bourbon and lawndarts

Generation Kill on HBO

2008-05-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

HBO will have a seven hour miniseries this July based on Evan Wright’s 2004 Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the New Face of American War. Wright was embedded with 1^st Reconnaissance Battalion in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It appears Sgt. Rudy Reyes; one of the more memorable Marines from the book will be playing himself in the series….hopefully with his J.Lo goggles.

Q & A: Robert Baer

2008-05-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

Bob Baer, a B&L favorite was recently interviewed in Men's Journal:

mj: Can we ever come to an understanding with the Iranians?

rb: Their interests are very clear-cut. They are not like the Takfiris who want to chop our heads off. The most popular TV program in Iran is about an Iranian diplomat who saves Jews during WWII. If we were Machiavellian, we'd quickly pull out of Iraq and draw the Iranians into a nasty civil war. Make them be the ones shooting people. Right now they look like the good guys, talking about the American imperialists. But if they had to impose order, they'd sing a different tune. Give Iran a taste of empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and send them a Christmas card every year asking, "How are things going?" But if we stay, spend a couple trillion dollars every five years...that's your retirement. That's rebuilding our bridges. Is it really worth it?

mj: You were in Tehran recently. How was it?

rb: It's a big party town. Opium is cheaper there than anywhere. The Iranians are fun, smart people, ironic and forthcoming. Except when it comes to instruments of the police state. They don't really joke about that.

Letters Home From The Garden Of Stone

2008-02-14T11:05:00.000-08:00

Everlast's latest song "Letters Home From The Garden Of Stone" is incredibly powerful, it almost chokes me up some.

I think it goes beyond the simple antiwar/prowar dichotomy.

Who you think i should be fighting
Mom are you proud are you ashamed
I really am trying to do the right thing
I hope my government can say the same

cause I won't know the man that kills me
and I don't know these man that I kill
We all wind up on the same side
cause not one of us doing God's will

Similarly, Serj Tankian's song "Empty Walls" is stirring. Falling more on the antiwar side, the power of Empty Walls comes in its video. The use of children to simulate the "global war on terrorism" is incredibly provocative and powerful. The scene with the Marines at the end of the video, while necessary, could have been done in better taste. But then again that was the point of it....the tasteless reality.

CSIS Smart Power Lecture: Hank Crumpton

2008-01-22T21:29:00.000-08:00

Henry “Hank” Crumpton is probably Bourbon and Lawndarts's idol. Crumpton ran the CIA's Afghan program in the wake of September 11, this same program brought the friggin' heat to the Taliban and AQ within weeks of the attacks. Bin Laden's head would be impaled on a fencepost at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if President Bush had listen to Crumpton when we were angling for the kill at Tora Bora.

Needless to say, when Hank Crumpton speaks, I listen.

He gave a speech at CSIS last week. Check out the transcript, video, or mp3.

Globalization we understand; we read about it all of the time – lots of great examples, but it’s not only globalization; it’s not only at a regional level, in Southeast Asia or Central Asia, or NATO – it’s not only the national level, but importantly it’s at a local level. Late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil, he said all politics is local. Well, I promise you, all counterterrorism is local. In the future of war, it will increasingly be the case.

Preach brotha...

I met with Ahmed Shah Massoud. He was the late leader of the northern alliance. He was assassinated just a couple of days before 9/11. Al Qaeda knew hew as an important ally with the United States and they wanted to take him out of the picture. But this was a couple of years before that; I had a discussion with him. It was in the
hinterlands of Central Asia – had a long talk about a variety of different things that we were working on together.

At the end of the conversation he asked me a question that I will never forget. He
said, your country – I have great respect for the United States, but I wonder, your country – you care more about al Qaeda and bin Laden, or do you care more about the people of Afghanistan. That was a pretty good question. And I gave him the best answer I could, which was, well, I’m from the CIA and my mission is a singular focus, and you’re talking to no one else in the U.S. government, so we care less about the people of Afghanistan.

And he smiled and nodded a very sad smile, but he knew the answer. He was
going to determine if I had the gumption to tell him the truth. But he was also I think teaching me a lesson, that you got to do both; you’ve got to find the enemy; you have to engage; and you have to engage in some cases without mercy, without hesitation. But if you don’t understand that environment and if you don’t care about the people, the job is not finished. And when we think of conflict in the future, it’s going to be exceedingly complex. It’s going to require that hard power, that critical 10 percent. But all that does is buy us space and time for that 90 percent that has to come in, that whole array of instruments. But how do we think about it? How do we organize ourselves? How do we fund ourselves?

Pearls of wisdom from the Lion of the Panjshir himself!

Your second question regarding the name, the war on – the global war on terrorism. I don’t like that name too much.

Economic Indicators

2008-01-22T21:14:00.000-08:00

Think America's economy is in the can? Try buying a round of beers in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia to our Boer readership)! Thanks to Jess for the pic.

Found in Translation

2008-01-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

"There is one evil I dread, and that is, their spies.”
- George Washington, March 24, 1776.

Found in Translation: FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets, by Philip Giraldi. The American Conservative, January 28, 2008.

Her allegations are not insignificant. Edmonds claims that Marc Grossman—ambassador to Turkey from 1994-97 and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001-05—was a person of interest to the FBI and had his phone tapped by the Bureau in 2001 and 2002. In the third-highest position at State, Grossman wielded considerable power personally and within the Washington bureaucracy. He had access to classified information of the highest sensitivity from the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon, in addition to his own State Department. On one occasion, Grossman was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a cash bribe of $15,000 from an ATC contact. The FBI also intercepted related phone conversations between the Turkish Embassy and the Pakistani Embassy that revealed sensitive U.S. government information was being sold to the highest bidder. Grossman, who emphatically denies Edmonds’s charges, is currently vice chairman of the Cohen Group, founded by Clinton defense secretary William Cohen, where he reportedly earns a seven-figure salary, much of it coming from representing Turkey.
After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released and allowed to leave the country.
Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on to the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network.

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

2008-01-21T21:33:00.000-08:00

Follow up to the Sunday Times article from two weeks ago that I posted on:
FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft. The Sunday Times, January 20, 2008.

Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file.

And then it gets really spicy:

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.
It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.
The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the ATC.

