"A drink a day keeps the shrink away."- Edward Abbey

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

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

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

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

Still, to know the worst of the stories that lie behind these images you not only need to know the lives these commonplace icons chronicle, you have to be looking hard for the worse and, in the end, dragging it out of your own memory. If you work at find the worst of people, you can always locate it.

But if those who keep these family altars are like my own mother in their dedication to them, you won't see them displayed. There will be no shadows there that you do not supply yourself.

My mother only adds the things of love to this board, never the things of disappointment, failure, heartbreak or betrayal. To do so would be a betrayal of the trust that keeping this board brings with it, and, to my mother at least, a waste of life.

My mother does not waste life.

In my mother's home not a scrap of love -- however faint or distant now -- is ever discarded. Everything that does not meet her measure is tossed away without pause or regret. If something comes her way that she deems special -- be it an out-of-focus photograph, a clipping from a far-away newspaper, a small note of thanks, or a pipe-cleaner figure made by one of the second graders she acts as a teacher's aide for -- it gets promoted to the bulletin board. Once there, as you can see, it stays. If something comes to her that's a downer, out it goes.

That's why my mother has two piles of scrap in the kitchen: one for recycling and one for the shredder. She gets a warm feeling by recycling, but she gets a real kick out of running things through the shredder.

At age 93, she's tiny but sharp. Quick to empathize and quicker still to laugh. Playing tennis several times a week kept her on her game in more ways than one. So does bridge and working as a teacher's aide with small children. She's wise that way but without pretense. If you ever told her she was wise, she'd shrug and ask you if you'd like another German pancake, this time with lemon juice and powdered sugar. She hasn't missed breakfast for nearly a century, which shows you, if you had any doubt, just how wise she is.

Years ago, after she sold her rooming house for college girls and moved into her apartment, she decided that the kitchen wall was perfect for a bulletin board that she could use to keep track of her busy schedule. Somewhere under everything else on the board we think there are things that pertain to schedules in the late 1980s, but it would take an archeological team to excavate them. Instead, one photo got put up, and then another, and then a clip of this and a note of that and, over time, it became the raucous riot of bits and pieces you can see here.

Babies and friends, present and past wives, can all be found. Girlfriends long let slide still peek out. Birthday parties and christenings, weddings, vacations, and graduations.... all the private triumphs and moments of personal happiness glisten and shine, one fit atop, against, behind, or aside the other as life rushed on and curved away, ebbed and then surged back again, brighter and larger than before.

If you knew all the pieces here as I do, you could review them and see the tokens of a life that begins before the end of the First World War and rolls along right up until today. It's a very big life to be contained on such a small board in such a small apartment, but my mother's genius when it comes to this collage is that, no matter how full it gets, she always finds room to add one more moment.

We don't know how she does it. It's a gift.

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

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

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

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

Hence the problem becomes how to send 17 million Mexicans back to Mexico in a moral and humane fashion. (While keeping our strategic reserve of mole sauce high at the same time.)

Please do not tell me "It can't be done." It can of course be done. True, it will not be done overnight by clicking the heels of the ruby shoes of the Deportation Fairy and saying, "For 17 million of you there's no place like home." Nope. They got here in dribs and dabs, and back they shall go the same way. The underutilized Greyhound buses that are still networked throughout the lower 48 states will serve well for this purpose as well as giving a much needed boost to Greyhound's stock.

Getting the illegals back to Mexico will be a simple matter of rounding them up and getting them to the bus on time. The shuttling of the Mexicans to the border and beyond will take some time, but with half the energy the government devotes to scanning your ass at the airport, it can be accomplished in about 18 months tops once the system gets rolling. Do the math. It breaks down to about 31,000 one-way border deliveries a day. Well within the core competency of Greyhound.

Of course, the real problem of this is that, as alluded to above, sending anyone to Mexico against their will is immoral. Unless, of course, they are armed. Then it is not only moral but beneficial to humanity in general. For this I will suggest handing out, to our deportees as they depart, not only a little spending money but some critical "democracy tools" from "The Unwelcome Wagon of the USA" along with a breakfast burrito and a Pepsi.

