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Does it Even Matter Anymore?
2007-06-21 15:19:00
Sapere Aude -- Have the Courage to Use Your Own ReasonWe all know that George W. Bush did all he could to avoid war, right? War was obviously his last resort. It wasn't like he wanted to invade Iraq, right? It wasn't as if he would stop at nothing to do so. It wasn't as if he was supressing a grin and probably an erection when he announce that the war had started. So, keeping in mind that our fearless leader wanted nothing so much as peace, lets review the finding that he sent to Congress before the invasion.(I) Whereas, U.S. reliance on further diplomatic and peaceful means alone would not(a) adequately protect U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, nor(b) likely lead to enforcement of all relevant U.N. resolutions regarding Iraq, and(II) Whereas, acting pursuant to the Authorization to Use Military Force was consistent with continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations including those nations, ...
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Who Won?
2007-06-19 16:14:00
Who won World War II? The short-term answer, obviously, is the United States. Even among the victorious allies, America benefitted immeasurably more than the others. The Soviet Union had lost 22 million citizens and seen the western quarter of its country incinerated. Great Britain had barely held out and, newly bankrupt, was about to lose its entire global empire. France had given in to collaboration and was now to give in to the inevitable loss of its own empire in North Africa and Indochina.Among the victors, only America had not paid a crippling price. The American mainland was untouched. American civilians had slept safely in their beds throughout the carnage. And the American economy accounted for fully half of the entire planet's wealth. Never before had any country, in either a quantitative or a qualitative sense, been so powerful.Our enemies, on the other hand, were decimated as no societies had ever been. More than half of the largest cities in Germany and Japan...

Wake Up
2007-06-15 17:44:00
Only a few guessed that the retreat of darknesspresaged the emergence of an entirely newand less tangible terror It's over. It's been over for years. We lost. Friend and enemy alike warned us not to do it. But we did it. The disgustingly proto-fascist attitude that held sway before the war is something that brings a still-visceral disgust to me. Too many Americans were pro-war pre-war, weren't they? Too many Americans were unforgivably negligent in their duty to be informed citizens. When the bombing of Baghdad began, I was genuinely ashamed of my country for the first time in my adult life. Disgusted. Fucking disgusted. Prime time television we made it, this storm of metal rained upon a nation of children and paupers. Did anyone shoot back? Did any Iraqi planes challenge ours? No. This was not war; this was murder. We will not have victory in Iraq because we don't deserve it. We were cowards then, bombing at will while our "enemy" could only hope that their children would not ...
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From Adam to the Atom
2007-06-15 16:18:00
The explosive force of suns,once safely locked in naturenow lies in the hand that long agodropped from a tree limbinto the upland grass...Both the light we seekand the shadows we fearare projected from withinScience, for all its wonders, is a human undertaking. This is why science has not prevented war, but rather perfected it. Why are we dependent on the Middle East? Because we are dependent on oil. And why are we dependent on oil? Because we refuse to use nuclear energy. And why do we refuse to use nuclear energy? Because it is dangerous. True enough. But is it more dangerous than building 50,000 nuclear weapons and rattling them in vain in a doomed effort to shape the world to our will? How is it acceptable to weaponize this beast yet too dangerous to tame it in the interest of clean and independent energy?Our identity is a dream.We are process, not reality,for reality is an illusion of the light--the light of our particular dayWe risk becoming the tools of our tools, which may i...
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On Bullshit, Briefly
2007-06-12 15:56:00
Who had more face to face meetings with Saddam Hussein: Osama bin Laden or Donald Rumsfeld?
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The Greatest Generation
2007-06-07 21:53:00
Destroy. Destroy. Destroy again.When destruction comes to define the national purpose, annihilation becoming the end product of the best-organized communal effortin history--there is the threshold to remember. By the year 1945what American believed in--judging not from what they saidbut from what they did--was nothing.I'm sure we are all familiar with the dominant paradigm of America's role in World War II. It goes something like this: we were attacked by an inherently agressive Japan, after which a psychotic Germany declared war on us. We did not start this fight, but we sure did finish it. We were the good guys and, all modesty aside, we saved the world. We crushed regimes that were evil and expansionist. Rarely has there been such a clear dividing line between right and wrong, between good and evil.I have sympathy with this argument, but it is riddled with holes, and millions of incinerated women and children filled those holes. While it is impossible for any American or...
