Osama Bin Laden: When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. -- Transcript of Osama bin Laden videotape - December 13, 2001

The recent resurgence of Russian military posturing coupled with their invasion of Georgia last year ought to give some pause. Putin has effectively sold Russia's physical and industrial resources to his friends and now runs the world's largest criminal state. He can operate much more effectively as he has none of the drag of a communist system, but retains the desire to play a dominant role in the world. -- BLACKFIVE: Russian fists clenching

Early in August, Vladimir Putin went on vacation. It wasn't like the ongoing vacationfest of Martha's vineyard that has so tuckered out President Obama that he needs to flee to Camp David. Pictures taken on Putin's much more rugged vacation were published in Russia and around the world. In the US and Western Europe these images were greeted with almost universal derision.

Continued...

After days of non-stop evaluation, adulation, and reflection MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and Captain James T. Kirk collaborate on a final wrap-up on the current status of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Besides various email tips from readers, I track over 230 pages in all subjects from Art to War on a daily basis. The items I find interesting and/or cutting edge I post to the sideblog, "On the Right." (It was once named "Side-Lines" but that was in another country and besides the wench is dead.)

I like to think this ongoing collection of links, images, quotations, and other objects is of more than passing interest to my readers. The nature of the beast is, however, that items scroll down from the top and then off into the great always wiped-clean white board of the Web.

Because some of these items have more than a passing interest, and because, I guess, I can, I'll be posting a once a month round-up of "On the Right" here. Mainly for historic reasons, such as history is these days, but also because it seems to me to be of interest to be able to scroll backwards into recent past before it becomes history.

That said it's been a hectic month @ On the Right. Here's the long, long collection of more than 275 items I thought it worthwhile showcasing in August (It might take a bit to load, but then again it's a big load.

Continued...

From:

"Not all voices are demonic.

I once met a man who heard happy voices. I was walking down the hall of the locked ward in the hospital’s inpatient facility (“Club Head”, we called it) and a young man with dark curly hair approached me, staring into space, smiling, giggling, laughing. He turned his head to whisper to someone who was obviously not there. We passed each other and I heard him chuckle and say, “That’s very funny.” I knew he wasn’t talking to me–I hadn’t said or done anything–and I knew he was psychotic (I recognised the symptoms). At dinner that night I asked my roommate about the young man. “Oh, that’s Kevin," he answered. "He hears happy voices.” I immediately hated Kevin."-- BEING CRAZY IS NOISY | More Intelligent Life

To:

Can it core a apple? O, it can core a apple.

File under "Never Gets Old" The Honeymooners - Chef of the Future

It's been a hectic month @ On the Right. Here's the long, long collection.

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[Click all to enlarge]

Opening September 8 at the Koplin Del Rio Gallery at 6031 Washington Blvd Culver City, California , this art show could be a blast or a bomb. One way or another, it will test the limits of Muslim tolerance in our new age of "understanding" and "dialogue" with Islam....

Continued...

   

There's Photoshop and then there's Alternate Reality. Erik Johannson is a master of the latter category. Four samples here. More of his work can be seen at his site: alltelleringet.com

Tim Hawkins, take us outta here!

See you all on the flipped spin side.

HT: IronyCurtain @ iOwnTheWorld.com said we'd be a fan in 3:04. IronyCurtain was right.

There's a story here. I'm just not sure I want to know what it is.

Another human, confronted with the co-joined alpha and omega point of both what we know and the limits of what we can know, explains it all for you. She's convinced and yet, somehow, lacking in conviction.

Continued...

Probably not....

HT: Doug Ross

Continued...

"What is it about? Like all Greek songs, about Love and Death." -- Melina Mercouri, Phaedra

The Politics of life are easy. It's the Poetics that are hard. The Poetics of life are much more persistent in their knocking at the door of your inner self than the Politics. Politics have their seasons, but the Poetics are our constant companions, waking and sleeping, thinking and dreaming. In a very real sense, since they run deeper than the Politics, the Poetics are the Politics' power source. But what are the Poetics about? Simply put, they are "like all Greek songs, about love and death."

