Hey, why not? He's at least as qualified as Ridge was. Gadget has a background in law enforcement. He battled a notorious terrorist, Dr. Claw, for years and protected the Homeland from God knows how many sinister attacks. He's quite tech-savvy and will use the latest law-enforcement innovations to bring the bad guys to justice.

He's honest, dependable and hard-working. He doesn't fuck up any more often than Ridge did. And whenever Gadget does fuck up, Penny and Brain will always be there to help him out.

And Gadget can play the Washington game. He's not going to let intertagency politics get to him. No, sir. He'll just bear down and get the job done. No way Osama BIn Laden would last four years with Inspector Gadget on the case.

Not a chance.

I can't say it's the nicest neighborhood I've ever visited. Poorly planned housing projects stand empty and abandoned. Weird obsessive neighbors refuse to cut their grass. Others neighbors seem friendly, but are incomprehensible. A few stand in their yards and jabber at me about things that should best be left inside their heads.
Things like:

As I was driving my nephew and niece to Toys R Us yesterday morning, two-year old Ethan joined in the finale of Hey Jude playing on the CD and four-year old Bernice sang along to the track, Gambler, by Kenny Rogers. I started to wonder if I was cool influence for their pop culture development.

You can stop wondering, buddy.

Or how about this?

7:00 am Tuesday.

Trying to think what to blog about. What will happen today?

Ahhhh.... The garbage truck just pulled in and hauled away another dumpster of trash. The dumpster has been full for the last 4 weeks. That means the Z shop, greenhouses and yard are getting cleaner. A great game it is to fill the dumpster each week. We are on a winning dumpster streak now.

7:25 am. Gee another thought. Whoops lost it.

7:40 am. Just got back from the bathroom. Speaking of trash..........

Or this:

I hate blogs. I find the idea of a public journal revolting. I feel the cultural voyeurism that has inspired the blog hysteria to be an illness. We have become too interested in the private lives of others, in their secret confessions, in the dark holes in their hearts. The anonymity of the internet allows us the freedom to share and read these confessions without the consequences. It's like reading the diary of a girl half way across the country. She doesn't worry that you'll share here secrets with her friends, and you don't have to worry about getting caught.

Nice way to start your blog, fella.

It was a nice little walk, but I'm glad to be home -- back inside the gates of the Lost City.

The Alabama Legislature reconvenes after the Thanksgiving recess.

Jim Crow won an election in Alabama on Nov. 2, the recent one, a 21st century one.

Subject to an automatic recount Nov. 29 because of the closeness, Alabamians voted not to repeal sections of a state constitutional amendment approved by voters in 1956 to mandate racially segregated schools.

This year, the Alabama Legislature referred Amendment 2 to the voters to take out of the state’s constitution the three most egregious vestiges of racism in its segregation amendment. They were that schools must be segregated, that a poll tax had to be paid and that a right to an education at taxpayer expense did not exist for an Alabama child. (And you thought the purpose of a constitution was to grant, not void, rights.)...professed Christians, those of supposedly superior moral values, beat Amendment 2....

Roy Moore, the ousted Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who built a Ten Commandments monument in the courthouse, said that repealing the ban on a right to education would effectively establish such a right.

Being the most progressive state in the deep south is kind of like being the tallest pygmy; neverthless the Times-Record seemed to enjoy castigating the brownshirts next door.

Spearheading the effort to reject the ballot initiative was -- no surprise here -- the Christian Coalition. After all, what could be a more Christian act than to segregate people by race, unfairly impose poll taxes and deny children an education? I'm sure this bunch of hypocrites could quote you chapter and verse in scriptural justification....after all, they have an almost trial lawyer-esque relationship with the Good Book. They parse sentences in Matthew or Thessalonians like they are city ordinances. Of course, they are also notorious for skimming past the parts where Jesus talks about love and mercy, or where he condemns the Pharisees for loving the Law more than the Word.

I don't know about you, but I've had enough. There is nothing Christian about these people. Nothing at all. They are cynically using Christian rhetoric to advance what is unquestionably an evil agenda -- and the Republican party has made a deal with the devil in throwing in with them. They have all conspired to kidnap Jesus and stuff him in the trunk. And I want him back.

I'm fed up with the lip service given to Christian values, dispensed by these sanctimonious, self-appointed defenders of "moral values". And I'm also fed up with the mainstream media for treating these lunatics seriously and providing them with a platform.

The next time I see one of these kooks on television, I'm reaching for the phone to call the network. The next time I see one of these kooks quoted in a newspaper article, I'm calling the editor. And if ever meet one of these kooks in person, I'm going to smite him repeatedly with all the strength that God, in his divine wisdom, gave to me at the beginning of the world.

I'll seek absolution later.

Godzilla makes a rare appearance at the Minnesota State Fair: August 29, 1981

Godzilla, old friend, you've hit the big 5-0. Where have the years gone?

We've spent a lot of time together, you and I -- some say too much time. Remember when you were transported to Planet X in order to help those weirdo aliens out with their King Ghidorah problem, and it turned out they were setting the Earth up for destruction? Or that time when that alien spaceship created its own monster at the bottom of the sea, just so it could wrestle with you in a three-falls-out-of-three cage match in the streets of Tokyo?

Or how about this -- remember our double-date with the Peanut sisters? Mosura was sure angry when he found out -- but those sisters were worth the risk, wouldn't you agree? Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more! Such memories!

Of course, you're one of those buddies my wife doesn't approve of -- she thinks you're a bad influence, that we keep getting into trouble together, and that it's childish of me to keep hanging around with you.

But listen. Some friendships are like a bad cold. You can't shake 'em off. So let's meet over at Sweeney's, old buddy, where the drinks will be on me. We'll toast your birthday. And 50 years of rompin stompin radiation-fueled mayhem.

Two jackalopes scan the horizon

It took a while, but I've finally done it. I've finally invented something that will make me rich. It'll make the world a better place, too.

My invention combines the exciting new world of nanotechnology with the age-old desire to put antlers on creatures that don't have antlers.

People yearn for mythical beasts like jackalopes to exist in the real world. Now, they can -- with the Antlerizer. The Antlerizer uses tiny nanobots to locate the ideal "antler points" on any skull, then build strong and authentic-looking antlers on the heads of rabbits, pigs, goats, dogs, cats, mice, gorillas, ferrets and snakes.

Naturally, after people tire of putting antlers on all their pets, they will start putting antlers on themselves. Antlers will become a fashion requirement. Women will go to salons to get manicures, pedicures and antlercures. Men will feel constantly insecure about the size of their antlers. Disputes will be settled by vigorous antler-clacking. Barfights will become bloodier, but much more entertaining. "Monday Night Football" will become the most popular show on television.

The Antlerizer will spawn whole new industries. Factories will turn out antler-hats and cans of antler-polish by the millions. Airlines will offer extra headroom for antlerized patrons. Architects will be forced to design higher and wider doorways to accomodate the antlerized homeowner.

I will set myself apart by choosing not to have antlers. With the billions of dollars I make from the Antlerizer, I will wangle my own TV show on Fox called The Last Non-Antlerized Billionaire, where I will offer ten antlerized contestants a chance to win my entire fortune by humiliating themselves on national television. None of them will win.

The offending paragraph allows the chairmen of the House or Senate Appropriation committees or subcommittees, or any of their appointed minions, to walk into any IRS facility and look at the tax returns of any American, anytime, no questions asked.