Note that Marc Grossman was central in the Libby trial. BTW, guess where Valerie Plame first met her husband Ambassador Joesph Wilson? Big high five if you guessed at an American Turkish Council party.

Sibel Edmonds, For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets

2008-01-06T20:13:00.000-08:00

Well sir, treason season started early this year....
- Kent Brockman, The Simpsons

I have posted before about the case of Sibel Edmonds, the former FBI Turkish translator subject to a gag order under the State Secrets Privilege. It now appears she has broken that gag, revealing some of her story to The Sunday Times of London:

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets
A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.
Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.
She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.
Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.
Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

I know a lot about this case. This story could end up a political scandal on scale with Watergate, or it could not get any legs in the US media and die-off. Needless to say if these revelations are proven true, it marks a sad day for our nation. The following are my comments are parts of the article:

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

The name of this official is also known to Bourbon and Lawndarts, who unlike The Sunday Times of London is not subject to the UK's notorious libel laws. The official in question is Marc Grossman, who was the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2001 to 2005, a former ambassador to Turkey, and is currently the Vice President of The Cohen Group.

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

The Sunday Times again does not name names, and again B&L has names. Starting with the household names Richard Perle and Douglas J. Feith come right off the bat.

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attach's in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

More specifically Mahmoud gave the $100k to Omar Saeed Sheikh a British born militant who once attended the London School of Economics. Omar Sheikh sent the money to Atta to finance the rest of the operation, then right before 9/11 Atta sent the remainder back to Omar. Sheikh worked with AQ, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Those last two groups are Kashmir related organizations that wage terrorist attacks against India. Sheikh is known to have contacts with the ISI, and was involved in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

By the way, Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad was is Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001, he had met with Marc Grossman a few day before.

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

It's Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, AL. Air Force Major Douglas Dickerson is likely the source of the stolen information. To bring this full circle, Malek Can Dickerson - the Major's wife - was also an FBI Turkish linguist with Sibel. The Dickerson's tried to recruit Sibel and her husband into the network on December 2, 2001.

Ebooks

2007-12-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

I have uploaded some ebooks on international relations and terrorism studies. This page lists them and will be updated.

Recently added:

Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World, by Peter Bergen

Psychology.of.Terrorism-0195172493.pdf, by Bruce Bongar (Editor)

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy, by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor, by Daniel Byman

The Rise and Decline of the State, by Martin van Creveld

Hezbollah-Changing-Face-of-Terrorism.pdf, by Judith Palmer Harik

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing, by Michael Scheuer

The Term Islamofascism

2007-12-30T12:43:00.000-08:00

AntoniusBlock at Strategy and National Security Policy blog has a great post on the term Islamofascism:

30 December 2007
On the Word "Islamofascism"

As I've pointed out here, I cringe when policymakers, pundits, and political candidates use the word "Islamofascism." It's inaccurate (fascism was a political and economic theory defined by hyper nationalism, militarism, corporatism, and a concentration of political power in a single person. The ideology of bin Laden, et. al has none of these characteristics.) More importantly, it sends the message to Muslims, who we hypothetically are trying to influence in a "war of ideas," that we are clueless. Rather than understand bin Laden's ideology (which is difficult for Westerners), we insist on stuffing it into a familiar box (a political ideology).

But I saw what I thought was a most excellent way of making this point on the smallwarsjournal.com discussion board. A poster asked how it would be taken in the United States if Muslims started analyzing the threat they faced from "Christofascism" or (and this is my addition, not the discussion board poster's), "Jewofascism"? I thought that really put it in perspective.

I know AntoniusBlock's real name, believe me - his insight is world class. And I am looking forward to the release of his new book.

"The choice is simple: Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge."

2007-12-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

In an opinion piece in the Times Magazine the great Peter Maass discusses oil and corruption. I blogged about this matter last week.

December 23, 2007
Phenomenon
The Fuel Fixers
By PETER MAASS

James Giffen likes to share the wealth. His generosity to friends is said to have included $180,000 for jewelry, $30,000 for fur coats, a luxury speedboat, two snowmobiles and lots of cash. Overall, according to prosecutors in New York, Giffen gave more than $78 million to senior officials in Kazakhstan, for which he was indicted on federal bribery charges in 2003. What makes his case most remarkable, however, is not the startling amount of supposed corruption. Nor is it Giffen’s unindicted co-conspirator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan.

What truly sets Giffen apart is that he has claimed in his defense that he was an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. As a close adviser to President Nazarbayev, who in the 1990s agreed to a series of large oil contracts with American firms, Giffen says he was moonlighting for the American government as, basically, our man in Astana. Giffen’s lawyers have called him a patriot who helped ensure that Kazakhstan’s reserves of oil and natural gas would be controlled by American rather than Chinese or Russian companies. And they have noted an oddity — after their client was indicted on charges that could land him in jail for the rest of his life, his supposed partner in bribery, President Nazarbayev, was welcomed not only at the White House but also at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport.

The case raises a number of questions, including this one: in an era of scarce oil, can America afford to punish anyone who cuts corners to win deals for American firms? In 2003, when oil sold for less than $30 a barrel, it was possible to believe we could have our anticorruption statutes and our cheap gasoline. Four years later, with oil going for $95 a barrel, it’s not so clear. The British government, citing-national security concerns, has called off an investigation into bribery of influential Saudis. Delays in Giffen’s case suggest that some federal agencies may be more concerned with protecting secrets than with seeing the prosecution go forward. Much of the pretrial evidence has been sealed, but what is known is that Giffen’s lawyers have asked for sensitive documents that they contend will show official approval of their client’s activities.

As an instrument of resource control, bribery has been the recourse of corporate executives and government officials the world over. In the 1970s, after American firms admitted to spending hundreds of millions of dollars bribing foreign officials, Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to put an end to these antics. For many years, the F.C.P.A. was not aggressively enforced and many companies outsourced bribery to middlemen or joint-venture partners. But as the corporate social-responsibility movement grew its baby teeth, the Justice Department began to show more interest in corporate bribery overseas. About 60 F.C.P.A. cases are now being investigated or prosecuted. Belatedly, American oil firms are being asked to, well, refine themselves.