I've done a dance or two with death over the years. I've found that he's not very graceful and he always wants to lead.

Once, during a long-lost summer, I was the night driver for a hearse at a mortuary. In the wee small hours of the morning, I'd drive the on-duty mortician to pick up a man or a woman's or a child's body from wherever it had become just a body. In the hot California delta night I'd drive the mortician, both of us in Blues Brothers suits, to a hospital basement, a home bedroom, a city morgue, or, one time, to a shabby skid row hotel where the leaking wicker basket holding the suicide had to be held vertically in the creaking ancient elevator for all eight slow floors.

Continued...

Outside the ancient offices of the Cosmoangelic Book Publishers that I once worked in at 2 Park Street in Boston, an old lady stood with her back to the old bricks on every working day. A square yard of sidewalk was her office. Eyes behind thick glasses were watery-gray. She stood hunched in a permanent flinch like some dog who'd been struck too many times for nothing. She dressed in clean, shabby, but not too shabby, clothing -- warm enough for the winters and cool enough when summer came around at last. To all who passed by her office she repeated her Bostonian-inflected mantra:
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"
"Spare a quarta?"

She stood to the left of the entrance for part of the day and to the right for the remainder. You didn't know when she'd shift, but she always seemed to be in your path as you came out of the building.

Going for some coffee?

"Spare a quarta?"

Going to lunch?

"Spare a quarta?"

Going to skip out on the afternoon and catch a matinee?

Continued...

Mike Austin aka Scipio

At the present time, for reasons unknown, The Return of Scipio, is offline. The URL resolves to a parked page at BlueHost.

I've linked to "The Return of Scipio" often in the past and hope to link to it again in the future. As I said above, the page is offline and no information is no information.

Mike Austin, the author of The Return of Scipio, was profiled last week on Esquire's website by John H. Richardson in Is Obama Fascist? Profile of Return of Scipio Blogger Mike Austin as an

"Oklahoma man — eighth-grade teacher by day, militant blogger by night — who may personify it more than any of the conservatives who, when the town halls pass, may be pointing the way to a holy war that goes way beyond health care."

I would hope that this profile has nothing to do with the disappearance of The Return of Scipio.

Any information would be appreciated.

UPDATED: I've received an email from Austin. He's fine and says that he has shut the page down for now for personal reasons. He was not coerced in any way. It is unknown if the page will return.

Study of these Steps is essential in order to progress towards sobriety and sanity through NYet Times Anonymous. The principles they embody are universal, applicable to everyone except Hopelessly Addicted Liberals who have not yet bottomed and persist in compulsive Obamallatio.

In NYet Times Anonymous, we strive for an ever-deeper understanding of our addiction to NYet Times Blather and devote ourselves to ending it forever. We are always mindful that even one small sip of a Maureen Dowd column can lead to a life of existential despair and intellectual bottoming out.

These 12 steps we have found essential for overcoming the NYTimes affliction in our minds and the plague upon the nation. We extend them here to our fellow sufferers.

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An item in "On the Right" (Yes, that sidebar over there on the right) reminded me of my out of print homage to Conan Doyle's great detective, Sherlock Holmes.

From the Preface:

"Indeed, with the publication of this work, possibly the last ever penned by my great-grandfather, it is our fond hope that the efforts of all involved may bring to you, dear reader, an opportunity to once more refresh yourself by drinking deep from the mind of the man my own great-grandfather once called, “the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.”

THE QUOTABLE SHERLOCK HOLMES
Originally Published by The Mysterious Press (Time-Warner) in 2000.
Now sadly out-of-print -- except here.**
Click Right Here to Download Free PDF [ 530K ]

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What do government officials think they can make you do? Anything at all, as long as it is "for the greater good."

Here's the latest bit of your government's wishing on a star "for the greater good." It involves a little nip, just a little snip, from the little tip.

Officials Weigh Circumcision to Fight H.I.V. Risk

Public health officials are considering promoting routine circumcision for all baby boys born in the United States to reduce the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

The topic is a delicate one that has already generated controversy, even though a formal draft of the proposed recommendations, due out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the end of the year, has yet to be released.