In any other place or time, the peasants would be reaching for the torches and pitchforks right about now. But in this new golden age of Republican supremacy, it could be only one thing: an innocent misunderstanding.

"It wasn't me! It wasn't me!"

WASHINGTON--Sen. Ted Stevens on Monday showed reporters a handwritten legislative proposal from an IRS employee that slipped into and nearly stopped the massive appropriations bill passed by Congress this weekend.

Stevens said the note proves that neither he nor any other Republican had crafted the potentially privacy-invading language.

The language, which could allow certain congressional employees to look at tax returns, created a furor on the Senate floor Saturday when discovered. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called it an "abuse of power."

Congress had been meeting all week as members of the Senate and House Appropriations committees merged eight spending bills into a single omnibus bill that runs more than 1,000 pages. Stevens is chairman of the Senate committee.

You may remember that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was calling the provision the "Istook amendment" up until yesterday. But Rep. Ernest Istook of Oklahoma is running around like Kevin McCarthy in his pajamas, shouting to anyone who will listen that it wasn't him, he didn't write the amendment, he didn't know how it got in there. So now Frist has backed off his previous statements. He now officially has no idea how the legislation got into the omnibus bill.

In fact, nobody does. Another profile in courage.

Istook is the chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS, and he is widely recognized as the chittering primate who slipped this paragraph into the $388 billion omnibus spending package that was passed by Congress on Saturday:

Hereinafter, notwithstanding any other provision of law governing the disclosure of income tax returns or return information, upon written request of the Chairman of the House or Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service shall allow agents designated by such Chairman access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and any tax returns or return information contained therein.

That's pretty clear, isn't it? Not easy to mistake the intent of that language. But the Washington Post reports that it was all just a wacky mix-up:

On Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) referred to the provision as the "Istook amendment," and congressional aides said it had been inserted at the request of Rep. Ernest J. Istook Jr. (R-Okla.), who chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the IRS.

But yesterday Istook said in a written statement that he had been left in the dark about the provision: "I didn't write it; I didn't approve it; I wasn't even consulted. My name shouldn't be associated with it because I had nothing to do with it."...

"We have a problem with how bills like this are put together," Istook acknowledged. "The subcommittee chairman should never be bypassed like I was in this case."

Poor guy. If only he hadn't been bypassed. Still, what a hilarious misunderstanding! How did that language ever get written in the first place and then get inserted into the bill? It's a head-scratcher.

But according to some congressional Republicans, the provision might have been intended to protect people from the IRS! How, you ask?

House officials said the language was intended only to allow staffers to enter IRS facilities where returns were being processed, to oversee how taxpayer money was being used. Such full access is now denied by the IRS, they said, because of the chance a congressional aide might inadvertently see a return.

So some Republicans in Congress say they had nothing to do with it, it was a mix-up, it was bad staff work, there was a fire, there was a tornado, it wasn't my fault!

Others are saying that it was really a provision to protect taxpayers from the prying eyes of Congress -- by allowing any subcommittee staffer to look at anyone's tax return, anytime, no questions asked.

Well, it has to be one or the other, right?

During the cold war, you needed one of these to listen to government propaganda.

Back during the Cold War -- an era that increasingly seems as distant as the War of the Roses -- I used to listen to a lot of shortwave radio. This was a hobby that Nemo and I had in common, and he and I would sometimes talk about what we'd heard on Radio Moscow, the Soviet Union's English-language service.

Radio Moscow tried hard to sound like the BBC World Service, which was the gold standard of shortwave programming in those days. But even a couple of schoolboys -- which we were -- could tell the difference. We knew the BBC was balanced because speakers on the Beeb would often criticize their own government as well as the governments of the Eastern Bloc. Internal strife and policy disagreements were freely discussed. But Radio Moscow papered over internal divisions. Newscasters speaking flawless English would calmly state Kremlin policies as if they had been handed down from on high.

We were supposed to believe that the Soviet policies were fixed and historically inevitable. The only critical words spoken on Radio Moscow were for the decadent West. Had I not grown up in the United States, I might actually have believed what they said about America -- how the cities were broken, festering warrens of crime, how the peasants in America's farmland were starving and on the edge of revolt, how order in the United States could only be maintained with the National Guard.

Funny how the Bush administration is sounding more and more like Radio Moscow every day.

Nemo asked this question a few weeks ago: when will Dubya finally admit to the completely bloody obvious: namely, the fact that we have far too few troops in Iraq?

Apparently, a very oblique, Kremlinesque admission is finally being made. The administration has always passed the buck on this issue, claiming that no one one the ground in Iraq has ever complained about the number of troops. Now, less than a month after the election, we're being told that circumstances have changed since November 1 and that --surprise! -- more troops on the ground will be needed after all. But where, do you ask, will the troops come from?

To boost the current level, military commanders have considered extending the stay of more troops due to rotate out shortly, or accelerating the deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is scheduled to start in January. But a third option -- drawing all or part of a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on emergency standby in the United States -- has emerged as increasingly likely....

If airborne units were rushed to Iraq, commanders here said, they likely would not be used in the offensive actions being planned, given their lack of heavy armor and their unfamiliarity with the targeted neighborhoods. Rather, their purpose would be to take over policing and other functions in Baghdad's International Zone, where American and top Iraqi government officials work. That would free locally seasoned units of the 1st Cavalry Division for such actions.

It should come as no surprise that the administration is taking the softest possible option here. No talk of a draft, and no talk of extending rotations. Just deploy the troops standing by in case of emergency and hope that no emergencies occur while they are tied up in Iraq.

But don't worry. This was the administration's plan all along.

When I say "7:15", of course, I really mean 7:45. Those commercials -- idiotically hyped by an unctious announcer as the pre-show entertainment -- eat up a lot of time, you know.

I am not talking about movie trailers, which have always been part of the moviegoing experience and which moviegoers love. These are honest-to-peaches TV commercials, which have been creeping into theaters for the last few years. Exhibitors have decided that patrons are now used to them and one more (and one more, and one more) won't hurt. Now commercials drag on for twenty minutes or longer. It might be a way to make a quick buck, but it's a shitty way to treat people who just paid $8.50 to get in the door.

AMC is already well-known for its shoddy customer service (the bovine popcorn-shovelers behind the counter at AMC theaters always seem astonished and completely unprepared for the arrival of customers) but the inexorable piling-on of more and more loud, stupid and obnoxious "rolling stock advertisements" is ruining the whole experience of going to movies. I used to go to the movies two or three times a week. Now I go only when there's a movie I particularly want to see. And I dread the whole godawful ordeal.

At movie theaters, it used to be a simple bargain. I buy a ticket and you show me a movie.

Now I buy a ticket and you make $5,000 showing me advertisements on slides, and then you make $20,000 showing me TV commercials, and then you show me nine trailers when the absolute limit used to be four, and then -- a half-hour later -- when I'm tired and pissed off from being treated with such disrespect by the exhibitor, the movie starts. And they want us to be grateful to them for providing us with such great entertainment. They should be paying us $8.50 to see the movie. If only Peter Brown could have heard the groans and curses from the audience when another and another and yet another TV commercial started.

But what does Brown care? He probaby hates the movies. Anyway, he doesn't seem to think much of moviegoers.

"I love you crazy kids. I really do."