Is it too late? The F.C.P.A. was passed when these firms were colossi in the energy world. Today, Congress and Exxon Mobil cannot set global norms on their own. They have to deal with a range of masters, competitors and rogues including Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hu Jintao, Gazprom, Lukoil, Sinopec and Eni. Desperate buyers — and this category now includes the United States — must compete against one another as they try to fulfill the wishes and needs of the autocratic sellers of petroleum.

I saw this firsthand when President Chávez signed an accord in Caracas with a Chinese company that would launch a satellite for Venezuela. Chávez delivered a lengthy and rambling speech, during which he flapped his arms in the air like a loon and raved about the beauty of Chinese women, the greatness of Chairman Mao and the evils of free enterprise, warning that “capitalists are generating death.” The Chinese on the stage, who seemed unlikely to share all of their host’s notions, slightly nodded their heads in the quiet approval that was required.

By lending support to the particularly dubious regime in Sudan, China clearly puts its energy needs above moral concerns. But the American government cannot avoid the contradictions of needing oil but wanting to get it, or at least be seen to get it, in moral ways. This predicament has been evident for a long time in our dealings with dictatorships in, for instance, Saudi Arabia and Angola. The Giffen case is a timely iteration as we fret on the threshold of $100-a-barrel petroleum. The choice is simple: Make painful but necessary changes to reduce our addiction to oil, or sink deeper into our moral sludge.

Peter Maass, a contributing writer, is working on a book about oil.

Conversations with History - Trita Parsi

2007-12-23T16:56:00.001-08:00

Sy Hersh on the Iran NIE

2007-12-23T16:52:00.000-08:00

Snoopy's Christmas

2007-12-22T13:05:00.000-08:00

Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel was one of my favorite books growing up. Enjoy, and Happy Holidays from Bourbon and Lawndarts.

My dog ate it!

2007-12-22T12:56:00.000-08:00

I love Jonathan Papelbon for two reasons. First is because he's the best closer in baseball and second is because he is just like some of my dumbass drinking buddies. But like all dumbassery, it comes with a price, witness this headline:

Papelbon says dog destroyed ball from final out of Series

Papelbon, his pink shirt, and his bulldog Boss

Homo erectus extinctus

2007-12-22T12:36:00.000-08:00

Homo erectus extinctus, by Lois Rogers. The Sunday Times, December 16, 2007.

Is nature determined to make men extinct? Senior scientists believe that women may evolve as humanity’s sole representatives — and social and political trends are lending weight to their theories. Lois Rogers reports

Roger Dodger (2002)

Still amped over winning the World Series!

2007-12-15T14:50:00.000-08:00

...But the Division championship was the most fun!

"Papelbon's taken the beer case off his head, so that's progress." - Dennis Eckersley

"Papelbon needs to put some pants on." - Dennis Eckersley

Chili Guy

2007-12-15T14:24:00.000-08:00

The Chili Guy is quickly becoming a Boston legend. For those not in the know, The Chili Guy lives around Fenway Park....literally around Fenway Park, because I think he sleeps on the streets. He's a ticket scalper and frequent contributor on WBCN's Toucher and Rich show. Anyway, he's probably one of the funniest people I have ever heard. Toucher and Rich are counting down the Top 5 Chili guy moments of the year. Enjoy!

#5 mp3 Download

Chili Guy's Myspace Page

#4 mp3 Download

#3 mp3 Download

Updates to come

Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets.

2007-12-15T13:11:00.000-08:00

Steve LeVine on his excellent blog The Oil and the Glory has a post titled “Prosecuting Foreign Bribery Under the Bush Administration”. Relating events in the ongoing James Giffin “Kazakhgate” case to our current administrations penchant for secrecy.

When they unveiled the indictment in April 2003, U.S. prosecutors portrayed their case against James Giffen as open and shut -- the largest foreign bribery case in U.S. history. And by the looks of the detail, they had reason for confidence. There they were -- six individual examples of U.S. oil company payments totalling some $80 million being coursed through European bank accounts linked to the president of Kazakhstan or his associates.

As regular readers of this blog recall, Giffen once controlled the biggest oil deals in the world as oil adviser to Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev. He's the principal character in The Oil and the Glory.

Yet in a New York court hearing today, the case seemed a lot more complex. Judge William Pauley, who two years ago issued fiery warnings to both sides to accelerate the pace, was reduced to a mild rebuke of the prosecution, and scheduling the next hearing for April 18th. And jury selection? Not a hint.

What's the holdup? The defense, brilliantly led by former U.S. prosecutor William Schwartz, wants documents from a handful of U.S. intelligence agencies to prove Giffen's contention that the whole time he was negotiating those oil deals for a fee, he was doubling as an effective agent for the American government.

This being probably the most secretive administration in U.S. history, dislodging such documentation takes time. Perhaps a friend of mine is right -- we may not see a trial until this administration is out of office.

Once again I will evoke this scene from Syriana, oft cited on this blog:

Some trust fund prosecutor, got off-message at Yale, thinks he's gonna run this up the flagpole, make a name for himself, maybe get elected some two-bit, congressman from nowhere, with the result that Russia or China can suddenly start having, at our expense, all the advantages we enjoy here. No, I tell you. No, sir. Corruption charges! Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.

P.S. - Steve's The Oil and Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea, is excellent.

Global Legal Monitor

2007-12-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

Good source:

The Global Legal Monitor, an electronic publication of the Law Library of Congress, is intended for those who have an interest in legal developments from around the world.

This online publication will be updated frequently, drawing upon information selected from the Global Legal Network, official national legal publications, and reliable press sources. Occasionally, a special section may be added to include lectures, conferences, symposia, and exhibits on timely legal topics sponsored by the Law Library of Congress.

Robert Baer on Alex Jones Show

2007-12-13T15:25:00.000-08:00

Robert Baer was interviewed on the Alex Jones show. Jones is a little out there, but Baer is my boy.

“By not answering these questions we're leaving open these nutty conspiracy theories.”

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Iran NIE

2007-12-03T13:19:00.000-08:00

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran is out:

December 12, 2007: National Intelligence Estimate Key Judgments: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. (PDF)

Key Judgments

A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.

• We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.

• We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)

• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.

• We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.

• Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.