Experts are also considering whether the surgery should be offered to adult heterosexual men whose sexual practices put them at high risk of infection. But they acknowledge that a circumcision drive in the United States would be unlikely to have a drastic impact: the procedure does not seem to protect those at greatest risk here, men who have sex with men. [I note in passing that "homosexual" as a word is out and the more casual "men who have sex with men" is in. I'll leave that little bit of bureaucrat drool for another time. ]

Continued...

Seated, second from the left.

While riding on a train goin' west,
I fell asleep for to take my rest.
I dreamed a dream that made me sad,
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had.*

Cruising in the bright August morning down Highway 5. California's great central valley, north of Sacramento, where the farm towns roll by, their blunt names like an old catechism of your life, "Willows," "Williams," "Orland," "Nord."

Rice fields shimmer in fives shades of green. Enough rice to feed the Orient with a bunch left over for the States. Old and new orchards in whirring diagonal rows. Roadside attractions promising 20 different varieties of olives. White egrets pacing in the irrigation canals. Yellow crop dusters banking and coming in low over the highway.

Heading south towards San Francisco; towards an appointment with an old friend trapped too early in a brain where all the furniture is fading, dissolving, melting into a blurred now and a bright twenty years ago.

The old story. You wonder about a friend you haven't been in touch with for a decade. You meet someone who knows someone who knows him. Or you run an Internet search and find an email of a person who once knew him. And you ask. Most of the time things are fine, but then there's that time when the news is not good. Not good at all.

Continued...

Whose Will decreed This slash of sea
Would frame This sun in gleams of green?
What Plan determines stone's decline,
Or shapes in stars, or shadow's sheen,

Or that we track, as clever beasts,
The passing haze of comet's fall,
And are the glaze of Thought on flesh
That sees the need of Plan at all?

I know, I know... no Plan at all
Is thought by some to be the plan,
And yet what is this sheen of thought
That seeks to measure more than man?

Look out beyond the far Deep Field,
Beyond the limits of our sight.
It cannot be that All that is,
Is only night on deeper night.

-- From Intelligent Design

"An environmental impact statement (EIS) under United States environmental law, is a document required by the National Environmental Policy Act for federal government for ps3 users agency actions "significantly affecting the quality of the human environment."[1]

It's difficult to think of a "policy" more likely to impact "the quality of the human environment" than the current behemoth of a bill before the congress. We've had press conferences and postings, meetings and punditocracy without number. We've not seen the background documents used to create this legislation except in a few leaked memos. Nor have we seen a summation of those documents except in a few descriptions offered by the President or the boosters of the bill in speeches or declarations. These are inadequate. There's another way; an extant process. One that the government is already set up to produce....

Continued...

 ¹⁰Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.

 ¹¹Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

 ¹²For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

 ¹³Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

 ¹⁴Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;

 ¹⁵And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;

 ¹⁶Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.

 ¹⁷And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:

 ¹⁸Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;

 ¹⁹And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel,

 ²⁰For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak. (Ephesians 6:10-20, King James Version)

The list of those slaughtered the Libyan animal at Lockerbie. Click to enlarge and read the names if you can bear it.

'We should be ashamed that this has happened' The Guardian

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"We no longer have time for the good, the beautiful, or whether or not something is true. We have only time for conversation." -- John Cage

It is a commonplace that the overwhelming mass of our contemporary art that is "exhibited" has devolved into mere "exhibitionism." Vapid, disposable and preening the works are doomed to be buried in the gaping garbage pits of marketing-driven museums, and crapulous galleries that hold most contemporary American and European art. Still, great souls persist among us and great art, though it is often obscured by poseurs and perverts and pallid imitators of all stripes, can still emerge when talent and skill are wedded to inspiration and belief.

In an arresting and rare explication and meditation on the origins of great art in our time, composer Morten Lauridsen writes of his own work and the work of a long dead master in It's a Still Life That Runs Deep. The essay reveals a bit, but just a bit, about how inspiration can leap from one medium to another in art and, by such a leap, gain even more power.

Continued...