The problem with Mexico is not that it is an oligarchy masquerading as a democracy (which it is). but that that the democratic/peoples component of the Mexican political equation is essentially unarmed. The Mexican oligarchy has, as oligarchies will, most of the guns and the lion's share of the ammunition in the form of the Mexican armed forces.

So it seems to me that if what we are up to is deporting illegal Mexican aliens back to Mexico, the least we can do is send them off with one of the true gifts of American democracy -- an assault rifle and a case or two of ammunition. Arriba!

This will solve one of the major problems implicit in the forced deportation of Mexicans back to Mexico, i.e. the forced destabilization of Mexico.

It is obvious that the opportunities and money available to illegal aliens in the United States is one of the few safety valves available to the ruling Mexican oligarchy. After all, if we didn't exist the ruling families of Mexico would have to either cut the wretched of Mexico in on the petroleum pie or face civil war. Remember that Mexico is a country in which one of the richest men has more money than 17 million of his fellow citizens put together. As long as we're covering the oligarchy's ass with our porous northern border, the steady state of Mexico's de facto dictatorship can survive. And who needs a dictatorship on our southern border?

We need to stop propping up Mexican fascists by importing their excess angst. We need to initiate a policy for illegal alien deportation that involves the importation of first rate American assault weapons. Once that happens the future for the ruling families of Mexico starts to look a little more sketchy than it has been up to now.

This compromise has two other benefits to America.

First, it gives our home grown armaments industries a much needed shot in the arm. After all, outsourcing the manufacture of your weapons to a foreign country (as has recently been suggested) is not always a cost-effective way of planning for your future as an independent nation.

Second, it gives a lot of repatriated Mexicans a shot (so to speak) at making their country a true democracy at last.

Of course, you may say that a wise and far sighted Mexican oligarchy would simply shoot these repatriated citizens as they crossed the border with assault rifle and bandoliers. Well, perhaps, but I think we could counter that by using the US Army, Navy, and Air Force to provide safe passage, protected corridors, and air cover for all the armed Mexicans until they got back to the city or village of their choice. After that, they'd be on their own. Back in Mexico with a few bucks, a weapon, and more than a few rounds to go around.

An economic bonus to this is that it would enable the US to stop paying for security on the southern border. After the first 50,000 or so pistoleros repatritatos were walked back deep into Mexico courtesy of the 101st Airborne, Mexico would look to seal up the border all by itself. If they got too carried away with the 101st there could be an opening for a whole new political party in Mexico overnight.

Sounds revolutionary to me.

"Lord, give me the strength not to attack with a baseball bat every fool and every chickenhawk and every Apathy Kid and every soft elitist and every intellectual hack and every Jody and every yuppie and every thirty-something child still finding himself when I get home. It's not worth my time. Do give me the strength to convince them to stop breeding and to kill themselves, in the name of bettering America. It's the only chance we have." -- Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal: Numb

A sign, Gaia, give us a sign! Soon to be worshipped by Al Gore and other idolaters.

Seen en route to lunch.

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

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

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

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

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

It is not that the whole experience is uncomfortable, which it is, but that the process has become -- through a Satanic collusion between the airlines and government -- utterly dehumanizing. Bean-counters and bureaucrats have combined to create the one central experience of American life in which you are reduced to a hunk of meat.

The next time you simply "must" travel observe the process from one mental remove. The snaking lines and the endless bland posters and placards at "Security." The forced removal of your items of clothing -- coats, sweaters, and shoes (the better to expose you to any tasty foot fungus left behind by those in line in front of you.) Then listen to the endless loop of warnings and instructions as you watch old women in walkers get wanded so that nobody can possibly say "Profiling is afoot!"

Put them all together along with the ever-present though distant chance that the plane will indeed fall out of the air, and you have a vague replay of kindly SS officers in the 1940s murmuring in dulcet tones, "This way to the showers, ladies and gentlemen."

