooses to highlight as columnists.

So here we go, a down and dirty dismemberment of Ted Rall's latest garbage.

"NEW YORK-Conspiracy theories are funny things: the wackier they sound, the more likely they are to be true."

Mr. Den Beste put it perfectly; if someone says it's too crazy to be true, it is.

"Little did I know how quickly I would be proven right."

This is one of the most nonsensical things anyone can write; we've all done it (or said it) every now and then, but someone who is paid to write really should be a little less sloppy in his thinking, or hire a better editor. Think about it; if Rall didn't know he would be "right" about his conspiracy theory, then he wouldn't have spouted off about it in the first place, and so he wouldn't be surprised about how he thinks he is right now. I guess you could say that he's surprised how "quickly" he was proven right (in his own mind, of course), but that's splitting hairs. The fact is, something like this is not only an immediate turn off (why should anyone want to read someone congratulating himself, unless he's doing it skillfully, artfully, humorously, all qualities missing here), but it's a cliche, and really doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

OK, OK, maybe I'm quibbling with that one. From here on in, however ...

"The Taliban government and their Al Qaeda "guests", after all, both were at best bit players in the terror biz."

Bit players? The guys who planned and executed the greatest atrocity in the long history of terrorism, the greatest single-day civilian loss of life in the U.S. in over 100 years? Who, pray tell, are the big dogs of terror, if Al-Qaeda are only wannabes. Oh, I forgot ... George W. Silly me.

"If the U.S. had really wanted to dispatch a significant number of jihad boys to meet the black-eyed virgins, it would have bombed Pakistan."

Our stated goal was not to dispatch "jihad boys" (is that anything like the Jerky Boys? Or the Boys of Summer? Boyz' in the Hood?), it was, initially, to break up Al-Qaeda by neutralizing the Taliban regime that harbored them. Any ten-year-old kid knows this, and there's very little doubt about it. Now you can disagree with that aim, or disagree with the war entirely, or even think that there may be an ulterior motive to it (it's the rare act, after all, that has only a single motivation) but there's absolutely NO disagreement about the primary reason we have been doing what we have been doing in Afghanistan the past three months. And no doubt that, in Rall's clunky phrase, we could bag the greatest number of "jihad boys" by targeting Tora Bora and its environs.

"Instead, the State Department inexplicably cozied up to this snake pit of anti-American extremists, choosing a nation led by a dictator who seized power in an illegal coup as our principal South Asian ally."

No, the snake pit was the Taliban, who we have dispatched (or at least violently displaced). There are certainly elements of Pakistan that aren't our friends, and it is somewhat disturbing that the Afghanis seem to be acting a little more truculent as time goes on. But the Pakistani anti-Americans, at least for now, don't have control, and whatever authority that is in Afghanistan now is certainly preferable to Omar and OBL .... isn't it?

"Moreover, the American military strategy in Afghanistan (news - web sites)-dropping bombs without inserting a significant number of ground troops-all but guaranteed that Osama would live to kill another day."

How in god's name does the one follow from the other? This is some violation of a fundamental principle of logic or dialectics or something, but I'm too lazy and in too much of a hurry to look it up. Suffice to say that we didn't NEED to insert too many troops in order to meet our military goal, which was to deny Afghanistan as a base of operations to Al-Qaeda and to destroy their ability to operate there. Which we have done with stunning success. And there's no guarantee that 150,000 American troops on the ground would have found OBL by now; the guy's got a price on his head for 25 million and is almost universally hated by Afghanis; you don't think they're not looking for him as much as possible? Rall's implication here is that ONLY American troops can finally corral OBL, and that the Afghanis, bless their little hearts, just don't have what it takes. That's a bit ... er, condescending of Afghanis, I believe. If the shoe were on the other foot, so to speak, and someone from their side was writing this, they'd call the author a racist for thinking that only our boys can do something and that those boys can't.

"So the Third Afghan War obviously isn't about fighting terrorism-leading cynics to conclude that it must be about (yawwwwwwn!) oil. Bush and Cheney were both former oil company execs, after all, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) was corporate counsel at Chevron."

What is a "terrorism-leading cynic"? Get a copywriter, for Chrissakes.

Now, on to the meat, which here is, that omnipotent Texan energy cartel that really runs the show, and has been running the show, I suppose, since the first wildcatter poked a hole in the Permian Basin. Ted Rall, meet Howard Zinn. The fact that Enron fell apart and trashed the private fortunes of many a Texan, no doubt friends to George W. and Cheney, is conveniently dodged here. We're to believe that this ubiquitous Texan energy cartel which runs the adminstration and even has a place for that turncoat-to-her-race Condi Rice (she sits on the BOARD OF CHEVRON, after all!) can trump up a war on the other side of the planet and hide their true motivations, but can't stop a Houston-based company from ginning up their books with nonexistent revenue streams and then blowing up into a full-bore disaster that threatens to dog this adminstration with scandal for quite a while. And if we were to damn every person in this country who sits on a board of directors of an energy corporation, we wouldn't have too many politicians left. (Of course, that might not be such a bad thing, but not in the way Rall thinks.) I'm surprised Rall didn't mention another master manipulator, Paul O'Neil, former CEO of Alcoa, which we know is one of those horrid extrusion-industry companies, not to mention the biggest single user of power in the Pacific Northwest. Rall, if you're going to make these accusations, please do your homework thoroughly!

"Unbeknownst to most Americans, oil fields dot northern Afghanistan near its border with Turkmenistan. But the real jackpot is under the Caspian Sea. Between confirmed and estimated oil reserves, Kazakhstan is destined to become the world's largest oil-producing nation, and will one day dwarf even Saudi Arabia."

Rall, look at a damn map. The Caspian Sea is quite a bit closer to Turkey and Russia than Afghanistan. If we were angling for that oil, why wouldn't we just buddy up to Turkey instead of promulgate a war with the defenseless and innocent little Talibanners? And guess what? There are existing pipelines from Baku, Azerbaijan on the west coast of the Caspian that run through the Causasus (and our new best friend, Russia) to the Ukraine and to Batumi, Georgia on the east coast of the Black Sea. And what the hell is so bad about this anyway? The U.S. goes in and helps underdeveloped countries like Kazashstan and Turkmeinstan and Afghanistan develop their economies so that their people can enjoy a good standard of life. WHAT IN GOD'S NAME IS WRONG WITH THAT? (Look what we did with the Saudis ... er, maybe I should strike that.) And if Chevron or Exxon (or even a moron like you, Rall) makes a couple of bucks in the transaction that they pass along to their shareholders (BTW, full disclosure, I am a proud owner of ExxonMobil stock for 15 years; I guess that disqualifies me from commenting on this situation), that's a good thing. That's capitalism, and that's a GOOD thing. Get it, Teddy Boy? And anything --- anything! -- that reduces our dependence on those Saudi bastards is also an unqualified GOOD thing.