Paleoanthropologists are usually a bookish and well-behaved lot, so it's been a bit embarrassing to watch them going apeshit over the discovery of a new hominid species in Spain. Pierolapithecus catalaunicas is believed to be a common ancestor to all the big knuckle-dragging hominids, including us. The New York Times gives the blow-by-blow on the Miocene-era meltdown:

In the report, the researchers concluded that the well-preserved skull, teeth and skeletal bones promised "to contribute substantially to our understanding of the origin of extant great apes and humans."

Dr. David R. Begun, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto who is familiar with the research but not a member of the team, called the fossils "a great discovery," adding, "I am convinced it is a great ape".

These might seem like pretty cautious, mild-mannered comments. But remember, these are scientists we're talking about. These eggheads are the highest-evolved of our species, like something out of Edmond Hamilton's nightmares. For them, this level of excitement is wild-eyed, feces-throwing yahoo-ism.

So consider their level of excitement as another can of gasoline poured on the inferno of the evolution-in-the-classroom debate. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1980s that creationism was religious dogma, not science, and ever since the creationists have been trying to figure out a way to circumvent that ruling. The first attempt was to dress up creationism as science -- they dubbed it "intelligent design theory" and did their best to appear serious and scholarly.

The problem was the creationists had no practical knowledge, formal education or scholarly interest in science. So they have pretty much shelved their attempts to develop a competing scientific theory and are now trying to get warning stickers put in science textbooks.

Yes, warning stickers. More than anything, the stickers affixed to biology textbooks on Cobb County, Georgia resemble the warning label one might find on a pack of cigarettes. The text reads: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."

This is ground-breaking stuff; it's probably the first time the phrases "open mind", "studied carefully" and "critically considered" have ever appeared in Georgia textbooks. At least the label doesn't claim that evolution causes headaches, nausea, vomiting, anal leakage, prolonged painful erection, seizures or death. Not yet, anyway.

Apparently students in Georgia will still be able to learn about the theory of gravity and the germ theory of disease without these sort of disclaimers (although I suppose cosmology and geology, scientific "disciplines" that teach that the Earth is substantially older than 6000 years, will be the next to go).

This being Georgia, the only people who are challenging the stickers are the pesky ACLU -- and we all know that nobody listens to them anyway.

Nemo only purchases the finest computer components available

You may be wondering where Nemo has been since his last post of a couple of days ago. I can't be sure, of course, but I do have a theory -- and I'm sure that I'm not alone. Regular visitors to The Lost City will have noticed a peculiar pattern in Nemo's computer-related posts:

1. Nemo disappears for a few days.

2. Nemo reappears, revealing that he had not been abducted by aliens or left for dead in Tijuana, as we had suspected, but that he had in fact been in his living room the whole time, surrounded by the sputtering wreckage of his malfunctioning computer.

3. Nemo then tells an amusing tale of why his computer wasn't working, why it took so long to repair it, and why he steadfastly refuses to be sensible and buy one that actually works. This is usually framed as a heroic "man-against-nature" story along the lines of The Odyssey.

4. Nemo disappears once again, as his just-repaired computer bursts into flames.

President Bush congratulates his newly-appointed CIA Director, J. Porter Goss

It is a capital mistake to theorize before
one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories,
instead of theories to suit facts.

Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Scandal In Bohemia"

Sherlock Holmes, that champion of logic and deductive reasoning, would need a sedative if he saw what was going on in the current American government. The New York Times writes up a comically deadpan story about Bush's newly-appointed CIA director J. Porter Goss and his Orwellian Memo To The Gang At Spooksville:

"As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies," Mr. Goss said in the memorandum, which was circulated late on Monday. He said in the document that he was seeking "to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road."

While his words could be construed as urging analysts to conform with administration policies, Mr. Goss also wrote, "We provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts alone speak to the policymaker.''

In any other presidential administration, this example of doublethink would have been rightly branded as blatant, shifty-eyed mendacity. But it appears that we have stepped across the threshold into a new and inarguably crazier world. Porter Goss brings to his beleagured agency an all-encompassing (some might call it a global) test of the integrity of intelligence work: if you want to know if something is good for America and / or the world, just ask yourself, "is it good for the Bush administration?"

Thus the thorny task of "reforming" the CIA just got a lot easier, and the job of your average CIA analyst just got a lot easier as well. After all, CIA analysts used to have to struggle with burdensome facts and the mercurial nature of reality. Now all they have to figure out is what the White House wants to hear.

The Republicans have tightened their grip on the three branches of government, but they want more than that. They want to control the sectors of power and influence where they have traditionally felt shut out: academia, journalism and the bureaucracy. Goss' memo only points the direction this administration will take over the next four years. And it won't be pretty.

Last week it happened again. I returned from work to discover that
my computer was off. This is a Bad Thing.

I always leave my computer on. I base this policy on the advice of
my grizzled
old computer veteran of a father, who once explained to me that
maintaining a consistent operating temperature was probably better
for solid-state computer parts, rather than unduly stressing them
with repeated on/off exercises.

I don't know how reliable that advice is in this day and age, what
with all the fans (4? ... 4!) cludging away inside my
computer. That's a lot of moving parts that didn't exist back in the
Digital Jurassic Era, when the advice was given.

Still, the computer should have been on. And it wasn't. Long-time
readers of this weblog know what I'm leading up to — another
chapter in the continuing serial drama of Little Nemo in the Land
of Obscure Computer Mis-hapery.

“What
the ... not YOU again?!”

I first tried simply turning it back on. I mean, why not? It was
off, right?

This yielded an ... interesting ... result. The computer would
come on for a second or two, and then shut down again. A little
twiddling with devices, peripherals, internal connections and such,
and I was able to extend the boot by a few more seconds. A sacrifice
of a goat or two, and I could even get it as far as the BIOS screen,
before the little Silicon Satan burped itself back out to Digital
Oblivion.

I should point out that this turn of events was, sadly, not
unexpected. My chief offline activity over the past nine months or so
has been pulling apart my computer, examining it bit-by-bit,
reassembling it in every possible configuration imaginable, throwing
in the occasional expensive new part ... and standing back in
slack-jawed amazement as nothing I did ever seemed to work.

Oh, and swearing. Lots and lots of swearing. I could write a
sailor's dictionary with the phrases I invented.

But this time, I'd had it. Dammit, other kids have computers that
work — why can't I? I briefly talked myself into
committing family heresy and buying an entire prepackaged system; but
a geekish friend of mine talked me down from it, and by the time he
and I had made it to the computer store, I was in a “bare-bones”
system kinda mood.

By the time we were actually in the store I had reverted
back to the traditional family stance of “just gimme yer damn
motherboard/CPU combo, odd-smelling, bearded freak!” I got it
... along with a new CD-R device, since somewhere along the line it
had died too.

My friend gets further honorable mention, by the way, because on
the way to the store we stopped by his house ... where we discovered
that his month-old computer had abruptly and mysteriously died as
well. Fiddling at it for the few minutes brought forth the
realization that, if anything, it was in a less responsive
state than my drooling imbecile of a PC. Totally catatonic. Flatline,
baby.

Sometimes I amaze even myself.

But wait: that's nuthin', man. The geek-clerks at the store
I frequent have a terrific habit of testing the equipment right
in front of you, before they sell it. This was a Very Good Thing for
me, since it took the geek-clerk in charge of my sale at least three
tries to find a motherboard that worked.

Even then, he had to flash the BIOS in order to do it. All the
while, another geek-clerk at the register to my immediate left was
suddenly unable to get his motherboards to test right.