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Bush Was Right (About One Thing)
2007-06-07 16:02:00
If there is one word that must come to define American foreign policy in the future, it is multilateralism. What we need, however, is not a regression to prior forms of multilateralism as embodied by the United Nations or even NATO, but one which more closely reflects the fact that the intertwined nature of foreign affairs is becoming exponentially more so with globalization, as well as, and this is the most fundamental point, the unique legitimacy of democracies in the shaping of geopolitics.Any broad assessment of American foreign policy must, of course, acknowledge the specific challenges that our country presently faces, rather than simply offer broad generalizations of an ideal future stance. When we look at our current predicaments, however, the rationale behind these broader orientations will manifest itself. At present, of course, the primary foreign policy issue for the United States is the war in Iraq.The way in which the war in Iraq was commenced should, by now, serve as ...
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Pyramid Schemes
2007-06-06 15:58:00
Science, in spite of its awe-inspiring magnitude, containsone flaw that partakes of the nature of the universe itself.It can solve problems, but it also creates them in a genuinely confusing ratio.They escape unseen out of the laboratory into the body politic,whther they be germs inured to antibiotics,the waiting death in rocket silos,or the unloosed multiplying power of life.We are finite creatures seeking to establish our own reality against infinity.Man has twice been forced to revise his concept of time. Revise is perhpas too tame a word for this pair of universe-bending revelations. The first realization was that the Earth was countless millions of years old, rather that the conceivably tangible few millenia previously thought. The second was that, although the Earth was infinitely older than previously thought, the span of a single human life could wrap itself around time.How different is the world today than it was when my grandfather, now 89, was born? That difference is gre...
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Just You Wait
2007-05-17 19:16:00
"The attack on the West is among other thingsan attack on the mind of the West. To be equipped with the mindof the West is like being an idiot savant, mentally defectivebut with a special gift for making arithmetic calculations. It is a mindwithout a soul, efficient, like a calculator, but hopeless in doing what is humanly important. The mind of the West is capable of great economic success,to be sure, and of developing and promoting advanced technology,but cannot grasp the higher things in life, for it lacks spiritualityand understanding of human suffering."I'm a fan of the West. Big fan. And while we should avoid self-loathing as much as possible, don't we all know that there is some truth to the quote above? Whether these words were written by Ghandi or bin Laden is irrelevant; what matters is that there is truth to them, and that eventually that truth will be visited upon us by people who will use our "advanced technology" to make us confront "human suffering" on a scale that ...
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The Word
2007-05-03 22:01:00
Amendment I (1791)"Congress shall make law no respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and the petition the Government for a redress of grievances."The constitution is as much about what it does not say as what it does say. The 1st amendment is the sacred cow, bandied about in the service of various and variegated causes, but how many of us have actually read it?Here is the source of the river that is the Bill of Rights: the denial of rights. The denial of rights, not the granting of them. Take a minute with that; let it marinate. The most liberal document of all time was never about legally granting rights to the individual; it was about legally denying rights to the government.The constitution, as timeless as it is cast, is, by definition, a product of its time, just as surely as the New Testament or Hotel California are. Hotel California...
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Of Heads and Hearts
2007-05-03 21:57:00
Here's the problem with illegal immigration...it's illegal. Do people ever march in the streets demanding their right to do other illegal things? Are there marches of people demanding their right to drive drunk? Their right to sell cocaine? The right to committ fraud? Speaking from the head here, we owe it to ourselves to be able to soberly say a couple of things: Firstly, there is no "right" to break the law. Secondly, if it is the policy of the United States to not enforce immigration law, the United States will not exist as we know it when my unborn children are my age.The heart, of course, begs for compassion. My head has no problem telling my mouth and my pen that all illegal immigrants need to be deported immediately. My heart, of course, calls me a soulless prick for even thinking this and defies me to look a man in the eye and tell him to go back where he came from. What we must do, to be honest with ourselves, it to try to close that gap.Part of being honest with ourselve...