"For the U.S., more production means cheaper oil, lower production and transportation costs, and higher corporate profits. The Kazakhs would be happy to work with us, but their oil is frustratingly landlocked. The shortest and cheapest of all possible pipelines would run from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf via Iran, but lingering American resentment from the 1980 hostage crisis has prevented U.S.-aligned Kazakhstan from getting its crude out to sea. Plan B is a 1996 Unocal scheme for a trans-Afghanistan pipeline that would debouche at the Arabian Sea port of Karachi."

Well, yeah, that's about how it would work. What's wrong with any of this?

"As Zalmay Khalilzad co-wrote in The Washington Quarterly in its Winter 2000 issue, "Afghanistan could prove a valuable corridor for this [Caspian Sea] energy as well as for access to markets in Central Asia." Khalilzad has an unsavory past. As a State and Defense Department official during the Reagan years, Khalilzad helped supply the anti-Soviet mujihadeen with weapons they're now using to fight Americans. During the `90s he worked as Unocal's chief consultant on its Afghan pipeline scheme. According to the French daily Libération, Khalilzad's $200 million project was originally conceived to run 830 miles from Dauletebad in southeastern Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan. Multan already possesses a link to Karachi. Partly on Khalilzad's advice, the Clinton Administration funded the Taliban through Pakistani intelligence, going so far as to pay the salaries of high-ranking Taliban officials. The goal: a strong, stable authoritarian regime in Kabul to ensure the safety of Unocal's precious oil. In 1998, after Taliban "guest" Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) bombed two American embassies in east Africa, Unocal shelved the plan. Chief consultant Khalilzad moved on to the Rand Corporation think tank."

Boy, this is just precious. Lemme get this straight. Some rather anonomyous chap who happened to write an article for a rather obscure D.C. publication about the importance of Afghanistan to the energy markets is the DARK PRINCE behind it all!. "Consultant" (what a dirty thing to be, Ted, especially when you're the chief one!) Khalilzad, from his perch at Rand Corporation, is mastermining the entire ebb and flow of this autumn's events --- hey, wasn't that Unocal gasoline that the NYFD fire trucks responding to the WTC were using? -- across space and time in ways we poor mortals (except, of course, for Ted Rall!) barely understand, using his contacts with the mujihadeen, the Clinton administration, the boards of Unocal, Condi Rice and her hairstylist, the Masons, the Freemasons, the Queens of England and Sheba, the man on the grassy knoll, the aliens from Planet Dork, and the cigarette-smoking man from the X-Files, so that this adminstration can all get rich on Caspian Sea oil and retire to St. Bart's after they've obliterated millions of Islamic freedom-fighters and crushed the Muslim world under the boot of free enterprise. I cannot IMAGINE a more dastardly plot. Thank God Rall has uncovered it. We can all sleep better at night.

"Considering the Taliban irredeemably unreliable, Clinton withdrew U.S. support. But as the newly-minted cliché goes, everything changed after 9-11. Now the Taliban are gone, replaced with a U.S.-installed interim government.Rising energy prices helped push the economy into recession; perhaps 90-cent gas will work where interest rate cuts failed. Once again, the pipeline plan is hot. Did Bush exploit the September 11th attacks to justify a Central Asian oil grab? The answer seems clear. On December 31, Bush appointed his special envoy to Afghanistan: Zalmay Khalilzad."

Ah, the circle is complete. I can see how Rall researched this article. He typed in some keywords in a Boolean string: say, "oil", "Afghanistan", "pipeline",."Rand Corporation", "Condi Rice", and out popped from Google (no, probably Yahoo's search engine; Rall is probably contractually obligated to use it in order to keep his opinion billet) the name of the murky and malevolent Mr. Khalilzad, who has been able to wield near-absolute power over the inner circles of four U.S. Administrations going back 20-odd years. Damn, if he's that good, I'm GLAD Khalilzad's on our side, Rall. Wouldn't want him running Al-Qaeda. Invest in Unocal now!

"This is a moment of opportunity for Afghanistan," the former Unocal employee commented upon arrival in Kabul January 5. You bet it is: Pakistan's Frontier Post reports that U.S. ambassador Wendy Chamberlain met in October with Pakistan's oil minister to discuss reviving the Unocal project. And a front-page story in the January 9 New York Times reveals that "the United States is preparing a military presence in Central Asia that could last for years," including a building permanent air base in the Kyrgyz Republic, formerly part of the Soviet Union. (The Bushies say that they just want to keep an eye on postwar Afghanistan, but few students of the region buy the official story.) Many industry experts consider Unocal's revived Afghan adventure fatally flawed and expect the U.S. to ultimately wise up and pursue an Iran deal. But thus far the Bushies have given the conspiracy theorists a lot to think about."

Well, I could go on, but I won't. The fact is, this kind of dross -- shoddy research, lazy thinking, trite writing, and totally lacking in any kind of substantiating evidence -- has been going on for a while in certain precincts of American discourse. The assumption behind it all, of course, is that the profit motive is evil and that the only way one person gets rich is if 500 others are impoverished. Perhaps Rall could have written something about the Enron situation, which I'll admit is beginning to smell. But that would involve Rall knowing something or learning about balance sheets and accounting standards. Too hard, and far more fun to concoct absurd scenarios featuring all-powerful rogues who would strain credibility even as Bond villians.

LAZLO SPEAKS

Lazlo Birinyi, the stock-market strategist who's a regular on Wall Street Week and the biz networks, turned very cautious on the stock market in the summer of 2000. That alone makes him worth listening to, unlike a lot of the clowns you see on CNBC. Birinyi's advice over the years has not been undermined by the kind of http://www.ifa.tv/12steps/Step4/Step4Page2.html hamfisted attempts at overall market timing that have marked the careers of some of the Street's biggest names, like Elaine Garzarelli and Joseph Granville.



Birinyi grew more bullish last summer and, although the autumn atrocities sunk the markets for a while, that prediction seems rather prescient now. He's still cautious, however, given the run we've had since September and that the stock market no longer seems to be terra incognita to the average investor. Fear has been supplanted, if not by greed, at least by anticipation.

With that in mind, Birinyi is advising that this decade will not see the kind of returns of the 1990s, and, more importantly I think, that the market has changed from a buy-and-hold investor's market we saw in the previous decade to a trader's market. This makes sense to me, and is backed up by history. Whenever a stock market bubbles up and then deflates like what has occurred over the past few years, the next phase of the stock market move generally features different leadership, and generally rewards different investment strategies.