But, of course, all that is not enough since nothing done to date has stopped people from taking planes like they used to jump on a crosstown bus. And so the small insults and creepy "economies" proliferate. It's now down to eliminating a single sheet of folded paper that wraps around the boarding pass.

Is there, somewhere inside what passes for the executive suite at Delta, some clone who figures out that people will accept this -- after all, why wouldn't they? -- and makes it a policy so he can justify a promotion or a bonus? I'll bet folding money there is. Does it, in and of itself, really matter? No, of course not. Except in the sense that it goes to extending command and control over the person who is supposed to have the power in this relationship: the consumer AKA the passenger.

The truth is, of course, that caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of big government and big airlines, the consumer is, as I said above, just so much meat with a few bucks left on his Visa card and a picture ID. Coming soon in this endless downward spiral will be:

• 1) transparent carry-on luggage with a weight limit of 10 pounds,
  
• 2) all checked luggage billed at $5.00 a pound with a signed waiver releasing the airline of all liability for losing it,
  
• 3) the aforementioned naked flying with bonus anal probe followed by the replacement of seats by racks of overhead meat-hooks in order to cram 200 more people on each plane. (You will be fed and watered and evacuated via tubes.)

All of this will be met not with outrage and boycotts by the "flying public," but with a shrug and the small, infantilized voices of the afflicted saying, "Well, you gotta fly. Hook me up."

"Delta Flight 666 is now ready for boarding. This way to the hooks, ladies and gentlemen."

"Ye Olde Walk-In Seattle"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's true," I agreed.

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

"One?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pikers, that's what Obama, Clinton, and McCain are. Just skinflint pikers. All this to-and-fro about the gas tax -- whether you are for it or against it -- just misses the mark.

To my way of thinking, if you're going to pander, pander big. Don't just sit around and gas about the gas tax but go for it.

You want to buy some votes? Fine. Bag the "gas tax holiday" concept for the summer, and get down to brass tacks. Put some real folding money in people's pockets so they can buy the gas they need to see the USA in their Chevrolet. No gaming each other to see who can be the least cheap bastard among the three.

I don't know about you but my vote can't be bought for the few buck a "gas tax holiday" might keep in my pocket.

My vote's going to go to the first Presidential candidate who promises me "A Summer Long Withholding Tax Holiday!"

Gentlemen (and Lady) start your blather!

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

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

Click to Enlarge

Catalina

Dawn at Avalon

Koi Dreams

Click to continue...

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

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

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

Click to continue...

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

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

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

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

But wait, that's not all.

We have not yet heard from that driving spike of the way-new economy, "The Boutiques:"

As the introductory performance wanes, the models will make their entrance, framed by the antics of the dancers. The models will parade a modern, hip blend of style and everyday fashion from *Retail Therapy, the first of our line of local designers and boutiques.

The mystical, musical strains of the Eastern world, invoking images of silk scarves and belly dancing beauties will be a prelude to our next boutique, *HAREM combining culture with sensuality comparable to the grand Egyptian Empire of old, featuring hats, handbags, veils, and mens robes, culminating in a dreamscape of imagination.

"Culminating in a dreamscape of imagination." One would say, "You can't make this shit up," except that some demented mind has indeed made it up. Ah well, second-rate cities demand second-rate copy.

But wait, that's not all!

You might think you've had enough of some twitching twinks in Venezuelan masks, but they are rented by the evening so you might as well haul them back out.

Return of DassDance: Here the dancers explode in a frenzy of grunge and intense, gyrating rock and roll, evoking the darker side of the audience, and assisting them in delving into the dominatrix inside of us all, as we introduce the next local boutique.

Well, given the amount of drugs and booze DassDance has probably consumed at this point, why wouldn't they jump back out to "explode in a frenzy of grunge?"