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Make Shit Work
2007-05-03 20:44:00
If there is one problem with American governance today, it is this: American governance doesnot exist. The task of American governance has, slowly but surely over the course of sixty years, morphed from ?make sure Alabama has schools? to ?make sure Seoul has anti-aircraft missiles?. This is not to say that Seoul should not have anti-aircraft missiles; it is simply to say that Alabama used to be closer to Washington, D.C. than Seoul.I am a republican, miniscule fucking ?r?. By republican, I mean believer in the republic. I am disposed of the increasingly unpopular delusion that the American government is supposed to govern America. I pride myself in not having absurdly naïve expectations of our government. I don?t expect my government to mediate the politics of Baghdad, especially when considering the fact that Iraqis simply refuse to speak American; I do, however, expect my government to do run of the mill things such as?oh?.preventing tens of millions of anonymous and illegal immig...
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Why I Believe in God
2007-04-27 19:51:00
One of the ultimate fallacies embraced by many in the West in the 20th century was that the explosion of scientific knowledge that was changing the nature of human existence was simultaenously making belief in God intelectually impossible. If it was now possible to scientifically explain how a molecule was constructed, was that not proof that "God did it" was no longer a valid explanation?What science has actually done, in truth, is to begin to unveil the sheer number of factors that must be balanced for the universe to even exist, never mind for it to allow stars, planets, and water. This number was far greater than anyone could have imagined. Science has shown that there are literally billions of factors that must be interrelated in the most delicate balance to allow existence and everything that follows.If any one of these billions of factors was one percent greater or lesser, we wouldn't exist. With this in mind, there are exactly two ways that we could have come to this po...
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The Mirror
2007-04-14 17:56:00
I am a child of the 60's. I was born in 1979. The dominant paragdigm would have it that my parents are children of the 60's but, in reality, they were children of the 40's. Just as the 20th century really began in 1914, the 60's really began in 1968. In 1968, my father was 22 and my mother was 19. They were brand new adults, former children of the 40's.The reason that the 60's were so tumultuous was that reality was clashing with the absurdist bill of goods that my parents' generation had been sold by their mother culture. These children of the 40's grew up being told that the United States was always on the side of justice, that American history could be seen as a Manichean struggle between liberty and darkness, and that whenever American soldiers were sent into battle, they did so in selfless acts of liberation, never for venal, Europeanish notions of self-interest or, God forbid, corporate interest.For a variety of reasons, it had become clear by 1968 that this narrative ...
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How the West Destroyed Time
2007-04-06 19:38:00
Perhaps the simplest answer to that ubiquitous question, "why do they hate us?" is this: they hate us because we destroyed time. "We" being the west and "they" being the types that will behead their neighbors for decadence if they use ice cubes. We must understand radical Islamism as a backlash against globalization, and we must understand globalization as the destruction of time.Put simply, the West , and especially America, defines itself by looking forward. Progress is taken to be inherently good and, accordingly, the past is seen as inherently inferior to tomorrow. Much of the East, especially the radical Islamists, look back a millenium rather than forward a minute.If one culture values the future while another reveres the past, this does not pose a problem to either as long as they stay on their own sides of the planet. The problem, however, is that one of the cultures, the West, must by definition spread its culture to the rest of the planet. The resulting backlash from elemen...
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Every War Is Civil / Jehovallah Versus The Lord
2007-03-28 07:02:00
IThere are many ways to classify the over-arching continuum of history: the story of the migration of tribes, the story of the spread of technology, the story of organized religion, the story of economic forces, and so forth. The best choice among the various over-simplifications, however, is this: history is the story of civil war.We know by virute of science and intuition that humans are far more similar to each other than we can even quantify and even the most insular among us recognize that humanity is one family. This family fights, as do all families. But there is a indissoluble bond nonetheless. With this is mind, we are led to the truism that all war is civil war.Civil war works on many levels, and they are by no means restricted by artificial and myopic national borders. Today, we see a civil war within the arbitrary borders of a political fiction called "Iraq". When we take a broader view, as we must, we see that most conflicts can be seen as manifestations of larger civil...
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Liberation Conservatism
2007-03-11 17:08:00
Conservatism, as practiced from above, is a force to be feared and resisted. This is the force that leads to executions for those who dare to assert that the earth revolves around the sun. This is the force that turns the water cannon against citizens demanding their constitutional rights. Conservatism from above is the timeless force that seeks only to conserve its own power. Conservatism from below, however, may be the only hope for America.Conservatism from below is not aimed at conserving a grip on the levers of power by a few; rather, it is a force of the many, in which they seek to deny powers to the state, with the sober understanding that any power yielded to any government will be jealously conserved and abused by that government. Conservatism from below, in other words, strives to assure that conservatism from above is never possible. When we speak of liberals and conservatives in our present context, what we are really referring to is where one comes down on the natu...