Birinyi notes that Wall Street member firm activity has doubled; these investors of big money are not making long-term investments but are trying to generate incremental income. He observes that there is a lot more short-term activity, and that there are a lot more aggresive buy and sell programs, than there has been in the recent past. Overall volume hasn't increased, I imagine, because the trading activity of individual investors is nothing like it was in, say, 1999, when day trading was all the rage.

If Birinyi believes that trading and not investing will be rewarded over the next few years, I wonder if this means that he has softened his stance somewhat against technical analysis. He's never been a fan of the squiggly lines, but you can't be a trader by looking at 10-Qs or quarterly balance sheets. Most traders I'm familiar with put more faith in support and resistance levels than they do in cash flow and price/earnings rations. It's not a matter of whether that's right or wrong; the fact is that a large part of asset allocation decisions are made by technicians, and that axiomatically lends technical analysis importance. Remember, technical analysis reflects the reality of a given security's perceived value among a given set of market participants (investors) at a given point in time, and does not reflect any underlying truth of a given company's worthiness or health. It predicts market prices, and not a company's earnings stream or innovations or management. The simple fact is that these are securities markets, not companies markets. Given all the questions that have been raised with how companies are reporting their earnings, issues that are at the heart of the Enron debacle with all its off-book debt, there are increasing doubts about just how trustworthy is the data that is used when doing fundamental analysis. Technical analysis, then, seems to be even more important now.

Still, Birinyi makes a good point. He isn't the only one to bash analysts for upgrading IBM at 120 and downgrading it at 90. And, true, a lot of those decisions come from technical analysts. IBM breaks a triple top at 120 and the upgrades begin, even though IBM's all-time high is in the mid 130s. That's because one of the rules of thumb of technical analysis during the 90s bull market was that you buy breakouts above a trading range. That view, evidently, obviously still prevails among the herd mentality of certain analysts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the market in general adheres to it. That's why Birinyi's larger message is so important: that this is a different type of market, and that those breakouts will probably not have anything like the staying power these did a few years ago. The latter 90s was one long momentum play, and you were generally rewarded buying breakouts. It's different now, Birinyi says, with different rules, and one of those rules is that a stock price breaking out of a trading range is not necessarily a sign of a new up move.

Ironically perhaps, Birinyi puts a lot of faith in money flow. That's a good habit to get into in any kind of market; you want to position yourself where the big money is going before it goes there to jack up the price of the security you own. That's what investing is all about, and although there's no magic bullet to it, money flow is probably as close as you can get to one. Yet money flow has always been considered a key feature of technical analysis, which Birinyi has historically denigrated. Curious.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WEST

Bubbleviewing last eve, I watched one of those shout-fests, this one on the Cornel West imbroglio. In one corner, Dr. Alvin Pouissaint, an associate dean at the Harvard Medical School; in the other, Dr. Shelby Steele, a prominent writer who is always referred to as "a conservative black" something or other, as if the two were irreconcilable to the extreme and, conjoined, represent some kind of eccentricity or, worse, aberration.

For those who haven't been mesmerized by this controversy, the president of Haavaad, Larry Summers, called the "distinguished" professor West on the carpet at the end of the old year (I"ve got to get more current in my postings, I suppose) for not attending to his collegiate duties, such as teaching and research. Evidently, Cornel had been instead cutting rap albums and bringing in 15 g's a pop --maybe it really is nothin' but a 'g' thang baby -- giving speeches across the country. West's other extracurricular activities included joining up on the unstoppable bandwagon (rollin' on the six-four, anyone?) that is the 2004 Al Sharpton Presidential campaign. West took umbrage at Sommers' upbrading and threatened to decamp to Princeton, along with the rest of the Haavaad's Afro-American Studies (does it just study hair styles of black Americans; I thought it was "African American") department. Assorted goofballs like Sharpton and his partner in bunkum, Jesse Jackson, did what comes naturally to them, and dropped the "r" bomb like tonic flakes on yo ass, bitch. (Couldn't resist it, sorry.) As usually happens in these kind of cases, a difference of opinion between a black man and a white man, both prominent, was immediately redefined through the prism of racism. Tempers "flared," tensions on campus were "ratched up," the issue was chewed over by experts in "race relations." Then, before the bitch-slappin' started, Summers made some vague statement about the spirit of diversity, West at least temporarily unpacked his bags, Sharpton went back to holding Michael Bloomberg hostage, and Jesse went off to try and open a dialogue with Iran's warped imanocracy like he'd tried to with the Taliban right after 9-11. Anyway, on the tube last night, Pouissant defended West; Steele not only dissed West, but Summers as well for caving on the issue and not canning West promptly. Steele made the better case, not surprisingly, especially when you look at what this essentially was: an employer exercising his right to criticize an employee's work and schedule. But like most conservatives, he never knows where to stop; Steele then launched into an attack on African-American studies as if that had single-handedly caused the collapse of American academic life and standards.

This dust-up touches on a lot of the same nerves that have already been rubbed raw by the events of this past autumn, both the attacks and the reactions. West is a real poster boy for the logorrhea and ethical numbness of academic discourse in this country. In the name of academic freedom and fresh scholarship, West's attentions have ranged from the predictable (free Mumia, reparations for slavery seven generations after the fact); to the irresponsible (sponsoring such racists as Farrakhan and and Benjamin Chavis Muhammad); to the downright weird (trying to merge [?] Marxist thought with Christian traditions).

Part of West's appeal I can understand. The one time I saw him speak, it was mostly inchoate musings on spirituality and Nietzsche; I think West was trying to elaborate on the "Dionysian"/"Apollonian" dichotomy, which makes him, I suppose, a philosopher of some sort. I know it all went over my head, and I've read more of Nietzsche than all of the other name philosophers combined. But I've never really been taken with the metaphysic. The point it, what he said was not nearly as memorable as the way he said it; West's delivery is hypnotic, sing-song, it rises and falls like, say, a piece of music does. He's well known for that, and probably has people constantly coming up to him and saying, "you know, Cornel, you ought to try rapping. If Shaq can do it, why can't you?" And he figured, "gee, why not?" Anyone who's ever tried to actually read West knows that, as a writer, he makes a good performance artist. Maybe that's why he's trying to break into rap. AWA: Academizz with Attitude, anyone?

One thing I'll note here in West's defense; evidently, he's fighting an "aggressive" form of prostate cancer. "Aggressive," of course, is euphemistic for "critical" if not "fatal." Maybe all this is as simple as West needing some time off to address what is obviously a serious threat to his health. I've seen close family members die of cancer, it's not a pretty sight, and I'm always willing to cut someone some slack when they've got it.