Seattle Light Rail: Not All Aboard

I actually tried Seattle's much touted new light rail system a few weeks ago as an alternate method of getting to Seafair. I was, to say the least, underwhelmed with this multi-billion dollar boondoggle. A toy for rich white people to look at lovingly and feel good about as they drive by it in their large cars.

The system in Seattle, since the political core seems to hate cars, is to link the rail to the bus lines. But the bus lines, of course, are already too skeletal to really work. To really make the new rail system utterly inefficient, the system has no feeder parking lots for the main stations. You are, it seems, supposed to take the bus to the train even if there is no bus line near you. The entire effort puts the lie to the old saw that "You can't gold plate a turd." In Seattle it would seem, you can. And you can ever sugar coat it enough that many people will say, 'Mmmm, good!"

AskMom, in a comment to Hope for Seattle Change Now That Nickels' Out? Elect Me! sums up much of my discontent with light rail and local public transport in general. If more people would listen to these human, all-too-human, points the folly of light rail might, just might, be avoided.

---

It's tedious listening to the Obamoids droning about walking, biking, bussing, light railing or even heavy railing. Were they ever parents, ever disabled, ever need to do errands, ever want to buy more than half a bag of groceries?

Continued...

We don't fill in a formula of departments and features and tips and quips every hour every day every week.

We're jamming.

We just make up our content on the fly. No going back. No edits. Mainlining others' thoughts.

Lock and Load. Fire and forget.

It's like an endless orchestra of brain musicians high on brain jazz.

If you can type and have something to say, you can sit in on the session and jam.

If you can take it high, if you can take it low, if you can tie it in a knot, if you can tie it in a bow. If you can throw it o'er your shoulder like a continental soldier...

You. Can. Play.

You can play. Any number can play. ANY NUMBER can play a number and that number is always an unknown number. But if you can play unknown numbers you can sit in on the session and jam.

If not, you can just login and kick back and watch the others go at it.

You never know what you're going to get, or which way the next person is going to bend the thread in your head.

You're just there, in real time, and saying, really, whatever comes into your head.

Sometimes its flat, even more often predictable, and, yes, it can get really boring.... just like a lot of modern jazz.

But still, there are times -- rarer now to be sure -- when the whole thing....

Just. Takes. Off....

And you find yourself thinking things you never thought you'd think remembering licks long forgotten and saying things you never planned to say to a lot of people who are coming right back at you, jamming harder and seeing if you can all somehow take it higher.

Not to be profound, just to take it around. It's like being in a Doctor Strange far out on the range in an intellectual groove and you've got lift off.

Have this happen a couple of time and you're hooked, man. Like me, man.

I've been hooked for years, man....

but it doesn't rule my life,

.... man.

Moments by Will Hoffman

This is the only thing you need to know about the world today. When you're done watching get up, go outside, and watch for moments. I am. See you later.

---

I'm back. It made me remember this:

Continued...

Yesterday I heard of a young mother who came downstairs early in the morning to find her fifth-grade son dressed for school but flat on his back in the middle of the living room staring in despair at the ceiling.

MOM: "What on Earth do you think you're doing?"

BOY: "I can't do it. I just can't go to school any more."

We all know how that small strike ended. Management made an offer ("Go to school or else."), and the union of one caved in with a few plaintive "But mom's.... "

I first thought that there was rough justice in that. After all, the thought of actually going on a ten-minute "I-won't-go-to-school" strike never would have entered my ten-year old mind. If it had I would not have heard the dreaded promise, "Wait until your father gets home." No, I would have heard the thermonuclear announcement, "I'm calling your father at work and telling him to come home right now." That one always alerted me that I had only one half-hour to get my affairs in order.

Today, after mulling the lie-down strike a little more, it seems to me there's more than a little to be said on the side of the fifth-grader's strike. After twenty years of schooling and more than thirty on the day shift, those early grades seem -- looked at through society's grubby glasses -- to be an idyllic time. After all, weren't they?

Continued...