I was beginning to feel like a Marvel™
villain. Were my mutant powers finally emerging? I made a note to
myself to try levitation at the earliest opportunity ...

But not before I had a computer up and running. I dropped all my
computer parts (old and new) on my friend's living room floor and
implored him to put it all together for me. Under the circumstances,
it was the only sane thing to do. Besides, I had to go to work.

He slapped it together. It booted and ran. He called me in
triumph; but I refused celebration, vowing to see it in operation
first before performing any ritualistic joy-jumping.

Of course, such celebration would be premature. My friend had
gotten the machine up and running all right, but hadn't left it on
long enough to prove anything other than that. This time, the damn
thing stayed up and running for a whole five minutes before clonking
out in my presence.

I was at a loss. Practically everything about the system had been
changed over from the point that my initial troubles began. Only the
hard drives and a TV-tuner card were left over. The case, video card,
motherboard, CPU ... even the damn monitor was different, and
still the freakin' thing was a crip!

I let loose with a few of the choicer phrases from my sailor's
dictionary, and the two of us decided to go out power supply shopping
the next day. Hell, what else could it be?!

I got a call from my friend the next morning. He had had a
“thought” sometime in the middle of the night:

“What if it just wasn't
getting enough power?” He asked.

“I don't ... whaddaya mean?”
I replied. “The CPU? It's got a 350-watt power supply.”

“Yeah, but ... what if the
power supply wasn't getting enough juice?”

“...?”

“I'm talking about the surge
protector. Most of 'em are crap anyway; what if all the other
peripherals attached to it were siphoning power away from the
computer?”

“It's possible. But I had
never heard of anything like that.”

“Well, I tried it. I've had
your machine up and running for two hours now. Crunching video, even.
And it's still going strong.”

And that was it. All this headache and hassle, and that was it. I
took the PC home, peeled off some of the peripherals, plugged it in,
and it's been going great guns since late Sunday. I have a feeling
the little twerp's gonna run until Doomsday
now.

Four motherboards, three video cards, two cases, two CPU's, and
one completely shorted-out 512Mb DDR memory card down the road, only
to learn that it wasn't even a computer problem to begin with —
at least not one that originated in the computer. It was
lame-ass, Mr. Killjoy surge-protector all along.

I guess it makes sense. When I first moved into this 1880's era
duplex of mine, I was taking care of all my computing needs on a
humble 150-watt, Pentium I system. Somewhere along the line I bumped
up to 250 watts, and then 350 watts. Plus a raft of wattage-sipping
peripherals.
In this primitive, pre-technical-era homestead of mine, and it's
conspicuous lack of wall outlets, was a digital Ragnarok inevitable?

If I read
this right, then yep, it was:

... switch-mode power supplies are
more sensitive to source impedance than source voltage, and the
increased impedance inserted into the line by the transformer may
actually hinder the power supply by restricting the current
available.

Then again, I know I have at least one electrical engineer in the
audience. Am I on the right track with this?

At any rate, this gives me a gut a feeling that my Long Digital
Nightmare is finally over (at least for me — my friend's PC is
still DOA). I've also got a fairly slick AMD
Sempron 2200-based system out of the deal. Once I got past the
initial “Sempron?
What the hell's a Sempron?”
phase of the upgrade, I've been rather impressed with that scrappy
little chip.

Although, come to think of it, I could use a faster
one ...

My reply is this: does your own country mean so little to you that you're not even willing to stand and fight for it?

Don't get me wrong.  I have nothing against Canada.  It's a clean, well-run and preternaturally friendly country.  Canada deserves our respect and admiration.  But I am an American first, last and always.  Nobody -- not George Bush, not James Dobson, not Karl Rove, not any percentage of the Flying Monkeys in the world -- is going to run me out of my own country.

The last election was tough and heart-rending, and it's natural for people to feel disappointment, anger, even denial.  But it's time to get over it. At its very core, this election was a test of character, one that we cannot afford to fail.  I have been critical of my own government in the past, and I celebrate that, because only a fool is perfectly happy with his own government.   I've been most critical when the government turns its back on the principles upon which this country was founded.  And when I see Cheney, Rove & Co trying to dismantle the checks and balances the framers carefully constructed, it makes me see red.  We shouldn't stand for it.

And we won't.  The tired old cynics and the smirking frat boys who now occupy the highest levels of government will not last long.  They can't -- because to them the flag is just a prop to be used in their ongoing quest to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted.  But we know what the flag actually stands for: equality and decency and fair play.  They have the money and at the moment, they have the power.  But that doesn't make them right.  America is not their country.  It's our country.  And it's worth fighting for.

If Hell is other people, then what are you doing There?

In 1963, Melvin Webber looked into the future and saw that all the cities of the earth would soon vanish forever. Telephones, television and mass transit had already rendered them obsolete. It was no longer necessary for people to live in tangled metropolitan warrens; only habit was keeping them there. Webber believed that he saw the dawning of a new age, an age of "community without propinquity".

It wasn't exactly a new idea, but Webber's theory was perfectly timed to send shivers down the spine of the academic world: it had a certain naive cynicism that was well-suited to the 1960's. In a recent essay, he recanted his earlier prediction, and tried to explain why it was so important for people to communicate directly, even in a business situation:

...information received in one's physical presence continues to be more highly valued, more credible than either printed or electronically transmitted data appears to be. And then, the informality of the conversational situation is likely to encourage exchange of more content than one might gain from a programmed transmission. Conversation after an hour in the bar or exchanged over a pillow is likely to be far richer than any exchanged over a fax line.

No argument here.

But wouldn't you know it, just when Melvin started waving the white flag, it started to look like he might have been right after all. Maybe the cities will disappear, laid to waste by virtual places like There.

Where's There? you ask. In a server somewhere, I guess; nobody's really sure. In that sense it's literally a Utopia -- a place that is nowhere. But There has thousands of citizens, its inhabitants drive dune buggies, shop for clothes, attend parties and fall in love. And the citizens spend a lot of time doing things There that they aren't interested in doing here -- an average, it is said, of more than 20 hours a week. People are spending big chunks of their lives in these places, even though those places -- even There -- aren't there at all.

But in an indication of just how real the unreal can be, There and EverQuest are being visited by both anthropologists and lawyers. It doesn't get much more real than that, does it?

If I was a smarter and more ambitious fellow than I am in the real world, I would create a new virtual community. The community would offer citizenship all the disaffected Dems from the last election. We'd drive dune buggies and fly jet packs and play in the sun. And we would have a great sailing ship that we could use to cruise across the sea and explore other lands.

It would be a nice vacation, but I wouldn't allow anyone to stay too long. Soon we'll all have to get back to work on winning back the real world.

Brace yourselves, Lost Citizens: I bring news that another
cherished myth of the 1960's has self-destructed. Yes, I'm
talking about that infamous 1967 “walking
Bigfoot” footage.

What's this? The long-anticipated Bigfoot and Wildboy reunion show?
Nope. Just another soul-sucking day in cold, stark Reality-Land ...

All those years of believing ... and it turns out it was
just a guy in a monkey suit all along. I haven't been this despondent
since I found out that Nessie
was a toy submarine:

The Yakima man who made history and
legend 37 years ago by walking in Bigfoot's flat feet donned the
costume again this week to put the hoax firmly in the halls of hooey.

“I kept it quiet for all
those years, but it wasn't a secret to most of the people around
here,” 63-year-old Bob Heironimus said Wednesday at his West
Valley home.