Geez, two softie posts in a row. I must have used up all my enmity this fall. Got to get back to normal.

TOUGH GUYS AND WARPED ADOLESCENTS

The sad case of Charles Bishop, the 15-year-old kid who flew the plane into the Tampa skyscraper, illustrates how due diligence against henious barbarians can become unctous chest thumping against unremarkable misfits. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7938-2002Jan7.html posing like many reconstituted liberals are in his new hair shirt of toughness, is glad that press accounts of Bishop have spared us the "he-was-such-a-good-kid motif" -- whatever that is.
In our national zeal to outdo the next guy in showing how studly we all are in the face of terrorism, constant belligerent blogging can easily warp into foolish bluster if it isn't occasionally tempered with forbearance. Something of empathy is lost when there's such unilateral condemnation. Perhaps because I was a loner like Bishop in high school (still am, for that matter), I'm kind of sensitized to teenaged angst, even when it is leads to violence such as Bishop's kamikaze run, or as the Columbine shootings. Lone, impulsive acts of violence that are the result of the distempered mind don't seem nearly as obscene to me as acts of terror marinated in ideological gunk, and alienation from something isn't nearly as censurable as hatred of it. Bishop was pushed over the edge and did a very bad thing. But he shouldn't be lumped in with the likes of Atta, who lusted for martyrdom through mass murder. Bishop, evidently, just wanted out.

Instead of excoriating this kid, let's remember the kind of garbage the Taliban was, and save our opprobrium for these cretins. Every day, we're reminded of how ghastly these people were and are. I just heard a press report that one of the few surviving animals in the Kabul zoo, a lion, is missing part of his face. How'd that happen? The lion, left to starve during the Taliban regime, tried to eat a live grenade that had been deliberately placed in his cage. The grenade blew up, naturally. Such deliberate acts of cruelty stagger the imagination, and the people and mindset which can conceive of such things have forfeited at least their right to freedom, if not to their lives. I'd like to see the Kurtzes of the world spend more time on that kind of thing, and less bloviating about some suicidial Tampa teenager and trying to fabricate some nonexistant link between him and Muslim terrorists.

THE DOGS AND WAR

All right. Back on track now. I've been dealing with a sick dog; Sidney (after Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, if any inquiring minds want to know) had a bad back and needed emergency surgery to carve some excess mineralization off of his vertebrae. Garn and gnarly that is, to be sure. Not to mention pricey. So I've been predisposed. If you've ever seen a beagle with 18 staples along his spine, you'd know what I mean.

Still have time to viddy David Hackworth and Charles Krauthammer on bubblevision, however. Krauthammer I've had problems with in the past, but he's been stellar on the war. He immediately tagged it for what it is (can we say "was" yet?) a conflict between modern secularity and medieval theocracy. I used to refer to him as Charles Katzenjammer when I was drinking. Not anymore. By the way, he's the last famous opinion maker I've seen in person in DC. He was just behind me in line when I saw Branaugh's "Hamlet" a few years back. (I don't get out enough, evidently.)

Hackworth isn't so exemplary. He keeps saying that the problem with the press coverage of the war is that none of them have served in the military; yet in the next breath, he saying that the all-volunteer force that just blasted al-Qaeda back to allah is the best we've ever had. So in other words, there's no grounds for any civilian to criticize the military unless they've served, yet the military's performance wouldn't have been quite so astonishing if they'd had a bunch of, say, Ashleigh Banfields or Aaron Browns on the roster.

Much has been made of the media's ineptitude in covering the war, with pansied louts like Robert Fisk used as examples of how unfit our Fifth Estate is to do anything other than read Noam Chomsky and cower in fear until they're rescued by the Fire Department. Our military involvement, however -- and, evidently, part of the reason it's been so effective -- has been subtle. Special Ops, behind the scenes stuff. This hasn't been (thankfully) Pelileu-type stuff, with Robert Sherrod cataloguing almost unbelievable carnage. It's been efficient, clinical, and quicker than anyone dared hope. So there's been precious little opportunity for the press to report with dramatic flair. If they've been a day late and a dollar short in their coverage, I think that's a function of how we are conducting the war.

Since everything is always better when it has willing participants, I think that the Afghan campaign so far puts one of the old warhorse arguments for the draft -- that it serves an important purpose in acting as a kind of social leveler, and that US will never have respect for the military until half of the populace has a common point of reference in their service -- to rest. Plenty of people who never served in the military (like me, although I did work for the military for several years, and loved the travel, especially when the Senior Chief would say at 2:30 that work was over and that it was time to start tossing 95-cent vodka tonics at the officer's club) still can appreciate it and the job it does (and not just the cheap booze, but that always helps.) And I doubt that my personal participation in the war so far would have, as they say on the balance sheet, "added value." I'm a lousy shot anyway.

No institution should get a pass, and that includes the military. There's no truth to the idea that you can only value something, or fairly judge something, if you have personal experience with it. For example, representative democracy: we entrust the election of government leaders to a populace who by and large has no experience either in elected office or in the professions -- such as law -- that feeds it. Yet no one questions that. Same with the military. Hackworth and his lilting demurrals suggests condemnation of any civilian criticism of the military, and that's very dangerous turf to revisit. That's part of the reason why we got into the morass of Vietnam. It's plain foolishness, and dangerous, to think that criticism of the military can only come from those who've served in the military.

MEDIA STAR?

I've only seen bits and pieces of the OBL tape, but what I'm immediately struck by is how ... ordinary and unimpressive this guy is. Bear with me a second; I'm not doing what that German artist did after he said the WTC going down was the greatest work of art ever. No one takes a back seat to me in fantasizing how to torture Osama Bin Laden so that he'd start calling me Allah. I while away my spare time thinking, like Lear did of Goneril and Regan, to have at OBL with flaming spits ....

You don't need to know Arabic, or really even need to read the translation, to make it clear what we've known all along: that this prick deserves a cell right next to Pol Pot and Ted Bundy in the seventh level of hell (and this coming from an agnostic).Inveterate analyst that I am, however, I'm trying to ascertain what it is about OBL that makes him so "charismatic." That's what the experts say, anyway.