B. We continue to assess with low confidence that Iran probably has imported at least some weapons-usable fissile material, but still judge with moderate-to-high confidence it has not obtained enough for a nuclear weapon. We cannot rule out that Iran has acquired from abroad—or will acquire in the future—a nuclear weapon or enough fissile material for a weapon. Barring such acquisitions, if Iran wants to have nuclear weapons it would need to produce sufficient amounts of fissile material indigenously—which we judge with high confidence it has not yet done.

C. We assess centrifuge enrichment is how Iran probably could first produce enough fissile material for a weapon, if it decides to do so. Iran resumed its declared centrifuge enrichment activities in January 2006, despite the continued halt in the nuclear weapons program. Iran made significant progress in 2007 installing centrifuges at Natanz, but we judge with moderate confidence it still faces significant technical problems operating them.

• We judge with moderate confidence that the earliest possible date Iran would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon is late 2009, but that this is very unlikely.

• We judge with moderate confidence Iran probably would be technically capable of producing enough HEU for a weapon sometime during the 2010-2015 time frame. (INR judges Iran is unlikely to achieve this capability before 2013 because of foreseeable technical and programmatic problems.) All agencies recognize the possibility that this capability may not be attained until after 2015.

D. Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so. For example, Iran’s civilian uranium enrichment program is continuing. We also assess with high confidence that since fall 2003, Iran has been conducting research and development projects with commercial and conventional military applications—some of which would also be of limited use for nuclear weapons.

E. We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program.

• Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran’s leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program. It is difficult to specify what such a combination might be.

• We assess with moderate confidence that convincing the Iranian leadership to forgo the eventual development of nuclear weapons will be difficult given the linkage many within the leadership probably see between nuclear weapons development and Iran’s key national security and foreign policy objectives, and given Iran’s considerable effort from at least the late 1980s to 2003 to develop such weapons. In our judgment, only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from eventually producing nuclear weapons—and such a decision is inherently reversible.

F. We assess with moderate confidence that Iran probably would use covert facilities—rather than its declared nuclear sites—for the production of highly enriched uranium for a weapon. A growing amount of intelligence indicates Iran was engaged in covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment activity, but we judge that these efforts probably were halted in response to the fall 2003 halt, and that these efforts probably had not been restarted through at least mid-2007.

G. We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.

H. We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.

2007-12-02T14:07:00.000-08:00

Ben has a blog post up about the Iranian Nuclear issue. He writes:

Until Iran allows unfettered access by the IAEA inspectors to determine the true purpose and capability of their programs, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

This presupposes that Iran is denying the IAEA access. The fact of the matter is that they are not. This is the summary from November 15^th IAEA Board of Governors report by ElBaradei, Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions 1737 and 1747 in the Islamic Republic of Iran, emphasis is mine:

F. Summary

39. The Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities. Iran concluded a Facility Attachment for FEP. However, it should be noted that, since early 2006, the Agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current nuclear programme is diminishing.

40. Contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities, having continued the operation of PFEP and FEP. Iran has also continued the construction of the IR-40 and operation of the Heavy Water Production Plant.

41. There are two remaining major issues relevant to the scope and nature of Iran’s nuclear programme: Iran’s past and current centrifuge enrichment programme and the alleged studies. The Agency has been able to conclude that answers provided on the declared past P-1 and P-2 centrifuge programmes are consistent with its findings. The Agency will, however, continue to seek corroboration and is continuing to verify the completeness of Iran’s declarations. The Agency intends in the next few weeks to focus on the contamination issue as well as the alleged studies and other activities that could have military applications.

42. Iran has provided sufficient access to individuals and has responded in a timely manner to questions and provided clarifications and amplifications on issues raised in the context of the work plan. However, its cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive. As previously stated, Iran’s active cooperation and full transparency are indispensable for full and prompt implementation of the work plan.

43. In addition, Iran needs to continue to build confidence about the scope and nature of its present programme. Confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme requires that the Agency be able to provide assurances not only regarding declared nuclear material, but, equally importantly, regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran. Although the Agency has no concrete information, other than that addressed through the work plan, about possible current undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, the Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran without full implementation of the Additional Protocol. This is especially important in the light of Iran’s undeclared activities for almost two decades and the need to restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. Therefore, the Director General again urges Iran to implement the Additional Protocol at the earliest possible date. The Director General also urges Iran to implement all the confidence building measures required by the Security Council, including the suspension of all enrichment related activities.

44. The Director General will continue to report as appropriate.

Grandpa's Old Cough Syrup is back in style

2007-11-30T09:39:00.000-08:00

Aww yeah.... Grandpa's Old Cough Syrup is back in style. Now we just need a story in the Globe about Lawndarts being the hot toy for Christmas and this blog will be cooler then Miles Davis.

Spirits of the Times: Bourbon’s Shot at the Big Time, By Eric Asminov. The New York Times, November 28, 2007

Bourbon’s Shot at the Big Time

By ERIC ASIMOV

In the recent history of whiskey, bourbon would seem to have had a lot going for it. It’s homegrown, for one thing. Grass-roots acceptance counts for a lot when you are battling for shelf space. Bourbon has always been right up there with college football, Nascar and canned beer — the sort of whiskey that anyone can order without fear of being labeled effete or snobbish.

Yet, awareness is not always enough in the whiskey business. The days are long gone when “Dallas” ruled the airwaves and J. R. Ewing made bourbon and branch a household term. When bourbon distillers looked up 20 years ago they saw the market moving in two directions, both away from them. Affluent drinkers were exploring the wonders and complexities of single malts while younger bar-goers were turning to vodka and rum.

The dive in sales forced bourbon producers to accept that the whiskey market had changed. They might not be able to compete with vodka, but to avoid permanent relegation to the dusty back shelves of liquor stores, bourbon producers would have to find a way to attract the budding connoisseur class.

Enter the small batch, the single barrel and the special selection, marketing terms for what the industry calls high-end and superpremium bourbons. These whiskeys are chosen to emphasize complexity and even elegance, a quality that has rarely been associated with bourbon and a word that no doubt panics bourbon marketers who still favor the rural look of bib overalls, boots and gimme hats (that effete snob thing).