Light, Lame, and Limp

Appropriationists: "Their work is caracterized by... recycling... cultural iconography by [arranging] elements of it in another context ...: a detour in which... the blow up of the reproduction can become more original than the original itself." -- American Appropriationists and the Lolita-Complex

The LA Times thinks it has "exposed" the Joker, but the real Joker artist is still at large. Half of the Obama 'Joker' Artist is a Palestinian Arab from Chicago, Firas Alkhateeb. All bets are off if you think you know where he's at politically:

"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him. I abstained from voting in November," he wrote in an e-mail. "Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state." If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

Dennis. Kucinich. ? Oh. Kay....

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PART II of GROWL

by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg

What Socialist Party of cement and aluminum bashed open American skulls and sucked out their freedom, brains and imagination?

Democrat! Darwinist Solitude! NEA Filth! Pelosi Ugliness! Recycling Cans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming silent under the D&C! Boys sobbing for Big Daddies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Democrat! Democrat! Nightmare of Democrat! Democrat the loveless! Gone mental Democrat! Democrat the heavy aggregator of girly-men!

Democrat the incomprehensible African-American plantation! Democrat the skull & crossbones soulless Senate and Congress of sorrows!

Democrat whose buildings are Fascist overbuilding with gun slits! Democrat the vast bloating stone of Deficit! Democrat the broke government of the pauper nation!

Democrat whose mind is pure machinery! Democrat whose blood is running tax money! Democrat whose fingers are in your wallet!

Democrat whose breast is a transexual dynamo! Democrat whose mouth is a smoking tomb! Democrat of the atheist thumb pulling out a plum and saying what a free to be bad boy am I! Democrat whose only god is Dracula!

Continued...

You know how it is, Whole. You know. And I know you know. We just can't pretend it is what it was any longer.

Bad things have been happening between us whenever I've tried to get into your sack for quite some time. It's time to face the fact that we just don't have that old natural spark between us any longer. We've faded from organic to conventional. It's time to move on to fresh fruits and vegetables new -- elsewhere. Ditto your firm, moist and alluring meats of many flavors. None of what you're doing to me is doing it for me any more.

I ignored a lot of your irritating habits, Whole -- like keeping that entire wing of the dairy case jammed with your revoltingly raw vegan pastes and six flavors of tofu, those sloppy seconds of soy. I rationalized you were just trying to keep your green ass from getting so fat you couldn't get into that tacky green apron you insist on wearing all the time, because "they go with my Earth shoes".

I put up with your petulant insistence on "helping me" find things I wasn't looking for whenever I paused in an aisle to ask myself "Johnson Grass and Brayla Suet Sausage? What the hell is that and what life form eats it?"

I put up with your plucking money from my wallet while I slept, so you could blow it on wind power and floats in the Green Pride Parades. I figured that every Whole needs a hobby.

Continued...

Jefferson Robbins of Film Freak Central contemplates Mad Men and concludes, "The only thing left for me to discuss is the hidden star of the show, something designed to go unnoticed unless you squint." The result is this compelling and illuminating exploration of the cinematography.

A recent comment caused me to remember an article I wrote for a Time Magazine special issue on Cyberspace back in the Stone Age aka "1995:" TWILIGHT ZONE OF THE ID Wednesday, Mar. 01, 1995 By GERARD VAN DER LEUN

The joint is called #hottub (pronounced "pound hot tub''), and it's open almost all the time. I've been soaking in it for two hours with "Bubbles,'' "Hard Charger'' and "Lush Lady.'' Charger and Lady are, shall we say, flirting heavily, while Bubbles is trying to get my attention. But s/he's a notorious transvestite, so I'm keeping my distance. People float in and out of this hot tub, which is open to all comers, but no one ever gets wet -- just a little damp sometimes. If you fancy someone, and he or she fancies you, it is possible to go private and exchange sexual fantasies until you're too exhausted, or bored, to continue.

This steamy place doesn't exist in the physical world. It is a "channel'' on Internet Relay Chat (called IRC among netheads). IRC consists of a series of real-time discussions on the Internet. Think of it as CB radio that you type instead of speak. Any number can play. And lots do.