The tall cowboy walked the
lumbering Bigfoot walk for filmmakers and anti-Bigfoot authors
Tuesday on private property near Rimrock Lake. The group's goal is to
make the film behind the film, that 60-second grainy image made in
1967 by a “chronically unemployed ex-rodeo cowboy” from
Yakima named Roger Patterson.

Waitaminit ... anti-Bigfoot authors? I smell bias
here. I mean, who ya gonna believe — some fancy left-wing
documentarian with an agenda, or a chronically unemployed rodeo
cowboy with a 16-millimeter camera?

It's just that — dang it — those pesky reality-based
types up and snagged
the guy who sold
him the costume, too. Did you know that the Bigfoot in the
footage was supposed to be a chick?

Korff and Long [the
anti-Bigfoot guys] have enlisted Charlotte, N.C.-based costume
maker Philip Morris, who sold the original gorilla suit to Patterson.
He created a new Bigfoot costume for the film. In the production,
Morris, 68, will explain how Patterson likely resculpted the suit to
create breasts — yes, Bigfoot was a she — and fashioned a
pillow in the back to make a rear-end crack. (Hint: the zipper in
the suit helped.)

So not only was Heironimus a goldanged Bigfoot hoaxer — he
was a crossdressing goldanged Bigfoot hoaxer.

Oh well. All is not lost. There'll always be a Mothman.

There's still a
Mothman, right? ...

“Sometimes I think this
country would be better off if we could just saw off the eastern
seaboard and let it float out to sea.”

• Barry
  Goldwater, 1964 Republican Candidate for President

  
  

Forgive me for doing a follow-up on your previous post, Uncle
Mike, but I could not help but notice that the wingnut you
highlighted seemed remarkably eager to throw out all of New England
along with the New York and California bathwater. In fact, it occurs
to me that the wingnuts who currently run this country have a
remarkable hostility towards that region.

It's also ironic that the topic of jettisoning them comes up from
that side, considering that the New England states practically
invented the concept of secession.

And I should point out that yes, lurking trolls, we understand
that this
guy isn't serious. We know this because he calls his idea a
modest proposal; and injecting the phrase “modest proposal”
into any piece of literature is universal pseudo-intellectualese for
“ha ha!
Just poking fun!”

Although I must say — Irish
baby, properly steamed in a broth of stem cells, and with a
little bearnaise
sauce on the side ...

Oops ... sorry. I should never write these things so close to
lunch. What was I talking about? Oh, yeah: New England Secession.

It's hardly known at all today, but New Englanders started talking
about ditching the Union practically from the moment it was born.
Right from the first few sessions of Congress it became painfully
obvious to them that those annoying, patrician Southern states were
going to steal the limelight from the humble burghers of the upper
North. And they didn't like it; not one bit.

The rumblings
first began in earnest after Thomas Jefferson — a
Southerner — negotiated
the purchase of Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. Expansion was
an unpopular concept in the tiny, tidy polities of the coastal
northeast.

What really set them off though, and almost got them storming out
of the Union in earnest, was the ill-fated War
of 1812. A convention of extremely grumpy (and influential) New
Englanders even gathered at Hartford,
Connecticut, during which the body came perilously close to
recommending full independence for the region. Cooler heads
prevailed, however, and attending states resolved merely to send a
delegation to Washington with a
list of constitutional demands.

What follows below is an excerpt from an editorial in the Columbia
Sentinel, dated January 13, 1813. It's from the height of the
secessionist frenzy, and does explain quite a bit. Does any of this
griping sound
familiar to y'all?

The sentiment is hourly extending,
and in these Northern States will soon be universal, that we are in a
condition no better in relation to the South than that of a conquered
people. We have been compelled without the least necessity or
occasion to renounce our habits, occupations, means of happiness, and
subsistence. We are plunged into a war, without a sense of enmity,
or a perception of sufficient provocation; and obliged to fight the
battles of a Cabal which, under the sickening affectation of
republican equality, aims at trampling into the dust the weight,
influence, and power of Commerce and her dependencies.

[...]

The Cabinet has no confidence in
those who enjoy the confidence of this people, and on the other hand
the solid mass of the talents and property of this community is
wholly unsusceptible of any favorable impressions or dispositions
towards an Executive in whose choice they had no part, and by whom
they feel that they shall be, as they always have been, degraded and
marked as objects of oppression and resentment. The consequence of
this state of things must then be, either that the Southern States
must drag the Northern States farther into the war, or we must drag
them out of it; or the chain will break.

Believe it or not, the author of this missive is actually arguing
against secession! Amazingly, after spending the entire first
90% of his editorial frothing about what a miserable mess the
Southern states had gotten everybody else into (the US was losing
the war, and badly),
the author signed off on the piece with a line or two about how
secession was a pandora's
box too risky to open.

Something which, apparently, never
occurred to Jeff
Davis and his cronies.

The truth is, America is not just broken--it is becoming irreparable. If you believe that recent years of uncivil behavior are burdensome, imagine the likelihood of a future in which all bizarre acts are the norm, and a government-booted foot stands permanently on your face.

That is why the unthinkable must become thinkable. If the so-called "Red States" (those that voted for George W. Bush) cannot be respected or at least tolerated by the "Blue States" (those that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry), then the most disparate of them must live apart--not by secession of the former (a majority), but by expulsion of the latter. Here is how to do it.

Having been amended only 17 times since 10 vital amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added at the republic's inception, the U.S. Constitution is not easily changed, primarily because so many states (75%, now 38 of 50) must agree. Yet, there are 38 states today that may be inclined to adopt, let us call it, a "Declaration of Expulsion," that is, a specific constitutional amendment to kick out the systemically troublesome states and those trending rapidly toward anti-American, if not outright subversive, behavior.

The 12 states that must go: California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware. Only the remaining 38 states would retain the name, "United States of America." The 12 expelled mobs could call themselves the "Dirty Dozen," or individually keep their identity and go their separate ways, probably straight to Hell.

I was all set to feel outraged, but I suddenly realized that the mouth-breathing primate's got a point.

Why didn't this occur to me before? The Repubs, shuddering with excitement over their 2% margin in the last election, are ready to overreach like they've never overreached before!

And by God, this plan of his is so crazy it just might work! If everyone agrees that we can be expelled, we can be expelled, right? Let's get expelled!

Obviously, we'll have to negotiate a pretty good deal to agree to something like this. First things first: I'm an American, buster, and a damn good one; I'm not leaving without the American Flag and the good old USA brand. Y'all in Spittoonland or Cooterville or Hillbilliania or whatever y'all want to call yourselves have got yer own flag -- I know you do because you love to fly it above your statehouses. You're welcome to it.

Also, I think 12 states is far too few. You'll have to do better than that. We'll take Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maryland and the District of Columbia. I'd like to have Iowa as a buffer zone; that's negotiable.

I figure if we work quickly, we can be rid of these yahoos by late March -- early April at the latest.

You remember those crack Iraqi troops that stormed
Fallujah General Hospital yesterday? At the time, I
wondered aloud about their ethnic makeup, and was even willing to
concede a hair of legitimacy to the Iraqi Puppet Regime if these guys
were shown to be even a little bit home-grown, instead of the usual
peanut gallery of Kurdish paybackers and back-in-black Exiles.