If you love whiskey but haven’t thought of bourbon as being in the same league as a good Scotch, Irish and even, these days, rye, you owe it to yourself to give it another try. A well-made, well-aged bourbon offers a gorgeous spectrum of flavors, beginning with a distinctive sweetness that can, depending on the distiller’s aim, turn spicy and peppery with clear fruitiness, or mellow into a creamy caramel toffee with highlights of citrus.

Confidence bred of success has led distillers to pay more attention to their best whiskeys. Meanwhile, microdistilleries all over the United States are getting into the act. While they have not yet made their presence felt on a national scale — whiskey takes a lot of time — it’s easy to anticipate their eventually making a mark.

Clearly, the producers’ efforts to improve quality, coinciding with the rebirth of the cocktail culture, have been a big success. The resurgence in spirit sales in the United States has been led by the high-end brands, said David Ozgo, chief economist for the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, a trade group, and that is especially true of bourbon.

From 2002 to 2006, sales of bourbon and Tennessee whiskey rose by 12.23 percent. In the same period, sales of high-end whiskeys ($20 to $30) rose by 27.62 percent and sales of superpremium bourbons (above $30) rose by 60.52 percent.

Sales are one thing. The Dining section’s tasting panel recently evaluated 25 bourbons strictly to answer another question: How good are these whiskeys, anyway? The short answer is, very good. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Pete Wells, editor of the Dining section, who has written extensively about drinks, and Ethan R. Kelley, the spirit sommelier at the Brandy Library in TriBeCa.

To begin, let’s get our nomenclature straight. While many people believe that bourbon must come from Kentucky, it’s not true. Bourbon can be made anywhere in the United States as long as two federal conditions are met. First, the blend of grains from which the whiskey is distilled must be at least 51 percent corn. Second, the whiskey must be stored in charred new oak containers. If it is aged in the oak containers (federal regulators do not seem to like the word barrel) for two years or more it qualifies as straight bourbon whiskey.

Bourbon is not Tennessee whiskey, like Jack Daniel’s, which is essentially made like bourbon until it is filtered through charcoal, at which point it becomes Tennessee whiskey. Bourbon is also not corn whiskey, which by law cannot be stored in charred oak containers. A whiskey can be distilled 100 percent from corn, but if it so much as kisses those charred oak containers it becomes bourbon.

While these laws may seem rigid, they leave a lot of room for creative distilling. Once you’ve got your 51 percent corn in the blend of grains (which distillers call the mash bill), you’ve got important decisions to make. Most distillers probably use 65 percent to 75 percent corn, blended with some proportion of rye, wheat or malted barley, and each grain provides different characteristics. The corn offers the sweetness and lush texture that are the basis of so many bourbons. Wheat adds a mellow roundness, while rye provides a spicy, peppery fruitiness and a dry quality. Barley can add a creaminess and a grainy sweetness.

Producers must also decide how long to age their whiskeys. Younger whiskeys tend to be more aggressive and fiery. Aging tames the whiskeys, rounding off raw edges and bringing out a smooth complexity.

Younger and older whiskeys have their attractions, but with bourbon long-term aging is particularly beneficial, at least in my opinion. I loved the smoothness and the added complexity in some of the older bourbons we tasted, but the combination didn’t always sit well with Ethan.

“I don’t know if bourbon was designed to be so elegant and proper,” he lamented, though not unhappily.

We all noted the wide range of flavors in these bourbons, from creamy chocolate and fruity to grassy and herbaceous. “It was not the full frontal corn assault that once dominated bourbon,” Pete said, noting that the flavors in some bottles seemed beyond the realm of what might be acceptable in bourbon.

The bourbons we tasted ranged in price from $14 to $120, and while a $20 bottle, Jim Beam Black, was our best value, there was some correlation between price and quality.

The most expensive bourbon, the 16-year-old A. H. Hirsch Reserve, was something of an anomaly. It was among the last batches of whiskey distilled at Michter’s Distillery in Schaefferstown, Pa., which closed in 1989.

The name Michter’s lives on as a brand, but it is distilled in Kentucky (Michter’s U.S. 1 Bourbon did not make our cut). The A. H. Hirsch is a fine whiskey, smoky and complex, but the $120 is mostly for its rarity.

Naturally, the bourbon industry wants to capitalize on the cocktail craze, which is fine, but anybody who makes a mixed drink of our No. 1 bourbon, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20-Year-Old, needs some remedial shaking and stirring. This is clearly a sipping whiskey of wonderful complexity, which would be wasted in even the finest mint julep or bourbon punch. The same goes for our No. 2, the fruity and chocolate-and-caramel-flavored Vintage 17-Year-Old.

If mix you must, I would suggest our No. 3, the brisk, spicy Knob Creek, which tastes as if it has a rye component. It might be the perfect whiskey for one of those cocktails that seem to be at home with either rye or bourbon.

Some of the biggest names in bourbon did not make our list. Wild Turkey just missed. It was good bourbon, but the panel did not find it distinctive enough in this company. We also liked the Van Winkle’s 10-Year-Old, which we thought would be great for cocktails. Maker’s Mark did not come close.

While the rules do not require it, most bourbons do, in fact, come from Kentucky. One that does not is the Hudson Four Grain Bourbon, distilled by Tuthilltown Spirits in the Hudson Valley. We liked it very much but left it off the list because it is virtually impossible to find.

Each of us also had a favorite or two that did not make the list. Ethan liked an Elijah Craig 18-Year-Old and an Eagle Rare Single Barrel 10-Year-Old. Pete liked the Eagle and the Wild Turkey. Florence liked the Elijah Craig and the Virginia Gentleman, an old brand that has the distinction of being distilled in Kentucky then redistilled in Virginia. I very much liked a Corner Creek Reserve 8-Year-Old and Bulleit.

The strongest bourbon in the tasting was Wild Turkey, at 101 proof. The final strength of a whiskey is another choice that distillers must make.

While the just-distilled whiskey can be as high as 160 proof, those pesky federal laws mandate that it must be watered down at least to 125 proof before entering those charred oak containers.

By the time it is bottled, it can be as low as 80 proof, so producers have a lot of room to find just the right strength. If you find a bourbon that seems too strong, do what the producers do and add more water. Or ice.