After all, the last dubious thing that Seattle contributed to the culture was, ahem, "Grunge." This blight on the nation was born in.... wait for it.... 1981! That's it. One idea every 25 years. Seattle's desperate rock scene has been dining out on it for decades, with no signs of dumping it back in the dented dumpster of rock history from which it was exhumed. Instead, grunge survives in this city because it satisfies the three prime requirements of rock-culture crapola: it is easy and cheap and requires no talent at all. In these elements, grunge might be seen as the harbinger of rap, but I'm sure the brothers would not agree.

In all the "frenzy of grunge" is a perfect prelude to the audience's diving into "the dominatrix inside us all." Whether or not it will be necessary to surface and shower down after such a profound dirt dive is left unsaid. After all, there is some grime ground so deep that not even a scrub-down with a steel bristle brush can get it out. (Not that some in the audience wouldn't crave to try it.) But it does little good to put down dirt. Much better to "celebrate it!"

One of the local names for Seattle is "Emerald City," but scenes like this one remind you that large neighborhoods resemble the prison of "Oz" on HBO, much more than the fabled city of Dorothy and her pals.

But wait, that's not all

Just when you thought it was safe to have safe sex, it's time for "The Crypt:"

The Crypt has long been a place where leather and chains rule, where you give in to your inner fire This is embodied by the clothes exhibited here, as black is prevalent, and flaming passion is a likely result from these sexy accessories. Women will be dressed dominatrix-style in corsets and boustiers, while the men will be sporting spikes, kilts and boxer briefs.

In a way, the good thing about being an atheist in Seattle in America in 2008 is that there is no waiting for Hell. Every single Saturday there's a fresh one tailor-made for you. Full of fun, fashion, frivolity, and all your friends. Just show up and there you are, all decked out in STDs in pretty colors and bright red Venezuelan masks.

Edgar Allen Poe couldn't have planned it better.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. Edgar Allan Poe: The Masque of the Red Death

Party on, Dudes! I'd go, but frankly I don't have a thing to wear.

On offer at my local butcher this afternoon.

First rate in every respect, this 27 minute video by Col. Austin Bay sums up how we got to Iraq, what's happened since, and what could happen in the future. Bay's extended commentary is part history, part military perspective, part political analysis, and wholly fascinating. Indeed, by coupling a video screen and a PowerPoint screen, Bay demonstrates how to find and use the Aikido point powers of the Web.

Click Austin Bay's Arena Channel and choose "A Rapid U.S. Military Withdrawal from Iraq."

In this pilot episode of Consequences, Austin Bay provides 7 scenarios that could result from a rapid U.S. Military Withdrawal from Iraq.

It is difficult to overpraise how informative, concise and powerful this production is. (You may have some browser issues, but by all means work to overcome them.)

Then watch it, think about it, and pass it on by blog, comment, email or word-of-mouth. You will want to tell others about it, regardless of their political views on Iraq. That done, watch it again. Simply brilliant.

First it's don't ask, don't tell. Then it's dogs with cats. Then, when you let that slide, it is only a question of time before it's seals with birds!

The seal was first spotted subduing the penguin, who was none to pleased by the advances. The seal overcame the penguin by laying on top of it, while the penguin flapped its flippers frantically. Sensitive Zooillogix readers should note that the penguin "showed no outward signs of injury" during or after the excitement, although it was no doubt traumatized.

"Traumatized," my ass! Murderlized is more like it.

Via Zooillogix who will doubtless keep us informed on the massive pending sexual harassment lawsuit.

P.S. I am certain there has to be some sort of parallel in this item to recent events involving Barack Obama and Reverend Wright, but I am not going to be the one to draw it. After all, a man has to have some standards!

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

Illustration by RapierWitt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Via "The Green Report"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HT:Zooillogix

Race hustling and black racism goes mainstream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Some images from Saturday at the market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the Wall Street Journal chiming in:

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

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

The backstory comes in from here:

Peak Oil News Discussion -- Food Rationing across NYC!

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

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

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

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

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

Bon appeitit!

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

Walmart Rations Rice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is there a contest here?"