I don't get that, OBL's "charisma." But I do know something about bores; Lord knows I've been accused of being one often enough. And this guy strikes me as being, when you strip away all the millions and all the religious fervor and all the hate and all the cruelty, a ghastly bore. When I look at him in the tape, and divorce the image that's loomed so large in all our minds for the past few months from what I actually see on the tape -- in other words, if I watch the tape as if he's some total stranger regaling a bunch of other total strangers about something I know nothing about in a language I don't know a word of --- what I'm left with is a totally unimpressive, not to mention unintimidating, slug. This isn't just cheap "let's have at the bastard of the day" commentary, either. But it's the only orderly comment I can bring to bear on this piece of videotape. Everything else in this is astonishingly alien. For instance, there are no conventional points of reference. When I sit around with a bunch of guys, we don't act like that. We drink and smoke and gesticulate with relish. Like the invaluable blogger Ken Layne says, what a boring party OBL is presiding over in this tape. There's no booze, cigars, dames; just some rancid egotist holding court. It's like he's making some kind of lame sales pitch; you take away the mufti, he could almost be selling Tupperware. (Remember, I'm not talking about what is said, I'm just discussing the visual.) He's not even lusty in his evil. And the morons around him! Nodding their heads like those wind-up plastic ducks you give to people as gag gifts on Cadillac Day.

People compare OBL to Hitler. I think the more apt comparison, after viewing the tape, is to Himmler, the dirtbag chicken farmer who went from being a nullity to overseeing a killing machine almost without precedent. Hitler, if you've ever seen his speeches, he does arrest the attention, and he probably would even if he wasn't Hitler, but was just some raving lunatic who just escaped from the pencil factory. Because, you see, Hitler was a raving lunatic, and you remember raving lunatics. Not fondly, perhaps, but they do stick in the mind. With Hitler, it's the fascination of the abomination, as Conrad said. It's the bugging eyes, the melodramatic slashing of the hands. The voice, here modulated, there stentorian. There's a kind of warped charisma there. Not so with with Himmler. Mild-mannered, a total nonentity. Wire-framed glasses over squinty eyes. There's just the abomination, no fascination.

Same with OBL. A nonentity. Like Marlon Brando said about Lee J. Cobb in On The Waterfront, "you take away your heaters and your pistoleros and your nothing." Well, OBL is really nothing. (Johnny Friendly is actually far more memorable.) He's not some 10 foot tall super terrorist who can't be stopped. He's some gawky-looking Saudi rich boy with lascivious lips and limp wrists and, quite probably, Marfan's Syndrome which would kill him off in a couple of years if we or the Afghanis don't get to him first. Yeah, he did horrible things; so did rats during the Black Plague. Hannah Arnedt also said it well, when she observed another cold-blooded nonentity, Adolf Eichmann, in the dock after the Israelis spirited him out of South America: the banality of evil. Perfect word that -- banal -- to describe OBL.

We' re gonna get the bastard and hang him proper. I'll go out on a limb and say that the head of Osama will make us all a good Christmas present. (I know, I know, not keeping in the spirit of the season. Oh well.) I expect that, in 50 or 100 years or so, after a decent and appropriate interval has passed, there's going to be a wildly successful movie or a play called "The Producers, Part II" about OBL in which he, the ghastly al-Qaeda and the goofy Talibanners, and everything they stand for and believe in, will be mocked and mocked and mocked and mocked, to the delight of a secular, modern, Western audience who, after having a good laugh at this moron's expense, will go out and have a good dinner, and then go home and get drunk and have good sex. He'll be remembered all right, but only as an object of scorn. A cheap hoodlum.

Saladin this prick ain't.

YOU SAY TOMATO AND I SAY TOMATOE

"Those damn Left and Right Coasters, I told you they were no good." So Andrew Sullivan, who's usually got all kinds of rewarding insights, is still sputtering about those fifth columnists who inhabit our coastal cities and calumniate with relish all things American, between sips of Chardonnay and morsels of Brie. John Walker is from Marin County, and John Spann from small-town Alabama. Ergo, Marin County, bad; small-town Alabama, good. Here's his recent dispatch on the matter --

"You may well have read the astonishing piece in the New York Times today about the divergent paths of John Walker and John Spann. The thing that stood out most starkly is the blue-red split. In fact, both are almost absurd stereotypes of each part of America. Here’s Spann’s background: “Mr. Spann grew up foursquare in a four-stoplight Alabama town. Life in Winfield revolved around family, church, duty and high school football, and Mike Spann embraced them all. He took apples to his teacher, played soldier at recess and prayed on Sunday with his family at the Church of Christ.” You couldn’t make that up. Then here’s Walker: “Encouraged by his divorcing parents to seek his own spiritual path, he found himself by rejecting teenage culture in the name of Islam. He sold off his hip-hop records, immersed himself in the Koran and started wearing a long white robe.” One is from Alabama; the other is from Marin County, California. One is a national hero, the first American casualty at the hands of the enemy. The other is the enemy. Does it get any starker than that?"

One of your heroes, Andrew, (and one of mine as well), George Orwell, captured this kind of attitude perfectly in Animal Farm. When the sheep would bleat out "four legs good, two legs bad" any time a poor creature dared to challenge the directives of the pigs, it wasn't just Orwell satirizing authoritarian government squelching dissent. It was his riff on how these did it: by fabricating cheapskate generalizations such as the one you keep insisting on between the brattish "blue" decadents of the coasts and the "red" heartland worthies. (Or maybe it's the reds on the coast -- after all, commies and all that, you know -- and the blues in the heartland; I forget which. It's one of those dyslexic things.)

I do know this: a sure sign of someone who's never lived in the heartland is someone who keeps making it sound like the repository of all virtue. Well, it ain't, just as the cities aren't all sin and America-bashers. Come on up here to my street in Upper Northwest DC, Andy, and see how every house on our street has a flag out in front of it or in the window.

And another thing; it's a sign of your parochialism, possibly, that you carve up the U.S. into the red coast/blue everywhere else pattern. Try telling a Yankee in rural Maine that they aren't really any different than a Cajun in Louisiana or a Plainsman in North Dakota, and then take one great big step back for your self-preservation. You'll get, at the very least, an earful, I promise you.

Give this blue-red thing a rest, pal. You're better than this.

There has been a great deal of silly carping against the Bushies regarding their prosecution of the war, and much of the condemnation directed at the Administration has been infantile, if not irresponsible. But this article from the San Francisco Chronicle is, as they might still say out in the Bay Area, right on.

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Anyone who isn't a feckless creep or a Western Civilization-hating flagellant should be happy with how the war's gone so far, and every time I see William Cohen equivocating about this or that act's repercussions on the "coalition," I'm damn glad that it's Rummy at the helm and Cheney in the crow's nest. But it's getting a little bit past the time, I believe, to give this entire Administration an exegetical pass on the culture issue, given the kind of stunts it's been pulling over the past few months. It is not pitching logic or fairness over the side of the boat (to keep the nautical theme going) to observe, like this article does, that even as we are fighting an enemy notorious for its medievalism and fascist fundamentalism, the Bush Administration, and in particular that loon John Ashcroft, has been acting as much as ever as errand boy to the Christian Right's domestic agenda.