A maze of steamy places that don't exist makes up the warp and the woof of sex on the Net today. The fact that virtual sex happens on the Net upsets a lot of people. Unfortunately, sex on the Net turns on a lot of people too. I know. I've been covering sex on the networks for nearly 10 years. Strictly as a professional, of course. I've seen things that would make William Burroughs blush and send Catharine MacKinnon into cardiac arrest. I've had a chance to order whips and chains by the gross, drop in on group sex and download more explicit pictures than are displayed in a decade's worth of Hustler. In one day, I've read more intimate confessions than are found in a year's worth of Penthouse letters. All this as an objective journalist, mind you. I report on cybersex, but I don't give it my essence.

Continued...

I encountered the Horseman in Laguna Beach riding along the Pacific Coast Highway. He was ahead of me moving at horse speed. The traffic, hurried as always, slowed to a pause and then pulled around him. As I pulled past him, I could hear the clip-clop of the hooves of his mount and his pack horse. I glanced into the rear view mirror after I got ahead of him and saw the blinking red and blue lights and heard the short bleep of a siren tapped once. He had been pulled over by the Laguna Beach police for an interview. I pulled in around the corner, walked back, and joined a group of citizens already watching this encounter.

Continued...

by Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg

For Karl Rove Solomon

I SAW the second-best minds of my not-so-Great Generation destroyed by Bush Derangement Syndrome, pasty, paunchy, tenured, and not looking too sharp naked,

bullshitting themselves through the African-American streets at cocktail hour lusting for a Cialis refill and one black friend on the down-low,

aging hair-plugged hipsters burning for their ancient political connection to the White House through the machinations of monied moonbats,

who warred on poverty and Blackwater's Wal-Mart and bulbous-eyed and still high from some bad acid in 1968 set up no-smoking zones on tobacco farms in the unnatural darkness of Darwinistic delusions floating a few more half-baked secular notions like "Let's all worship Zero!",

Continued...

Dear President Obama,

I am writing in response to your demand for additional money via the "WTF!? Re-Financing America's Health Care Through Gentle Extortion Act." I wish I could help you. God knows I need medical care now. Repeated exposures to you, your "speeches," and your policies have left me with an extreme case of "Spontaneous Projectile Vomiting" which I desperately would like to shake. Still, as much as I need it, I find I cannot pay for your "Free" Health Care.

In previous years I might have been able to pay doctor's a reasonable sum for curing me, but now my tax advisors tell me I can't even afford to pay you to get the "Free" kind of health care. I find I have neither the resources nor the complexion to benefit from your visionary. In short, in the middle of your term I find myself, along with 150 million other Americans, caught in an "Out of the Money Experience."

In my last letter to you I put "Poor Planning" as the cause of my overnight insolvency. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I am a taxpayer by trade. During the last year of our recent national mortgage "accident," I was working alone on the roof of a broken-down six-story building in West LA, laying down slate shingles and edging it with solid copper gutters, hoping to flip it to "Flip This House" at the Steal It Yourself cable franchise, or to palm it off on the wise Latina down the block until she got a job with the government and moved to Washington. (Thanks for that one, Barry.)

Continued...

An ad? Five minutes? Yes. And worth every second.

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A bomb called Licorne. Fired at 18.30 on July 3, 1970, and yielded 914 kilotons (Think "57 Hiroshimas"). Imagine it being fired next door. Hope that if it is ever fired, it is fired next door.

Sixty-four years ago today: "On Monday, August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged." - Hiroshima

I would imagine that if you repeated those grisly facts to most of the people of the world today they'd express either some polite sadness, a bit of political high dudgeon, or the classic contemporary rejoinder, "Whatever." It's not that they don't know or care, but that -- for the vast majority of the population of the world -- they simply cannot imagine a Hiroshima.

It has been 64 years since the incineration of a city in a second, and we've lost any sense of immediacy about exactly what it means. The images only survive in black and white films of a long-ago era, films of before (a city) and after (rubble and ash). In black and white images blood is the color of shadows and that's what we have, as a race, of memories about what these weapons can do -- shadows of victims seared into stone at the moment of the blast.

Continued...