Taibbi Interview

2007-11-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I had an epiphany, I realized that I didn't have a problem with the American Left, insomuch as I had a problem with Leftists. They were just so full it. Narrow down the axiom “all politics is local” to “all politics is personal”. This of course is unenlightened and tribalistic, but so is the nature of man.

Realizing this, I set out to find liberals who's books I could read without chewing a bottle of Tums. People who didn't give me a migraine and weren't constipated. One guy I found was Greg Palast, a corporate fraud investigator and forensic economist turned investigative reporter. Another, was Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and formerly The eXile. Both can crack and take a joke, hit you with the facts, and write in a entertaining and accessible manner.

CampusProgress.org certainly is not a site I frequent, but it currently has an interview with Taibbi worth noting.

Taibbi on journalism:

You wrote a column in the New York Press a few years back referring to journalism as “shoveling coal for Satan.” I believe you also said that journalism as a career was worse than being a worker in a tampon factory. Should any sane young person consider a career in journalism?

If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days. My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism.

What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something. Instead of having a bunch of liberal arts grads who’ve read Siddhartha 50 times writing about health care, it would be really nice if some of the people who are writing about health care were doctors.

Are there any journalists working today who you look up to?

Seymour Hersh is the guy I really, really admire. I met him last year for the first time—I had to interview him for Rolling Stone and I was really nervous about it because I was told that he was this famously irascible character. When I called him up to schedule the interview, he was such an incredible prick on the telephone—he just cursed me out and everything, it was awful.

He cursed you out?

Oh yeah, totally. He was busy. He was like, “Go fuck yourself.” Then when I actually went to go meet him he was the nicest guy you could possibly imagine. I sat with him for four hours. He’s old school. He’s the kind of guy who sits and pores over the newsletters of all these minor government agencies to see who retired that week so he can approach that person to see if he’s got any stories to tell on his way out of service. There are a few guys like that who are still out there, but they’re all holdovers from a lost age. I’d like to say that I’m the continuation of that crop of journalists, but I’m totally not.

On the left:

You wrote an article for Adbusters on “The American Left’s Silly Victim Complex.” Some lefty blogs were pissed off about that piece.

Sure, yeah, I got so much hate mail about that.

I think your basic critique was that the left today sort of has its priorities out of place. Have you changed your view about that at all?

No. It’s not that I’m taking issue with anything that the American left stands for or how it behaves. It’s really a class issue more than anything else. The people who are the public face of the American left tend to be people like me. They’re upper class, liberal arts-educated white people, for the most part, who come from a certain background where the things that are important
to them are these mostly intellectual issues—like the environment, or social issues like abortion, feminism, that sort of thing. The historical basis for the American left, if you go back to Roosevelt, is sort of a patrician structure where you had these upper-class people advocating on behalf of a wider working class base. What’s happened now is that it’s kind of splintered and the upper-class portion is overemphasizing the things that are important to them and deemphasizing the things that are important to their base. That’s why the party orthodoxies right now aren’t things like free trade and credit policy, for instance—like the bankruptcy bill. You would never find a celebrated lefty politician who is pro-life but voted against NAFTA, for instance. It’s always the other way around. What’s happened because of that—because the orthodoxies are all backwards—is that the American left has alienated its natural constituency, which is this vast, middle-to-working class underclass that has been fucked over by modern global capitalism.

Instead of standing up and fighting for those people, the left has gotten bogged down in political correctness and the environment and stuff like that. They’ve lost touch with those people, who are now flocking en masse to the Rush Limbaughs of the world, who are talking directly to them and who are actively courting their support. That’s all I was saying. It’s just a question of emphasis; it’s not that the stuff they stand for is bad.

His essay "The American Left's Silly Victim Complex" is excellent and worth checking out.

Strange Maps

2007-11-25T19:30:00.000-08:00

This site: Strange Maps, is awesome. They have some crazy stuff on there.

RP

2007-11-25T18:47:00.001-08:00

Tea Party '07

Sibel Edmonds

2007-11-25T18:10:00.000-08:00

An Inconvenient Patriot, By David Rose. Vanity Fair, August 15, 2005.

Let Sibel Edmonds Speak

From The American Conservative, April 26, 2006. By retired CIA operative Philip Giraldi:

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish FBI translator turned whistleblower who has been subjected to a gag order could provide a major insight into how neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time. On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives who have profited from the Turkish connection. Israel has long cultivated a close relationship with Turkey since Ankara's neighbours and historic enemies - Iran, Syria and Iraq - are also hostile to Tel Aviv. Islamic Turkey has also had considerable symbolic value for Israel, demonstrating that hostility to Muslim neighbours is not a sine qua non for the Jewish state.

Turkey benefits from the relationship by securing general benevolence and increased aid from the US Congress - as well as access to otherwise unattainable military technology. The Turkish General Staff has a particular interest because much of the military spending is channeled through companies in which the generals have a financial stake, making for a very cozy and comfortable business arrangement. The commercial interest has also fostered close political ties, with the American Turkish Council, American Turkish Cultural Alliance and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations all developing warm relationships with AIPAC and other Jewish and Israel advocacy groups throughout the US.

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen to turn a dollar. In fact the neocons seem to have a deep and abiding interest in Turkey, which, under other circumstances, might be difficult to explain. Doug Feith's International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey, with Richard Perle taking $48,000 annually as a consultant. Other noted neoconservatives linked to Turkey are former State Department number three, Marc Grossman, current Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, Paul Wolfowitz and former congressman Stephen Solarz. The money involved does not appear to come from the Turkish government, and FBI investigators are trying to determine its source and how it is distributed. Some of it may come from criminal activity, possibly drug trafficking, but much more might come from arms dealing. Contracts in the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars provide considerable fat for those well placed to benefit.

Investigators are also looking at Israel's particular expertise in the illegal sale of US military technology to countries like China and India. Fraudulent end-user certificates produced by Defense Ministries in Israel and Turkey are all that is needed to divert military technology to other, less benign, consumers. The military-industrial-complex/neocon network is also well attested. Doug Feith has been associated with Northrup Grumman for years, while defense contractors fund many neocon-linked think tanks and "information" services. Feith, Perle and a number of other neocons have long had beneficial relationships with various Israeli defense contractors.

Library

2007-11-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

This is a file library to host some pieces that are interesting or hard to come by.