Consequently, it's not reckless, unseemly, or even particularly gratuitous for the author to lump the likes of our Attorney General in with the Taliban. There's no statute of limitations that I know of against using such a rhetorical smackdown. The Administration's record since 911 on issues such as therapeutic cloning and physician-assisted suicide is a blatant cave to its Christian Right base, and it is all the more revolting since it's an assertion of the kind of intrusive federalism the Bushies claim to so detest.

The Administration's effort at preemptive ethical bankrupting of cloning research is not only an evisceration of its less-government ethic, but also, as Michael Lind and others have noted, an almost-unprecedented and mortifying attempt at using Federal fiat to criminalize scientific research. The Department of Justice, which you'd think would have more important priorities now, is nevertheless committed itself to identifying and punishing physicians who prescribe drugs to the terminally ill at their request. I'd rather these agents be cracking down on those al-Qaeda cells which everyone thinks are still lurking in suburban duplexes across the nation.

A bit about physician-assisted suicide. I believe that one of the most unassailable individual rights of all is to alleviate pain and manage one's own life, and that death is after all a part of life. The fact that this right, which increasingly the modern citizen wants, is under attack by the Justice Department at this time I find personally insulting. It is a bit much for me to accept that someone in great physical pain, with no hope of recovery, cannot exercise their right to end their tormented existence in a clean fashion because someone else thinks their personal deity wouldn't approve of it.

The issue here is the intersection of the expansion of individual freedoms, which is the fundamental genius and strength of our culture and which is expedited more quickly than ever by technological innovation, with taboos which are no longer either necessary or justifiable. With physician-assisted suicide and therapeutic cloning, as it was with open homosexuality and in vitro fertilization and, before that, with the emancipation of women, it is the religious fundamentalist fighting the rear-guard action against these things' widespread acceptance in society. I think it was Frazer's The Golden Bough which noted that all our taboos have a historical basis and necessity to them; the injunction against suicide, however, is surely less valid to the survival of our society now than it was in the distant past. And let me nip this one in the bud; I'm not advising suicide here. I sat on a suicide hotline, for Chrissakes', talked several people out of it (believe it or not), and consider that one of the finest things I've ever done or will do.

Perhaps the taboo against suicide was necessary in the past, but as they say, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. The point is, a lot of taboos have been unwound as civilization and its mores changed (a process which most of us, I'd think, would approve of), and many things that were verboten aren't now because the reasons they were unthinkable then don't exist now. The reason why murder is taboo then, and it is now, is fundamentally because it denies something to someone else. Suicide was taboo in the distant past because communities were frail and everybody was needed. Later societies, however, didn't need every single person in order to survive, and in fact many societies considered suicide a noble end; we all know the story of Socrates. The fact that we no longer ostracize the families of those who commit suicide (and haven't for a good while) illustrates that the taboo against it is expiring. Therefore, it follows that, now that the pharmaceutical technology is available, someone should have as much right to end their own life in the manner they wish, including to contract with a physician who is willing to prescribe and administer a lethal dose of drugs, as they do to make other choices, such as to get married or have children or even to support John Ashcroft.

Most of the "arguments" against physician-assisted suicide -- that physicians would be violating their Hippocratic Oaths, that it would lead to (or reinforce) a "culture of death," that it would lead down the "slippery slope" to mandatory "mercy killings" -- are more or less obscurantist nonsense, especially given how the law has been working so far in Oregon, where there have been actually many fewer suicides than even the measure's advocates anticipated. In particular, the slippery slope argument (which is also dragged out in the cloning debate) is patently absurd and the reddest of herrings; an individual exercising the right to end their own life is not going to lead to a state-sponsored bureaucracy authorizing killing anyone who's got Parkinson's disease. To make such a ludicrous leap requires conflating individual rights with government authority, and someone who does that obviously understands neither. The slippery slope, in fact, will probably end up going in the opposite direction; doctors who are afraid of being charged with murder will be even more reluctant than they are now to prescribe adequate pain medication to the terminally ill, and anyone who's had the misfortune to have a close family member die a lingering death (as I have) knows many doctors are already loathe to prescribe the adequate doses to relieve (and not just "manage" -- screw that!) pain.

None of this, evidently, matters to the Administration. It hearkens instead to the truncated views of Burke Balch, medical ethics director of the National Right to Life Committee, who says that drugs "should be used to cure and to relieve pain, not to kill." This is also nonsense (but then, what would you expect from the Director of Medical Ethics?) and, worse, insulting. "Killing" is what the terrorists of 911 did; a doctor giving medications to a consenting, dying patient in intense pain and with no hope of recovery isn't killing, unless the verb "to kill" is to lose its essential meaning. (And I thought it was conservatives who were always worried that the language of right and wrong was being fatally diluted by our morally relativistic society.) Physician-assisted suicide is arguably a compassionate act, and in any event it is no business of the Federal government to outlaw it.

In doing the bidding of their religious-conservative masters, the Bush Administration is using the blunderbuss of Federal law enforcement to criminalize issues no honest conservative could possibly think the government has any business prohibiting. (This doesn't mean that government wouldn't have a say in regulating these practices; grounding them in a legal framework, in fact, would help ensure there weren't the kind of abuses the opponents always bring up.) This kind of stuff guts any claim the administration has to representing "states' rights," physician-assisted suicide, after all, has been approved by Oregon voters twice, and is very popular with the voters there. The Bush Administration pursuing the Christian Right's cultural agenda often makes a mockery of its claim to represent individual freedom; for the Administration to be devoting time and resources to the fundie wish list at this time in our nation's history is outrageous.

Vermin watch: The scuttlebutt is that Johnny Walker Black (named for the color of his Taliban-issue turban which he so proudly wore as a fellow traveler of theocratic totalitarianism) was a CIA plant. Methinks there are too many devotees of Robert Ludlum covering this war. And if Walker really was a CIA plant, then good God, what more proof could you want that we need to replace the CIA with an entirely new intelligence organization.

Meanwhile, George Will, who never misses an opportunity to irritate, seems to have demonstrated some uncharacteristic tender-heartedness when it came to old J.W. Regarding our modern-day Lippmann's performance on This Week with the Has-Beens, Will was evidently cutting Walker more of a break than he did, say, Holden Caulfield:

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I keep meaning to demolish Will's little jeremiad against The Catcher in the Rye; I'm saving that task for a day when I'm in a really foul mood, and not just being an off-the-shelf curmudgeon. Will should keep to Cal Ripken-worship and nattering about "Federalism." I'd imagine that old Holden, were he alive, wouldn't have pulled a John Walker and gone off to join the Taliban, and that, being a good New Yorker, he would have been mighty pissed about the WTC. I'd rather be around a whole swarm of "self-indulgent" adolescents than spend two minutes with one middle-aged scold.