The Asheville, North Carolina restaurant was one of those common to our post-post-modern world. Open and airy with a wall of windows framing hanging plants. Casual to the point of paper napkins. Sporting a list of local beers and -- surprise -- local wines. Tarted up with the kind of overtly ironic art on the walls where the painter has one statement and one image in his repertoire and repeats it ad nauseam. This time it seemed that the sensibility being trotted out was one of Hieronymous Bosch meets Hello Kitty.

The menu, a litany of updated regional classics such as black-eyed pea cakes, was relentlessly "improved" by garnishes such as avocados and Basmati rice. The joint's "philosophy" -- since all new restaurants must now publish a justifying manifesto along with their menu -- centered on the now tedious homage to "local" "organic" produce and a dedication to "reviving tradition" -- plus the removal of trans-fats. Collard greens, sweetened lima beans, and salty sweet potatoes bracketed the entrees. In the center you'd find rib-eyes under slathers of sauteed onions, broiled slabs of local fish dusted with some orange spice, chickens with a roasted-on glaze, pork in five different variations, and dried cranberries slipped into cakes on the sly just when you thought it was safe.

It was a boutique version of the kind of food once common to the region, but that now survived either in roadside diners named "Granny's" and "Hubert and Sal's,"or at upscale nostalgic eateries such

Continued...

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the cloud.
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
-- Wallace Stevens

A clear day and a long road running south out of Nelson in British Columbia towards the US border. Lakes loom on the left embraced by the forested mountains that rise up displaying more greens than can be counted. The air, as it slips by the window, is crisp even in July. Somewhere up past the first two ranges of mountains, snow lingers. It's a perfect day and the road goes on forever.

We come over a rise and see curling out before us between the forests a rolling S-curve of smooth asphalt arcing down the valley and then up and over the hill far beyond. My passenger, skilled in racing very large motorcycles very well, looks at it and says, "That's the road motorcyclists dream of. Perfectly banked and perfectly curved with a long, long sight line and no oncoming traffic."

I nod and give it the gas. The turbocharger kicks in. The car leaps forward with a growl. The forest outside becomes a green blur. We sweep down and around, up and over the hill. And we're gone.

I pity the future for a lot of reasons, but I really pity that future that will no longer be able to know the pure pleasures of personal speed. As Jack Kerouac knew, "Man, you gotta go."

Say what you like about our poor beaten-down gas guzzlers, they've given us over a century of thrills for everyman.

I pity that future that won't ever experience the sweet feeling of motoring in a vehicle with a large internal-combustion engine running on heavy fuel. A vehicle with a glutton's diet of pure petrochemical byproducts. A car that turns the sunshine that fell to Earth on some antediluvian day 500 million summers gone into a surge of pure speed on this fine July afternoon.

I pity my descendants who will never be able to look out at some sweeping mountain road, perfectly curved, perfectly banked, with no oncoming traffic and just "Give it the gas."

"Give it the photons" just doesn't have the same cachet.

---

HT to The Dipso Chronicles: Literary Antacid for bringing this back.

“There are signs the recession is easing.” -- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner

Once upon a time
Having money was a crime,
And I was in my prime
And working for nothing.

Now that habit's hard to break,
And what I got you wouldn't take
The time to steal. Life's so unreal
When you're working for nothing.

Working for nothing
-ain't my act.
Working for nothing
-an un-natural fact,
Working for nothing.

Continued...

Once again my vision for a new green America takes a giant step thanks to the current government of "really smart people:" Cash for Clunkers May Cost Up to $45,354 Per Vehicle. Sooner of later, the Obama Administration is going to have to implement my fiendish plan from 2005:

Hybrid government issue hybrid cars for all Americans, Free! (Well, almost)

---

The Didik: Rejoice! Your Government's Car is Here to Help You Kill Global Warming. Varoooonk!

I know saturation pollution first hand. I was born in Los Angeles in the smog of the late 40s. Electric cars were either long forgotten or not yet envisioned.LA was Smogville for Angeleans at that time. I can remember walking to school in smog so thick it seemed that my father would march in front of us with a machete. Black flakes of soot settled on the white enamel of my mother's stove as she cursed the black streaks in the collars of my father's starched white Hathaway shirts. The air, on the clear days, was best described as "ocher."