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Who Are We?
2007-03-09 01:02:00
My sister is a student at a public university, and her abnormal psychology professor gave her a dose of abnormal psychology recently. When my sister informed her professor that she had made a mistake in sourcing a paper and asked for a chance to correct it, her professor told her, "you white people are all the same...always looking for other people to clean up your messes".Firstly, I take issue with the logic of this indictment. If white people are always looking for other people to clean up their messes, why was my sister asking for permission to clean up her own mess? She is a disgrace to white people everywhere, apparently. All joking aside, I wonder how it is that a person who felt it acceptable to say this to a student could possibly be employed by a public university.There is no such thing as reverse racism, just as sure as our society harbors no sympathy for reverse murder or reverse rape. Racism is racism. When it is "reversed", none of its immorality is alleviated. M...

Beware the Narrative
2007-03-06 15:18:00
We are witnessing now, in real time, the construction of the Narrative that will arise to explain our inevitable defeat and (partial) withdrawal from Iraq. This Narrative, as it must, will shadow the Narrative that has taken hold regarding America's defeat in Vietnam.Firstly, it must be said that certain types of people, such as the type of people who would read this blog, often delude themselves into thinking that their Narrative of the Vietnam War or the Iraq War is in any way similar to the dominant paradigm throughout the country as a whole. In order to understand how most Americans think about Vietnam, for example, we should not read Howard Zinn. We should watch Rambo.The dominant Narrative of the Vietnam War boasts two villains. First, we have the natives who, despite the unending selflessness and generosity of the United States, steadfastly refuse to live up to their responsibilities and defend their own country. Second, and more central, are the liberals. Yes, the lib...
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Irakornam, Nutshelled
2007-03-06 15:15:00
For those who don't care to descend into the minutiae of my argument regarding the Irakornam Syndrome, here is the message in a condensed version: No superpower, no matter how super, no matter how powerful, will ever win a land war in Asia unless said superpower is......Asian.P.S. Iraq is in Asia. P.P.S. The United States is not in Asia.
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Irakornam Syndrome
2007-02-27 18:14:00
While it is impolitic to the dominant paradigm to speak of the United States as ever having lost a war, we can surely agree that there are three wars that the United States has not won. These three wars were fought in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, and they all betrayed the same fundamental ignorance of the imperial American president.In all three wars, the American president deluded himself into thinking that he could wage war in another power's neighborhood and realistically expect that other power to refrain from aiding its anti-American allies, even though this hostile power knew full well that the United States could not attack it directly.In Korea and Vietnam, this power was China. In Iraq, this power is Iran and, indirectly, China. The United States escalated the wars in Korea and Vietnam until each reached the borders of China. China then inevitably intervened, whether with waves of infantry or with fleets of trucks. American presidents then continued to fight in Korea and Vietn...
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Mission Accomplished
2007-02-16 21:03:00
"Democracy perishes by two excesses, the aristocracy of those who govern, or the contempt of the people for the authority it has itself established, a contempt in which each faction or individual reaches out for the public power, and reduces the people, through the resulting chaos, to nullity, or the power of a single man" --Robespierre"Terrorism and tyranny lie in the eye of the beholder; and under democracy each beholder will not only perceive for themselves, but is explicitly entitled to do so" --John DunnDespite the gloom of the media and much of the public, one American success in Iraq has been studiously ignored: Iraq today is a democracy. This uncomfortable and perhaps counter intuitive truth is far more indicative of the dangers of democracy than it is of anything positive about Iraq. What we are seeing in Iraq is democracy. What we want in Iraq, and what we have in the United States, is not democracy.For all the messianic talk about America's timeless and selfless mission ...