Articles

Licensed to Kill: Shadowing our Government's Favorite Arms Dealer, by Ken Silverstein. Harper's, May 2000. (PDF)

My Brother the Bomber, by Shiv Malik. Prospect (UK), May 31, 2007 (PDF)

An Army of One's Own, by Elizabeth Rubin. Harper's, February 1997. (PDF)

Israel and the origins of Iran's Arab option: dissection of a strategy misunderstood, by Trita Parsi. The Middle East Journal, 60.3, Summer 2006. (PDF)

Cocaine and Cutouts: Israel's Unseen Diplomacy, by Jane Hunter. The Link, March 1989. (PDF)

Ebooks

American League Champs!

2007-10-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

It is not sufficient that the Sox succeed--the Yankees must fail.

Ron Paul For the Long Haul y'all

2007-10-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

This music video is amazing! This is how you campaign; de-centralized, emergent self-organizing, with oodles of creativity.

(h/t: Seth)

Syrian Nukes

2007-09-23T20:48:00.000-07:00

"North Korea may be cooperating with Syria on some sort of nuclear facility in Syria, according to new intelligence the United States has gathered over the past six months, sources said. The evidence, said to come primarily from Israel, includes dramatic satellite imagery that led some U.S. officials to believe that the facility could be used to produce material for nuclear weapons."
- N. Korea, Syria May Be at Work on Nuclear Facility, By Glenn Kessler. Washington Post, September 13, 2007

"This story is nonsense"
- Joseph Cirincione

Hogwash. I don't buy any of this. An absolute waste, we are absolutely going down the wrong track.

Syria In Their Sights: The neocons plan their next “cakewalk.” by Robert Dreyfuss. The American Conservative, January 16, 2006.

“Missed Opportunities: Cooperation Confrontation in the U.S. – Syrian Relationship,” David Lesch. The Century Foundation, 9/5/2007 (PDF)

Prescient?

" Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.
But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.
Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging — through influence in the U.S. business community — investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan’s economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.
Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.

King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein."
- A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm

Ron Paul on the drug war

2007-09-23T18:40:00.000-07:00

This is a 1988 clip of Ron Paul appearing on the Morton Downey Jr. Show. An audience member challenges him on his drug war policies, hilarity ensues.

Israel Lobby Documentary

2007-09-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

The Dutch documentary program "Tegenlicht" about the Israel lobby in the USA and it's influence on US Foreign Policy. April 2007

Part one

Part two

Part three

Part four

Part five

Greenspan on Daily Show

2007-09-23T18:33:00.000-07:00

Link Dump

2007-09-12T15:54:00.000-07:00

Financial Warfare, By Paul Bracken. Foreign Policy Research Institute, September 2007

Iran moves to ditch U.S. dollar, By DEREK SANDS. UPI, Sept. 10, 2007

Prediction Validated? China and the Dollar, National Interest Online, 09.06.2007

Kunstler: The Dis-information Society, September 10, 2007

Boston Cannons Lacrosse

2007-09-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Bourbon and Lawndarts used to be a big time Lacrosse guy. This Cannons highlight mix is pretty sweet.

Be Sure to Vote

2007-09-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

The Ex Presidents

Interview with Stephen Gaghan

2007-09-06T06:40:00.000-07:00

This interview with Stephen Gaghan is highly recommended. Gaghan wrote and directed the film Syriana, while Bourbon and Lawndarts has mixed thoughts about the film, we did enjoy the hell out of it. In researching for the screenplay, Gaghan hooked up with one of Bourbon and Lawndarts’ idols, Robert Baer, and joined him in traveling around the world. This interview with Charlie Rose does not offer mile-deep scholarly analysis of the Middle East, but does give a mile-wide view. Gaghan talks about experiences in the souk’s of Beirut where he met with Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, talks with Gucci Gulch policy-wonks and realpolitik with London oil traders. Enjoy!

A Second Look at the Saudis

2007-09-06T06:28:00.000-07:00

Great work by this guy, I haven’t read all of it, but his research parallels mine:

A Second Look at the Saudis

Videos-a-Plenty

2007-08-31T07:53:00.000-07:00

Kimmel explains what Miss Teen South Carolina, and future Mrs. Bourbon-and-Lawndarts, really meant.

Ron Paul Mops the Floor with CNN Anchor (05/20/07)

Robert Baer on Hardball, "We fought a war on a lie"

David Brent : Free Love On The Freelove Freeway

Mad as Hell

2007-08-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

Bourbon and Lawndarts has been channeling Howard Beale lately:

Whats driving international relations?

2007-08-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

Lest we forget what the driving issue is in world politics these days:

The evangel of Arthur Jensen:

Network (1976)

“Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?” The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no “Third Worlds.” There is no “West.” There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immense, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars. Electro-dollars. Multi-dollars. Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up and howl about America and democracy.

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon—those are the nations of the world today. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.”

Gonzales Resigns

2007-08-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

"It's Morning in America"

- Fired U.S. attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias on the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

What is unfolding right now is absolutely incredible, if not incredibly disturbing. I'm not sure the media has the narrative down.

'Voter Caging' is the important thread here:

What the heck is vote caging, and why should we care? By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, May 31, 2007

PBS Caging Story - Part I

PBS Caging Story - Part II

Horton on Hofstadter

2007-08-18T13:48:00.000-07:00

Scott Horton has an excellent post up about Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". I have always said Hofstadter nailed it for the ages. Worth the read.

Love this Photo

2007-07-26T20:48:00.000-07:00

I really want this framed:

Courtesy of the National Security Archive

McMaster

2007-07-26T20:35:00.000-07:00

Army Colonel H.R. McMaster was passed up for promotion to Brigadier General for the second time this week. McMaster, a veritable military genius and rock star is responsible for one of the few successes in our Iraq campaign, with the successful pacification of Tal Afar. In the Gulf War McMaster was awarded a Silver Star for his leadership at the Battle of 73 Easting, which was subsequently chronicled by Tom Clancy. In the intellectual realm, McMaster’s doctoral thesis at UNC transformed into the book Dereliction of Duty, which now an influential text about the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Vietnam.

Col. McMaster is the target of a political hatchet job. I imagine he stuck it to the bureaucracy one to many times, was shown to be right one to many times, and made too many bureaucratic and political enemies. This is a damn shame. Col. McMaster is exactly the type of man our nation needs and deserves to serve as a flag officer.