Update: Originally seen at The Anchoress.

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, back at the hotel:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[YouTube video removed April 18,2008]

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

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

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

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

After all, she went in looking like this:

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USA: Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay

According to readers of Freakonomics

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

USA: Our Poor People Are Fat

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

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

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

Let's review:

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"If this Demo has offended,
Think but this; and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While my blather did appear,
And my changing hopeful theme
No more truthful than a dream.
Voters - do not reprehend.
If you pardon, I will bend
Over and, as I am a lying schmuck,
I hope I can hold on to luck.
Now to twine my serpent's tongue.
I will make amends ere long.
Else Barack a liar call,
So please blow me one and all.
Give me your votes if we be friends,
And Obama shall change all your ends."

Apologies to Shakespeare and Puck

Then Duke stands up and beats his chest,
Says "I made it. Why can't all the rest?
You got nothing to lose
But the shine on your shoes"
-- Steve Strauss, Wolfgang & Strauss

I'VE KNOWN MORE THAN A FEW very rich men. Some of them came by their wealth via a win in the sperm race. Some of them got a very big hit from the money machine in the first Internet Bubble lottery. Some of them married or divorced into it. Some of them got gobs of greenbacks the "old fashioned way, they worked for it."

Let's say you're one of these. Let's say you are so wealthy that, as one said to a friend of mine, "I no longer need a 'rate of return'." You've got ALL the stuff you will ever need and the dough just keeps piling up. You've got the private plane and your advisors keep saying you need the private helicopter "for tax purposes."

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In my line of work, I have to look at the Internet for many hours a day. As a steady diet this is not good.

As you all know, the Internet makes it drop-dead easy to find at least 30 things that really piss you off before your first cup of coffee cools. I don't care where you're coming from, this axiom (15 Minutes Internet = 30 Things That Frost Your Cookies ) is universal. [See: Godwin's Law / Van der Leun's Corollary for an earlier iteration. ]

So it is, I have to remind myself, always in my best interest to get up and get out of the house on a regular basis. Normally, and this is especially true on weekends, but "knowing how way leads on to way," hours can pass and this resolve is still waiting to be acted on.

During the weekdays, however, I have a great break clock just across the street from my house. It is probably the best break clock a man can have. Its alarm is made of children's laughter.

Three times a day, the elementary school across the street throws the doors to its playground open and several hundred children blast out onto the blacktop. They're out there right now. Whoops, and shouts, and laughter. Just a second, I've gotta go check....

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As astute readers of American Digest know, nothing so engages my attention as technological advances that make the world a better place. Today, the always astute neo-neocon made me aware such innovations in her "Swimsuit wars."She reports,

"Fashion is hardly the issue for serious swimmers, it's winning. And in the race for the gold there's a new weapon in the arsenal, the Speedo Fastskin LZR racer swimsuit. The controversy over the suit involves whether it confers an unfair advantage in terms of buoyancy. Its attributes: bonded seams that eliminate drag-inducing stitches, a hidden zipper for the same reason, and special panels that further the cause. The problem is that not all countries have access to the suit. But is the playing field ever level?"

Alas, as women know and men observe, when it comes to swimsuits, the field is always at a 45 degree slant. If it were not, then women would not equate shopping for a new swimsuit with a near-death experience.

The Speedo Fastskin, pictured here for purely scientific purposes, is a case in point. Its cutting edge features include: "Bonded seams, so no stitches to cause drag. A hidden zipper - again, less drag. LZR panels reduce drag in some areas of the swimsuit by as much as 24% compared to other Speedo suits." Clearly a swimsuit for the 21st century. As can be seen here again, purely for scientific purposes:

Clearly, something has been going on inside the Speedo development labs and, strictly in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I set out to discover what other innovations the company had in the pipeline.

I am proud to present the fruits of my research for the benefit of all mankind.