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The Good Germans
2007-02-14 22:47:00
Tragedy number 151 of the Iraq War: we're fighting the wrong people. The Sunni Arabs are our natural allies in Iraq, and one of the endless ironies of this cauldron is that these natural allies have been America's primary tactical enemy since the invasion four years ago.The Sunni Arabs of Iraq, at least the more secular ones, must feel about the Americans much like elements of the Germ an Army did in early 1945. Dissident generals and admirals from the Third Reich tried in vain to negotiate and come to a separate peace with the Americans based on a very simple and logical consideration: although currently engaged in hostility, Germany and America were the most natural of allies against the true and common enemy of Communism.The United States refused to negotiate with the Third Reich, of course, and it was right to demand unconditional surrender. This calculation, however, came with the acknowledgment that the German officer corps was correct; Germany must be America's preeminent a...
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Why Collective Rights are Wrong
2007-02-14 21:12:00
What makes one black? I have always labored under the apparent delusion that it was black skin, which is to say that blackness makes one black. This, however, was before I was informed by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Harry Belafonte that Condoleeza Rice is not black. This led to me realize that it is not just blackness that makes one black, but blackness combined with an unflinching and unquestioning support of the dominant liberal paradigms of the late 20th century.Since Condoleeza Rice is not a Democrat or a liberal, she is not sufficiently black. Condoleeza Rice, who grew up in the segregated south and had friends murdered in terrorist attacks because of their blackness, is not sufficiently black. One wonders what the verdict on Condoleeza's blackness might have been if she had been murdered in the basement of that church. Or did the bombers only target liberal 10 year old black girls? Has Condoleeza been spared racial slurs and slights throughout her life due to her co...
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Blood on the Tracks
2007-02-08 03:11:00
It would be hard to imagine a more venal form of ?statesmanship? than that being practiced by the United States Senate with regard to Iraq. In the four-year war, the President?s performance has ranged from childish (flight suit, bring ?em on) to comprehensively ignorant (de-Ba?athification, Sunni/Shi?a divide) to criminal (instigating war of aggression, use of depleted uranium). But the Congress has not fared much better. It has progressed from utter dereliction to catastrophic meddling.In 2002, a Congress both prone and supine decided that it must look tough. In particular, those members up for re-election had to look tough. So, in accordance with this divine insight, Congress proceeded to vote its constitutional duty out of existence. Congress and Congress alone holds the authority to declare war, but in 2002 Congress voted to arrogate this most solemn of authorities to the President. To be fair, it made them look really tough.So, after a co-equal branch of government voted to cas...
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American Oligarchy
2007-02-03 00:13:00
Hillary Rodham Clinton must not be president. Hillary Rodham is more than intelligent and capable enough to be considered a serious candidate for president, but Hillary Rodham Clinton must not be president. A second Clinton presidency would further the insidious trend of American oligarchy that is quietly coming to dominate our politics.Since 1948, there has been exactly one presidential election in which Richard Nixon, Robert Dole, George Bush, or George W. Bush was not on the ballot. If national politics were dominated for a half century by four men, including a father and son, in any country to the south of us, it would rightly be tarred as a banana republic. Americans are so concerned with the democracy of others that we have allowed our own to deteriorate even as the members of our government have become the most powerful men on earth.Oligarchy is a threat, and so is the dynastic sub-trend that is manifesting itself in American politics. It is not new, of course; America has it...

The Wall
2007-01-27 19:58:00
Israel is a tri-lingual state; Hebrew, Arabic, and EnglishIsraeli soldiers in shopping mall, Jerusalem Wailing Wall , JerusalemWall, Arab East Jerusalem Arab East JerusalemThe Garden of Gethsemane, sight of Jesus' arrest, JerusalemThe Wall, seen from the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem February 2006 The Dome of the Rock, seen from the Mount of OlivesThe Middle East is awash in myth, and Jerusalem is where they coalesce in blood and earth. Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms, especially Palestinian, are crippled by their focus on victimization. Societies who look back rather than forward, and who remember tragedies as more important than triumphs, are doomed to a cycle of violence that is intertwined with each side's myths about, in third-grade parlance, who started it. Israelis and Palestinians both resent the very term "cycle of violence", because it implies a process of cold mathematical inevitability, with no beginning, no end, and no moral component. The Israeli narrative holds th...
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Window Rock, Navajo Nation November 20...
2007-01-22 01:00:00
Window Rock , Navajo Nation November 2006
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Eifel Tower Paris March 2006
2007-01-22 00:56:00
Eifel Tower Paris Marc h 2006

Vatican City March 2006
2007-01-22 00:54:00
Vatican City Marc h 2006
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