Well, cynicism in the face of liars is no vice. I ran across some
additional information about “Battalion 36” (as the unit
is known) ... and everything I suspected about them is absolutely
true:

The US operation on Fallujah
includes Battalion 36, an elite fighting force of Kurds and the Badr
Brigade (former exiled Shi'ite group in Iran) , as well as combatants
from Iraqi exile groups trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency
in Hungary before the war. They are considered “alien”,
and their participation beside US forces will not only provoke local
tribal sentiment, but also have an impact on countries such as
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria, and attract support for the
resistance, though from the grassroots level.

Kurds, renegade Shi'ites, and CIA stooges. Yeesh. It's actually
worse than I thought. These guys lend about as much legitimacy
to the cause of Iraqi Freedom as Brigade
2506 did to the overthrow
of the Castro
Regime.

Oops. That's attempted
overthrow, of course. Don't count us out yet, though. We'll git that
sucker yet — and I'm sure we have some very long-range
plans in operation to do just that.

At any rate, there's nothing remotely authentic about the boys in
Battalion 36; the homies are all Kurds, and whatever Arabs there are
in the bunch have been away from the desert for so long that if you asked
them to choose between Bactrian or Dromedary, they'd mull a bit and
tell you that they're not that high on Chinese food, so how about
grabbing some Mexican instead?

Yesterday I also wondered about the overall number of Iraqi troops
involved in the Fallujah operation. Today, I believe I have found the
answer to that question, courtesy of the New
York Post:

The Iraqi fighters number about
1,000, officials said, and along with U.S. troops are studying
the tactics used by the Israelis in the West Bank for use in
Fallujah. Officials expect the elite troops will not be vulnerable to
and cowed by insurgents, as were the local security forces who proved
ineffective during the April siege of Fallujah.

So that means there are 10,000-15,000
US Army/Marines currently hacking,
slashing,
and blasting
their way through the city ... and 1,000 Iraqi troops hanging around,
waiting for their next photo
op. Throw in those 850 UK Black Watch soldiers cooling
their heels on that fat
bulls-eye at the edge of town, and you've got a total of
12,000-17,000 ground forces involved in the operation.

Making it, at a minimum, an 83% American pony show.

If you scroll down a bit on this
somewhat confusing page, you can find an old Le Monde
article mentioning the afore-mentioned Battalion 36, and putting
their personnel numbers at around 340 warm bodies. Assuming the
entire unit is engaged in Fallujah (after all, they are our
most reliable Iraqi troops), that leaves another 600 or so ... [ahem]
... less noteworthy locals helping us in the cause.

And how are they doing? About as good as could be expected, it
would seem ...

Another issue is the role of Iraqi
forces fighting alongside the Americans. A National Public Radio
correspondent embedded with the Marines outside Fallujah reported
desertions among the Iraqis. One Iraqi battalion shrunk from over
500 men down to 170 over the past two week — with 255 members
quitting over the weekend, the correspondent said.

Well ... I suppose the officials in the Post article could
have meant that they had 1,000 soldiers left ... after
all the desertions.

What's that? Nope. I don't think so either.

"Your brainwashing will continue right after these commercial messages."

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm a geek. Friday night is BBC America night at my house. The Britwork offers a trio of mod cloak-and-dagger shows and I feel compelled to watch. For a while it was Very Square Roger Moore as The Saint, followed by the delectable Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers.

The third show in the trio was that trippiest of trippy dramas, The Prisoner. But recently I found myself annoyed and disappointed that the latter show was rotated out in favor of The Persuaders, with -- ugh -- Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. I emailed BBC America to complain (about a 40-year-old TV show, no less) -- something I've never bothered to do before.

The Prisoner is an interesting footnote to television history because it marked an odd moment where 50's establishmentarianism dressed itself up as 60's counterculture in an attempt to fool people. It did -- all too well, in fact.

Our story begins in 1964, when British television producer Ralph Smart pitched a number of new series ideas to TV executive Lew Grade. The idea that struck Grade's fancy was a rip-off -- ahem, an homage -- to the recent cinematic smash Dr. No. The new series was to be called Danger Man (later broadcast in the United States as Secret Agent).

Smart enlisted Patrick McGoohan, a popular British stage actor of the time, to star as Bond-esque secret agent John Drake. But McGoohan was a Puritan and demanded a number of changes to the concept. For one thing, Drake would only employ violence when there was no other option. Fisticuffs were acceptable, but the character would rarely carry a gun. Secondly, McGoohan insisted that Drake's relationship with women be cool, professional and above-board. Sexuality, the only thing that really kept agent 007 going, was banished from the series.

After a successful two-season run in Britain (and a made-for-TV film Koroshi) McGoohan had decided to pull the plug on Danger Man, and he joined writer George Markstein in developing a new series called The Prisoner. The concept of the new series had been lifted from an unproduced Danger Man episode: A secret agent angrily resigns from his job, for reasons unknown; he is immediately kidnapped and transported to a quaint seaside village, from which he cannot escape and whose friendly inhabitants constantly try to trick and brainwash him into divulging a single piece of intelligence information: the reason for his resignation.

The series was conceived as lasting for a single season only, and taking a cue from the vaguely kinky hipsterism of The Avengers (which hit its zenith that same year) it embraced the dizzying sociological and cultural mishmash that was Britain in 1967.

It also tried to catch the tidal wave of angst and paranoia that was tearing through western society. The Prisoner tells his captors, "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered" and this is a not-so-very subtle play on the then-popular cry of alienation that sprang from the instruction on the old IBM punchcard: Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.

But if you watch the episodes closely, you find that the mysterious agent -- referred to only as Number 6 -- is not a bleeding-heart liberal trying to stick it to The Man. He is, in fact, a bit more like William F. Buckley stranded on the Island of the Fabian Socialists. The Village, as it is called, is the sort of place Edward Bellamy might have been happy to live in. Health care, employment, housing, even the Village newspaper are centralized and "work units" are the local currency. Inhabitants of the Village are cultured internationalists (Number 6 gets into an argument with one villager over the origin of a meal; the villager says it's "international cuisine", while Number 6 stubbornly insists that it's "French"). Number 6, we learn over time, is a priggish, upper-class loner in a classless meritocracy run by unforgiving extroverts. He is rebelling against conformity, but he sees conformity being imposed by the left, not the right.

It was never entirely clear if the secret agent in the series was the John Drake of Danger Man. George Markstein maintained it was, and devised a clever final episode of The Prisoner, in which it is revealed that John Drake had years earlier submitted a proposal to his superiors for a place called The Village. It would be a prison for spies with secrets too valuable to risk losing to the enemy. Drake eventually dismissed the idea as morally abhorrent, but later discovers that his advice has been acted upon; the Village has been constructed and is in operation. In a fit of moral outrage, he resigns, only to be knocked unconscious and shanghaied to -- well, you know where, don't you?

Thus the Village is literally his prison, a prison of his own making. It's a simple, elegant solution, but McGoohan would have none of it. With Markstein forced out of the show, McGoohan wrote the final two hours of the show himself -- two hours of what might charitably be described as open-mouthed codswallop. A lot of chaotic running around, pointless dream sequences, people in ape masks, midgets driving semis, groovy hokum....a loud, frantic, arm-waving spectacle, filled with desperate attempts at misdirection and empty symbolism. McGoohan had no idea of how to end the series, so he just danced around for two hours, trying to fool the eye at 16 frames per second.