Now a haze still lingers over Los Angeles, but you need distance and elevation to make it out. There are days when the wind and weather collaborate that shine crisp and clear. Even though the automobile population of Los Angeles has quintupled since my childhood, a great deal of progress has been made in smog control and reduction. Compared to my childhood, the air of Los Angeles is now pure and pristine.

Alas, to Progressives, this progress is no progress; any improvement shy of perfection is no improvement at all. Automobiles remain. Pollution remains. Los Angeles remains. Curses, foiled again!

Worse still, the middle class remains. It grows larger, more affluent and greedy for the good life than ever. None of this is "A Good Thing." To Progressives, seeing Utopia forever just out of reach, and locked in the immortal dystopia of the now, only perfection persuades. Anything less is just not good enough. Ever.

"The Four Horseman are on cruise control among us.
They are driving Hummers."

Cash for Clunkers? Not. Good. Enough. Ever. For the Priests of Perpetual Perfection, it never will be. For the carping Friends of the Sierra Club's Earth and the jet-owning Hollywood Hypocrites, the situation remains drastic. Petroleum-Armageddon is always just one tank of gas away from destroying Earth. Every tank of gas bought and burned threatens life as we know it on every mile of every road, urban, suburban, and rural, in these states. The Four Horseman are on cruise control. They are driving used Hummers.

A savior is at hand, however, in the new hybrid vehicles popping up like dubious

Continued...

• November 2009
  
• October 2009
  
• September 2009
  
• August 2009
  
• July 2009
  
• June 2009
  
• May 2009
  
• April 2009
  
• March 2009
  
• February 2009
  
• January 2009
  
• December 2008
  
• November 2008
  
• October 2008
  
• September 2008
  
• August 2008
  
• July 2008
  
• June 2008
  
• May 2008
  
• April 2008
  
• March 2008
  
• February 2008
  
• January 2008
  
• December 2007
  
• November 2007
  
• October 2007
  
• September 2007
  
• August 2007
  
• July 2007
  
• June 2007
  
• May 2007
  
• April 2007
  
• March 2007
  
• February 2007
  
• January 2007
  
• December 2006
  
• October 2006
  
• September 2006
  
• August 2006
  
• July 2006
  
• June 2006
  
• May 2006
  
• April 2006
  
• March 2006
  
• February 2006
  
• January 2006
  
• December 2005
  
• November 2005
  
• October 2005
  
• September 2005
  
• August 2005
  
• July 2005
  
• June 2005
  
• May 2005
  
• April 2005
  
• March 2005
  
• February 2005
  
• January 2005
  
• December 2004
  
• November 2004
  
• October 2004
  
• September 2004
  
• August 2004
  
• July 2004
  
• June 2004
  
• May 2004
  
• April 2004
  
• March 2004
  
• February 2004
  
• January 2004
  
• December 2003
  
• November 2003
  
• October 2003
  
• September 2003
  
• August 2003
  
• July 2003
  
• June 2003
  

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• Links
• Links

• The Strong Horse vs. My Little Pony
• Status: Senator Edward M. Kennedy
• August On the Right: That Was the Month That Was
• August On the Side: That Was the Month That Was
• An American Koran: "We didn't start the fire..."
• The Floating Worlds of Erik Johannson
• From Torturing the CIA to the Latest Member of the Dead Kennedys, It's Been a Week That Was
• Enigmatic Image of the Week
• Whistling in the Dark: "Nothing" Except Perhaps the Will and the Idea
• Is It Too Soon? (Updated) (Updated) (Updated) (Updated) (Updated)
• Notes on Love and Death
• Compassion Fatigue
• Will "The Return of Scipio" Return? (Updated)
• NYet Times Anonymous: The Twelve Steps
• Free to American Digest Readers: The Quotable Sherlock Holmes
• Nip to Tuck: If They Can Make You Wear a Helmet and a Seat Belt, They Can Make You Circumsize Your Child
• Visit to an Old Friend
• The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D
• Where's the Environmental Impact Statement on Health Care?