The brouhaha over fellow traveler John Walker is gathering stream and, unsurprisingly, some loony columnist is characterizing the miserable bastard as some kind of American archetype, or hero, or victim, or as anything other than what he is, which is a traitor:

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This kind of stuff shouldn't really outrage any more. Obviously, this war has shown us that there are certain fraternities of belivers in this country where the fundamental expression of common sense -- the desire for self-preservation -- is totally negated by their near-monomanical need to strike the dissenter's pose. 911 was, first and foremost, an attack on our society, our freedoms, on the very aspects of our society that progressives have always claimed to like. To try to understand/reason with/explain/sympathize with the Attas of the world is much more than inexcusable, it's suicidal. The first people to go under the knife if religious theocrats like the Taliban took over would be the secular left. (And, yeah, I consider al-Qaeda and the Taliban two sheets on the same roll of toilet tissue.)

Most secular leftists, of course, realize the danger these cretins pose and are as keen on striking back as anyone else; you'd never know this from reading, say, the Weekly Standard, but it's the truth. There are those odd nuts, nevertheless, lurking in Berkeley and Ann Arbor and, for all I know, Waco and Winnemucca, who actually think up tripe like this twisted justification of Walker's activities; they do this because they only feel comfortable when tweaking the consensus. And the larger that consensus is, and the greater the preponderance of opinion which is set against them, the better these "critical thinkers" like it.

Dissent, to these people, has taken on the character of an aesthetic; it is the tradition -- the pose -- of dissent itself, rather than the actual opinions, that drive these people to stake out the kind of idiotic positions they do. But dissent should be rational, thought out, and, like many valuable things, it loses its puissance if it's used too much. To mangle an old bromide, the person who dissents from everything, dissents from nothing.

The article self-righteously states, "The Bay Area is also a place that encourages critical thinking about the U. S. role in the world. That may have played a part in (Walker's) vulnerability to the Taliban's extreme propaganda." The author of this piece really should be pitied for his flabby reasoning, and those who harbor such muddled ideas can't be taken too seriously. If "critical thinking" about U.S. policy is based upon geographical location, then that "critical thinking" isn't thinking at all, much less critical; it's only peer pressure, and clearly refutes the claim made by any such leftists that they are "unorthodox."

Real critical thinking has nothing to do with aligning with the character of the surrounding community. (If anything, it's the reverse; when I lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, a noted lefty enclave, for instance, I found myself becoming an almost obsessive captialist, but that's another post for another time.)

To turn their own weapon against them, a deconstruction of the above San Francisco Chronicle quote would read, "Certain loudmouths in the Bay Area mandate excoriation of the United States, no matter what it does, and Walker should be held up as an icon of freethinking." Part of the reason these people seem to turn up so much in the news is that they make great copy. There's nothing like reading some apologist for John Walker linking his decision to go fight on the side of mass murderers to a "spiritual odyssey" or a "cultural sensitivity" or some other nonsense. It gets my hackles up almost as much as an appearance by William Bennett on my TV screen.

But then you read this sentence -- " With a slightly different turn of events, Walker might have become the idealistic doctor he once talked about, in order to help the poor in developing countries. Then we would have been celebrating his achievements, instead of wondering what went wrong." -- and you realize the cause of trying to understand these people really is hopeless. I have a good deal of sympathy for those who say that a twitch of a mountain goat's nerve can lead to a landslide, and I find chaos theory (or what I can understand of it) fascinating stuff, but this is a bit much. Going off to fight with a bunch of religious, medieval fanatics is something more than a "slightly different turn of events" than, say, going to medical school.

As far as Walker is concerned, his picture should replace Benedict Arnold's when "traitor" is mentioned in the school books. There are, to be fair, certain circumstances regarding Arnold that mitigate somewhat against his historical reputation as the most villianous of all traitors.

Arnold, after all, earned his stripes in the Revolutionary War as a hero of the American resistance prior to his defection. Arnold started out as a fervent supporter of the revolutionary cause. He participated in the key capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May of 1775. He then led his men in one of the most heroic chapters in American military history, on an arduous march through the Maine wilderness to Quebec City, the capitol of British Canada. His starving troops, outnumbered two to one by their British opponent, nonetheless attacked the position and, although defeated, inspired the budding revolutionists with their courage.

Arnold himself exhibited great personal fearlessness on several occasions during the Revolutionary War: at Ticonderoga, Quebec, and elsewhere. He was also ambitious and vain. Passed over for promotions and driven to financial distress, Arnold sold the revolutionists out rather basely at West Point and went down in the books as the quintessential blackguard. An argument could be made, however, that Arnold's treason was mitigated somewhat by the excellent service he had given to the Revolution prior to his perfidy.

Anyway, the point is that John Walker, pampered issue of the American middle class who went to fight on the side of an enemy whose sole animating principle is not to defeat an American army but to kill American civilians en masse, doesn't derserve one iota of sympathy, and should be summarily discarded like the garbage he is. I'm not all that keen on the administration's military tribunal idea, but I figure Johnny boy would be a good test of it. Unlike with Arnold (or that matter Ezra Pound, who at least wrote some interesting poetry), there are no mitigating circumstances with this punk. And the conditions of his case are so extreme that these should choke off all extenuation.

Matt Welch, whose warblog has become a mandatory stop every time I take a spin on the Inet Skyway, has a neat riff about George Harrison's death, and how the hagiologic excess of the media coverage about Maharishi George nurturing the spirit didn't quite square with the reality of Tory George whoring in the Hollywood Hills:

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Georgie was a bit of a money grubber, and that's bully with me. Give me griping about taxes any day over endless palaver about the soul. I'll sing along with "Taxman", and you can have your "Something in the Way She Moves" (or whatever it was called.) After all, "god" spelled backward is "dog", but "mammon" is practically a palindrome. So which one do you think is more eternal?

BTW, I wonder if Harrison wrote off his operating expenses when he arranged the Concert for Bangladesh?

Now that we've iced the Taliban and gutted al-Qaeda, to the evident satisfaction of the Afghanis (and even to some Europeans and postmodernists, possibly), the next bums to deep-six really ought to be Iran's ruling, dyspeptic theocrats.