In the end, he outsmarted himself. Pointy-headed liberals spent years dissecting The Prisoner as an outcry against the Establishment. It is possible to be entirely too clever for your own good, and McGoohan -- who wanted the young people to see the Establishment as groovy -- sent the opposite message.

Oh, well.

In Fallujah, the pounding part is over, and the
slogging has begun:

With warplanes pounding the city,
U.S. troops fought their way into the western outskirts of Fallujah
on Monday, seizing two bridges over the Euphrates River and helping
Iraqi soldiers take the city's main hospital in the first stage of a
major assault on the insurgent stronghold.

[...]

The U.S. military said Iraqi troops
captured 38 people, including four foreigners when they swept into
Fallujah’s main hospital, which the military and Allawi said
was under insurgent control. Allawi had earlier said the 38 people
were killed, not captured.

Iraqi soldiers were shown on
video storming through the facility, blasting open doors and pulling
handcuffed patients into the halls in search of gunmen.

Considering how the Iraqi people view this occupation, one has to
assume that the video footage was effectively taken for the benefit
of American audiences. I'm also constantly annoyed by the fact that
while it's easy to find out how many American
troops are involved in this operation (10,000),
and that it is a mixture of Anglo-American
and Iraqi forces, I can never find any references to the exact number
of Iraqis in the force pool.

In other words: sure, Iraqis are participating. But to what
extent? According to this report, the Iraqis have two
brigades committed; but exactly how big is an Iraqi brigade?

Later in the original MSNBC article, there is a rundown of
the reasons given by the US military for why they seized the hospital
— and why they chose Iraqis to do it. I am not heartened by
their line of reasoning:

• The facility will be needed to treat coalition casualties.

  
  

• It was believed the enemy insurgents and foreign
  fighters would not heavily defend the hospital.

  
  

• The Iraqi 36th Special Operations Battalion are considered
  the toughest, most capable and loyal of all Iraqi security forces
  and inserting them into Fallujah before any American ground troops
  arrive puts an “Iraqi face” on the entire operation.

  
  

• A U.S. military official said there are concerns about
  “inflated civilian casualty figures,” so they wanted
  friendly forces at the hospital. It's believed the U.S. military
  will place embedded western journalists at the hospital to verify
  casualty reports.

  
  

In other words, the job was considered such a slice of cake that
even the Iraqis could be trusted to follow through on it.
This, despite the fact that the 36th SOB's are the cream of the
Mesopotamian crop.

It would be also nice to know how many of these crack Iraqis are
Arabs or Kurds. According to this foreign
news report, an unspecified number of Iraqis in the attack force
are indeed former Kurdish Peshmerga
guerrillas.

It's an important point, because if the 36th is made up of actual
Arabs, then at least I can take it as a sprig of concession that the
vast majority of Iraqis who are
not Kurds are actually beginning to fall in behind this
government we have installed. I am frankly so cynical of official
information coming out of that country these days that I have begun
to assume that any fact unspoken is in fact the worst of all possible
worlds.

Like the ruckus about “inflated civilian casualty figures.”
Coming from a military that has been caught both inflating
its enemy combat kills, deflating
its civilian casualty totals, and just in general being completely
wrong about nearly
every figure they calculate for the insurgency,
I have a hard time believing they have suddenly decided to become
Warriors for the Truth.

Hate your next-door neighbor, But
don't forget to say grace.

• “Eve of Destruction”
  P.F.
  Sloan (1965)

  
  

In the first few centuries of the existence of Christianity, one
of its chief rivals was a mystery-cult
religion known as Mithraism.
Believed to be an import from the far eastern fringe of the Roman
Empire, the cult of the warrior sun-god Mithra (also known to the Romans as
Sol Invictus — the “Undefeatable Sun”)
eventually spread to
every corner
of the Imperial domain. Even Hadrian's
Wall, quite literally the northernmost fringe of Roman influence,
was dotted with Mithraic temples (Mithraeums).

The widespread worship of Mithra/Sol Invictus in its time was
largely due to its popularity
within the ranks of Rome's legions. Since the religion emphasized
its worshipers' roles as active participants in a protracted and
costly spiritual war between nearly-equivalent forces of Good and
Evil, its appeal to the mindset of a lifelong soldier is
understandable.

If all of this sounds creepily
familiar, it's because much of what we regard as Christianity
today can be attributed to its early contact with Mithraism. From some of
the most basic vestments of our clergy (ever
wondered why the Pope's
hat is called a Mitre?),
to the date
of at least one major
religious holiday, the influence of Mithra/Sol Invictus is at
least cosmetically evident in the way most of us worship to this day.

It also survives in little daily vignettes like
this one:

With US forces massing outside
Fallujah, 35 marines swayed to Christian rock music and asked Jesus
Christ to protect them in what could be the biggest battle since
American troops invaded Iraq last year.

[...]

The marines then lined up and their
chaplain blessed them with holy oil to protect them.

“God's people would be
annointed with oil,” the chaplain said, as he lightly dabbed
oil on the marines' foreheads.

The crowd then followed him outside
their small auditorium for a baptism of about a half-dozen marines
who had just found Christ.

I know this is supposed to be all heartwarming and joyful, what
with all the blah-de-blah about salvation and annointed protection
and the coming of souls into to bosom of Christ; but things like this
just leave me theologically chilled. Is it really all
about Jesus, or just a feel-good messianic puppet-show? And who's
that demi-god in
the funny cap pulling the strings up there above the box?

I mean, I hate to have to be the the one to ruin anyone's nice
warm bath with the icewater of theology here; but Jesus does not
protect the lives of soldiers in battle, at least not any more than
He watches over anyone else.

This is because Jesus is not your fairy godmother. Neither is He
Sol Invictus. He is Jesus.

Soldiers have to be prepared to kill. And volunteer soldiers,
especially, understand what they are getting into when they sign up
for that. All soldiers also implicitly understand that there
is the chance that they, too, might be killed at the hands of another
soldier. It's the calculus of war.

And as for whatever side a soldier's fighting on — good,
evil, indifferent ... whatever. It doesn't matter where the moral
slider sits that your army fights under.

It's not as if a soldier has that much choice in deciding what
sort of army he chooses to serve; it's far more a factor of basic
geography than morality. And war is never that morally clear-cut
anyway.

It's not like all those Iraqi soldiers we
buried alive in their trenches during the First Gulf War were
there because they all woke up one day possessed with some satanic
notion to die for their evil
overlord's failed global domination plan. Most of them were
conscripts;
and not a few were Christians,
to boot. A fairy godmother Jesus would have at least made some
attempt to dig a few of them out.

But it doesn't work that way. I am reminded of Matthew
4:5-7, the story of Jesus and Satan in Jerusalem:

Then the devil taketh him up into
the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,

And saith unto him, If thou be the
Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his
angels charge concerning thee: and in [their] hands they shall bear
thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.

Jesus said unto him, It is written
again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

A soldier going into battle is essentially stepping off into that
void. He knows that there is a much higher chance of violent harm
coming to him than if he were at home in bed, not yet even risen for
the day.

He may ask God and/or Jesus to guide him in the coming
difficult hours; but to ask Him for protection above all others —
to seek a special status in a kill-or-be-killed environment —
well, that's just tempting Him.

And that, to me, is not
Christian.

“What a dreadful sight! Their
own work! So many places! How stupendous a decision!”