Of course the first thing a responsible journalist does when profiling a company these days is to ask, "Just how damned green is this conglomeration of craven capitalists, anyway?" I am pleased to announce that, regardless of its penchant for water resistant petrochemical byproducts, Speedo is doing all that it can to reduce its carbon breastprint.

Here, for example, is Speedo's breakthrough sustainability swimsuit, the Speedo Flora:

The Flora is made of 100% organic artisan petals grown in free-range conditions under a fair-trade agreement with the underemployed young women of Costa Rica. The expenses of upkeep are minimal. When worn near a pool, or a conscious heterosexual male, the suit waters itself.

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This is the full text of a comment by "Been There, Done That" that was appended to today's item, More Good News: Seattle Times Axes 200 @ AMERICAN DIGEST . It has the voice of bitter experience and I thought it would be a shame to leave it as a comment.

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Forgotten Readers of the Seattle Times

The "team" responsible for tossing litter onto my lawn every so often grew smaller today. Seattle Times to Cut Approximately 200 Employees via The Stranger "Seattle's Only Newspaper"

A memo just promulgated onto the web by the odious "Stranger" details the reasons for the mass sackings -- 45 from the newsroom. [Full text after the jump] The money shot is right up on top with

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Dear 60 Minutes and Washington Post,
Wake up and smell the bullshit!
Sincerely...

Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate

Private contributors have already donated or committed half the money needed to fund the entire campaign, he said. While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million.- Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer [emphasis added]

Over the weekend there was a lot of speculation about the sources of Al Gore's announced $300 million budget for his forthcoming "campaign." "Who's behind this?" "Where did it come from?" ran the questions.

As far as I can see, all of those speculating overlooked one key fact: Gore is a liar. Professional. Pathological.

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Now that weird names are part of the pitch for "electability" is seems only fair that the Republicans set off a counter-barrage against the Democrats.

Enter: Theodore Terbolizard!

Now you might think that the name "Turbolizard" would count against this upstanding American. You might think that, but then you probably thought some character named Hussain would never get three votes outside of that downtown Falafal stand on the sidewalk, right? Right.

Let's face it. America is the place where you can not only overcome your DNA and your psychological problems, you can get elected to lead because of them!

This does not mean the road has been easy for Barack Hussain Obama. After all, he's had to deal with what he thinks the rest of the world thinks of him. He's had to suffer a Harvard education in the past, and telling his wife to put a sock in it for the moment. Add to that the chaffing fact that it is not always possible to find a laundry to put in just the right amount of starch in his shirts while on the campaign trail and you have the suffering of the dispossessed minorities of America in a, well, nutshell.

Things are not going smoothly for Turbolizard either....

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Citizen Kane: You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.

Citizen Pinch: You're right, I did lose a million readers last year. I expect to lose a million readers this year. I expect to lose a million readers *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million readers a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 weeks.

Ironman @ Political Calculations: The Accelerating Decline of the New York Times notes, with data to back him up,

Sometime, within the next twelve to eighteen months, the average circulation of the weekday edition of the New York Times will drop below one million. This event marks the continuing decline in the fortunes of what had been the U.S. newspaper of record as the New York Times' average circulation has been well above this level for decades.

Here's what the years from 1993 to 2007 looked like at the New York Times:

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Ironman cites a number of reasons for this but doesn't look at the prime mover. Who is that prime mover? Well, you need to ask yourself what happened to the New York Times at the beginning of this inexorable drift downward? One fear factor stands out:

Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. - (born 22 September 1951, Mount Kisco, New York) became the publisher of The New York Times in 1992 and chairman of The New York Times Company in 1997. Sulzberger is the son of the previous Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and grandson of another Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He is married to artist and journalist Gail Gregg. He is sometimes referred to by the nickname "Pinch," a reference to his father's nickname "Punch," but he reportedly dislikes the name.

I'm sure that somewhere among the Time's staffers -- more and more up for being laid off -- at least one person, confronted with the continuing evidence a disastrous career on the part of the boy publisher, has said to another, "Hey, Pinch happens."

• In My Mother's Small House Are Mansions of Mem