Ever since the war began, there's been a marked increase in the restlessness among the Iranian people, particularly among the two-thirds of them who are 30 and under and want to enjoy the pleasures of youth rather than listening to rancid clerics berate them about its evils. Soccer games have turned into protests against cultural restrictions against discos, and even though the Shiite behavior police have been working overtime busting chops like the vilest of the Brownshirts ever did, the ghost of that madman Khomeni must be quivering in the light of the modernity which increasing numbers of Persians want shined more brightly yet on their country. The latest is a call for Uncle Sam to pay a military visit:

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Whenever I read a news report that notes that a people have been "cowed by 20 years of repression," I figure it's only a matter of time before the oppressors are shown the door. The activity in the streets of Terahan has a clear resonance to what went on in Prague and Budapest in 1989.

Like the article says, however, the demonstrators are becoming disillusioned, and the window might be closing fast. Nothing is inevitable; the reason why the Velvet Revolutions proceeded as they did was that Gorbachev saw these as a way to extricate his dying Soviet empire from its Eastern European franchaise. There's no guarantee Ayatollah Khamenei and his ilk will go so gently.

We must not allow that spark to die. We owe the Samanehs and Pirouzes our support -- militarily if necessary -- so that they can get on with enjoying their lives, and not just living them. By siding with the angels of secularity in Iran, we will, for the first time in our 50 years of meddling there, be making the correct choice.

With a grateful Afghanistan and a modern Iran on our side, both freed from religious theocracies, we will not have to obsess over coalitions that are irrelevant anyway. We'll then be free to call into account on our own terms the region's other retrograde regimes, whether Bathist and nationalist Iraq or fundamentalist, Wahibist Saudi Arabia; regimes which might not be quite as easy to crack open as the Taliban were.

In the flush of our success, the essential fact of this war -- that it is a clash between a modern, secular society and a medievalist theocratic totalitarianism -- seems in danger of whitewash. Our enemies are animated by the certainty that comes with the religious fundamentalist who are charged by their god; a certainty which we have often seen on display domestically by our homegrown Christian fundies. That's probably why there's been so much ratiocination recently by so many neocons in this country to blame the terrorist attacks, which are invariably receding just a bit into memory, on something other than religious extremism.

But any attempt to render the events of 911 as caused by anything other than the toxin of Islamic religious barbarism is an insult to the victims of 911 and a dangerous emendation of the situation we face. Iraq and Saddam loom large on the Mideast stage, but Saddam is first and foremost interested in his own self-preservation; we can no longer tolerate his regime in the long run, but he should not be our next priority because he does not really represent the essence of the threat we, and the secular West, face. Iran is the geopolitical lynchpin in that area, and we should do what we can to secure it next.

This is a test.

Wait a minute. This isn't radio, it's Cyber World, so typing "this is a test" is, if not inappropriate, entirely lacking in imagination. I plead guilty -- with, like you'd say when fighting a speeding ticket, an explanation.

Typing "this is a test" belies my grounding in the technology of the past. I've read about the pioneers of radio who'd say "this is a test" to determine if they were being heard. Think of old recordings of Edward R. Murrow reporting on rooftops about the London Blitz, trying to get the signal back to the States, of Orson Wells sending the country into a panic with his Halloween broadcast of "The War of the Worlds." The very tentativeness of the voice, the scratchiness of the broadcast, lending even greater mystery and gravitas to what came next. Thus, the canonization of "this is a test" as the mantra granting the speaker access to the electronic forum, and a call to attention to the listener. Pay attention, dammit!

I grew up in a time when hearing "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System" still stirred up the lurking fear of the Nuclear End. "This is a test" always had it's downside -- what would you do if it wasn't? -- and that gave it authority. So it's not unreasonable of me to have started blogging with "this is a test," because I have encoded within me some antiquated manifestations of an era when "information" and "technology" were never mentioned in the same sentence. Even though "this is a test" most definitely loses something in the translation from audio to computer screen.

In due regard of Cyber World's impact on society, then, it seems that it should have its own abracadabra-like phrase which would announce the arrival of another cybertrician to the online party, and that it shouldn't have to borrow one from the radio tradition. So, let's see. "Four score and seven years ago" is too pompous; "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day" too literary, "here I am" vaguely plainitive, "you lookin' at me?" too confrontational, "strap on your seat belts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride" too acidic, "this blog will be about all the good things in the world" too cloying, "I'm going to bitch and moan here" too off-putting, and "in expectation of the report of working group B here are today's actionable items" far too stuffy and reminiscent of the nonsense I'm often called upon to parse in my day job as a functionary of Your Federal Bureaucracy.

"Citizen Rant," my sobriquet which may change at any time, is "Citizen J" all grown up. "Citizen J" was this author's sometime-handle in the last millennium, when he wrote articles for a none-too-successful e-newsletter on personal finance. This "effort," as they say in the bureaucracy, had the unfortunate luck to germinate during the summer of 2000, just when the stock market began its meltdown. The bursting of the Nasdaq bubble, and the subsequent expiration of the enthusiams of the investor class, laid the newsletter low. But Citizen J endured, lurking online and sending out spasmodic bulletins to contingency organizations and indulgent acquaintances, waiting, in other words, for a mission, like Kurtz. The wait ended September 11th. Among all the other changes that occured to me on that day, my personal opinions seemed more important to me, and it seemed more important that I should at least advertise them. One of my lifelong ... well, crusades, has been against religious fundamentalists; I've known my share (of the Christian variety) personally, found them to be often unpleasant and reliably boring. Don't paint with a broad brush ... yeah, yeah, but exposure at a tender and early age can leave its mark forever. Anyway, I'd had a bad feeling about the Islamic variety for a long time prior to the 11th, and in particular I'd paid attention to this Bin Laden bastard. If I'd forseen the stock market similarly, I'd be a reasonably wealthy man today.

I predict that, sometime in the future, ascribing to that horrible day of world-historical significance some mote of intensely personal implication, as I've just done, will be considered a conceit, a charade, a cliche. Perhaps that is already happening; I'm already reading criticisms from those who are critical of individuals who want to air and arbitrate in a public forum their ideas and, more importantly, emotions about those atrocities. Such criticism is unseemly and antithetical to the Ur-concept of this nation, the First Amendment. The rise of the blogger, of unexpurgated individual opinions not subsumed into a moldy consensus or synthesized into blandness by conglomerate media, can only reinforce the importance of the First Amendment as not only desirable, but necessary to a healthy society.

Now, having written such a overwrought paean, I'm reminded of the scene in Citizen Kane when Kane as a young man makes a big deal about his statement of principles to his buddy Jedidiah (Joseph Cotton), who's less than impressed, but more than amused, by his friend's earnestness. Then the camera switches back to Orson Welles, and we see his face in this curious contortion, and the camera shot is held for just one moment too long. The enthusiasm in his features suddenly seems to be something darker, and you're not sure whether Kane is laughing at himself and at his tyro's zeal, or whether it's the first signs of the monomania which eventually destroys him.