• Napoleon
  Bonaparte (September 15, 1812)
  Emperor of France

  
  

“The town was one mighty
furnace from which sheaves of fire burst heavenwards lighting up the
horizon with the glaring flames and spreading a burning heat. These
masses of flame, mingling together, were rapidly caught up by a
strong wind which spread them in every direction ... Motionless and
in the silence of stupor we looked on at this horrible and
magnificent spectacle, with the feeling of our absolute helplessness
to render any assistance.”

• Baron
  Claude Francois de Meneval
  Private Secretary to the Emperor

  
  

On September 7, 1812 the Russian Army mustered together all the
strength it could and squared off against the invading forces of the great Emperor Napoleon
at a place called Borodino.
It was a tremendous gamble for the Russians. While numerically both sides were equal, the Russians clearly were the less disciplined of the lot.

Seeing his opportunity to smash these peasants once and for all,
and not feeling inclined to dabble in strategic niceties for the benefit of a bunch of Slavic thugs, Napoleon
simply formed his army into a giant, Gallic fist and hurled it at the
Russian center. In one of the most pitched battles of the Napoleonic
Era, the Russians and French exchanged debilitating blows until
Mother Russia, overwhelmed and having lost over one third of her
force — 44,000 men – hiked up her skirts and flew away into the night.

Moscow, a mere 75 miles away, seemingly forgot all sense of
dignity and threw herself down before the mighty ruler of Europe without so much as a peep.
Exactly one week later, the Little Emperor rode haughtily into an
eerily vacant city and settled easily into The
Kremlin for the night, sending word to the Tsar that he was prepared
to receive Russia's terms of supplication.

Later that night, he was rousted awake by his panicked aides. The smell of smoke was in the air ...

Now you know what we should do; and you know why. We should do it
not as an act of retribution or misguided petulance, but as one of
hard, honest logic.

Get the torches. Soak the rags. The Emperor must be granted no chance to camp in the city he has won. We owe him nothing, and his bargains are all poisonous to us anyway. For when he comes to us, it will only be when the time comes for the blame to start getting spread around.

Thus, neither should we fret over that which he has earned, for
there is little of it of value to us in the long view of things.
Rather, we should expressly not want it, for now. Not with
winter
coming, anyway ...

There is no reason to even believe our Emperor when he declares
an outward desire to reach out to our side of the political
fence, even if in his own mind he believes it when he says it. Our
Emperor always makes noises like this when it suits him; and
his version of “compromise” always requires
everybody else to come crawling clear across from the other side of
the room in order to do it.

If he has a mandate, then let him retire unto his Kremlin and
enjoy it for a few short hours. But if he chooses to dictate the
terms of peace, then I say we take a gamble, burn
it all to the ground, retreat
to the hinterlands, and casually
wait him out. Any fool, after all, can see that winter is on its way, and our Emperor is ill-prepared ...

For its falling
temperatures.

And its biting
winds.

And its frozen,
ice-clogged
rivers.

You'd think that any fool could see it; but Bush, like Napoleon, isn't just any fool.

Back in Russia, the Little Emperor sulked for weeks in his burnt-out husk of a
city for an answer that never came. With no army to fight, nobody to
negotiate with, his men starving, and all shelter burned to the
ground, Napoleon bitterly decamped his bedraggled army and prepared
for the long march back to Paris. But by then it was too late; winter had set
in, and suddenly Cossacks were stirring in the shadows along his flanks.

On October 28, 1812 Napoleon's Army came again upon Borodino, the
site of his victory a mere month earlier. There were still tens
of thousands of corpses lying there, French and Russian,
untouched and frozen where they had fallen.

It is said that the Emperor “hastened past.”

Via the Angry Bear weblog (and apparently making its rounds on the web), we are presented with a map of the new, de facto political structure of the North American continent:

Have fun with that there ass-kickin', gun-totin' Jeebus of yours, suckas ...

It's funny because it's true. I am a little sorry about having to leave Iowa behind, though. Behind all the jokes, I was really sorta rooting for them.

Really, only a few thousand votes separated the Iowans from our side of the Bible Curtain. Perhaps we could set up some kind of Yalta arrangement for them? Maybe y'all down there could let us have a section of Des Moines?

You might want to consider playing ball with us, you know; we've got us a lot of fresh water and oil sitting up there on our side of the border ...

Oh, that's right. You guys never get thirsty anymore, do you?

So it's the beginning
of the end that the voters have chosen this time, eh?
Interesting: the American electorate, in its infinite wisdom, has
decided to speed the process of history along.

I'm glad I got that “sour grapes” caveat in while
there was still time. I'm here to warn you, folks — the faster
version of history is always the more painful one.

Consider what this guy has to say about his hopes for a Bush II term. Let us pray,
children, that he is just a blowhard, and not some secret channel into the mind of our current President:

On the plus side, we'll stop
jerking around with the insurgents in Fallujah.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and CENTCOM won't have to worry any longer
about delicate domestic sensibilities. Finally, they'll be free to do
the killing — and there's no nicer word for it — that
needs to be done there.

Oh, goody. Killing. There's something
we Americans haven't
been doing enough of lately ...

Another plus: The US just gained
some serious negotiating strength with Iran's mullahs. And when I say
“negotiating strength,” I mean, “the increased
threat of superior firepower.” Iran stands to lose a lot of
money, men, and material in Fallujah, too.

In what parallel universe does the nation that perfected the
“human
wave” assault technique give a damn about losing a little
men and material?

And money?! Have you seen the price of oil lately? Whatever moolah
the mullahs need they can just pump out of the ground these days. We
Westerners will gladly pay for each precious drop they send our way.

Take this fact and bank it: Iran is about as concerned about a US
military action against it as B'rer Rabbit was about the briar
patch.

From the “Well,
at least he's not a pro wrestler” department, I give
you the news that the political career of Minnesota's
42nd Governor is now officially in
utero.

Oh, yah sure ... #42 won't be due to take office until 2014; but
how could any political prophet take a look at these tossed bones and
not come up with the
same eerie conclusion?

Former professional boxer Scott
LeDoux delivered a knock-out blow to Anoka County Commissioner
Dave McCauley Tuesday.

LeDoux, Andover, unseated McCauley,
Coon Rapids, the longtime District 5 incumbent, on the Anoka County
Board by a 10,676 to 10,106 margin.

District 5, which includes the city
of Coon Rapids, east of Hanson Boulevard, plus the southern part of
Andover, was one of three county board seats on the general election
ballot Nov. 2.

[...]

LeDoux has lived in Anoka County
for 32 years. He now works in the real estate business, but retains
his boxing ties by serving as an analyst on ESPN boxing telecasts.

LeDoux has apparently throttled back a bit on his analyst
career, presumably to allow more time for his scheduled 2014
coup.

Besides vague ties to the DFL and an implied
born-again commitment, Ledoux's main political stance so far
seems to be the deplorable state of Anoka County roads. From what I
know about the place, LeDoux could have written a seventeen-volume
encyclopedia on the deplorable state of the entire danged county.
But I suppose that wouldn't have gotten the man elected.

And Anoka County is damned important if LeDoux hopes to follow in
The
Mind's footsteps. Followers of Jesse's political career should
recognize that county as the
Lumpenprole Kingmaker that Crowned
Him.

Incidentally the City of Anoka, which is also the county seat, somehow managed
to get itself crowned the “Halloween
Capital of the World” several years ago — a title
which has, for some reason, become widely enough accepted that
documentaries on the holiday often mention it. The townball teams
were often called the “Spooks;”
although I gather that's a
bit less the case in this day and age.