In face of this political hackery, the words of my idol, Air Force Col. John Boyd resonate particularly well:

"Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” he said. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction.

“Or you can go that way and you can do something – something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared into the officer’s eyes and heart. “To somebody be or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do. Which way will you go?

Sole Survivor

2007-06-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has a great article about Marcus Luttrell, a man at the center of one of the most chilling battles in the "War on Terror". Luttrell, who was previously only discussed as "The ONE" and definitely has the same wallet as Jules Winnfield, finally gets to step out of the shadows and tell his tale with Patrick Robinson in Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10. The coauthor of Lone Survivor, Patrick Robinson, is my buddies father, so I have been privy to some of the story for a year now. I have little doubt that this is going to be an intense book. Luttrell emerged as the only survivor of Operation Red Wing in Afghanistan, June of 2005.

Remember:
Petty Officer Danny Dietz (SEAL Team 1)
Petty Officer Matthew Axelson (SEAL Team 1)
Navy Lt. Mike Murphy (SEAL Team 1)
Chief Warrant Officer Corey J. Goodnature (pilot, US Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment)
Chief Warrant Officer Chris J. Scherkenbach (pilot, US Army 160th SOAR)
Sgt. Kip A. Jacoby (US Army, 160th SOAR)
Sgt. 1st Class Marcus V. Muralles (US Army, 160th SOAR)
Chief Petty Officer Jacques J. Fontan (SEAL Team 10)
Lt. Cmdr. Erik S. Kristensen (SEAL Team 10)
Petty Officer 2nd Class James Suh (SEAL Team 1)
Petty Officer First Class Jeff Taylor (SEAL Team 1 medic)
Master Sgt. Michael Russell (US Army, 160th SOAR)
Maj. Steve Reich (pilot, US Army 160th SOAR)
Sgt. 1st Class James "Tre" Ponder III (US Army, 160th SOAR)
Petty Officer 2nd Class Eric Shane Patton (SEAL Team 1)
U.S. Navy Lt. Michael McGreevy (SEAL Team 10)
Petty Officer Jeffrey Alan Lucas (SEAM Team 10)
Senior Chief Petty Officer Dan Healy (SEAL Team 1)
SSgt. Shamus Goare (US Army, 160th SOAR)

War Readings

2007-05-28T14:55:00.000-07:00

Robert Baer - More Bad Intelligence on Iran and Iraq

You would think by now the Bush Administration would have drained the well of bad intelligence on Iraq and Iran. Apparently not.

Michael Scheuer - Al-Qaeda’s Waiting Game: Bush isn’t winning in his battle against our real enemy.

The lack of an al-Qaeda attack inside the United States since 9/11 proves only that there has not been an al-Qaeda attack in the United States since 9/11. That fact is in no way proof that our war on al-Qaeda has destroyed its capacity to hit America at home. The most that should be claimed is that the CIA rendition program may have disrupted and delayed operational planning. Alternatively, bin Laden may have decided that a near-term attack would reunite Americans at a time when our own folly is already sufficient to make the U.S. the second superpower to be defeated by Allah’s mujahedin.

Andrew Bacevich - I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.

William Engdahl - Darfur: Forget genocide, there's oil

No. "It's the oil, stupid."

BBC - Obstacles to peace: Water

The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Martin Asser looks at the central issue of water.

Linkage

2007-05-24T09:29:00.000-07:00

Lustick -

Comparing Bush's speech to the Cadets in 2007 to the speech he gave there in 2003, the difference is obvious. In 2003 he described al-Qaeda's remnants as being hunted down in a few dark corners of the world. In 2007 he described al-Qaeda as a raging storm, building Iraq as a gigantic base of operations. America, he said, "living in the eye of a storm. All around us, dangerous winds are swirling, and these winds could reach our shores at any moment." Beware of Hurricane Osama! What a sensational story, for the press and for the President--the storm of the century that is always about to hit, and never goes away!

Nate Fick -

The American political system doesn’t always leave much room for people who’d rather vote for policies than for parties. Next November, however, I’ll likely side with the candidate who best articulates a sensible international agenda. There are five items on my foreign policy wish list, shaped both by pride at having served alongside our nation’s flag in Afghanistan and Iraq and by the reality of having buried too many comrades beneath it.

Freakonomics -

Interview with Nassim Taleb the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

PhilaLawyer -

Tanuki - Part 1

Succisa Virescit

2007-05-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

After a horrible year of injustice, the Duke lacrosse will be playing in the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Final Four this weekend. The team went 16-2 tearing through their regular season and will face-off against the Cornell Big Red on Saturday.

Good luck to the Blue Devils, both Men’s and Women’s teams are looking to bring home some hardware this season.

9/11, Ron Paul

2007-05-19T14:28:00.001-07:00

Rep. Ron Paul kicked up a dust storm last week during the South Carolina GOP primary debate. During the debate he argued that 9/11 and al Qaeda was a result of “blowback”. Blowback is term used at CIA for unintended consequences of covert action; Paul stretched the term to include broader American policy over the past 60 years. One policy mentioned was our containment of Iraq throughout the 90’s whereby we regularly bombed Iraqi targets.

Rudy Giuliani immediately seized on this statement for a cheap political score:

That's an extraordinary statement of someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've ever heard that before and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11.
(APPLAUSE)
I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that.

The only problem is that Ron Paul is largely correct. Containment of

Iraq

in the 1990’s is an ancillary reason for bin Laden, but illustrative of the policies he is at war with us over. Paul is exactly correct in describing AQ as an unintended consequence of our policies. The combat aircraft that we flew in order to enforce the

Iraq

’s southern no-fly zone, and contain Saddam, mostly flew out of bases in

Saudi Arabia

. The presence of American combat forces on the Saudi peninsula is/was Osama’s primary bone of contention, and a major source of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. This is clear to anyone who takes the time to read bin Laden’s statements.

That Guiliani says “I don't think I've ever heard that before and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11” is an indictment against his candidacy for Commander in Chief of our nation. This directly contradicts Sun Tzu's maxim from The Art of War:

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will win hundred times in hundred battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you win one and lose the next. If you do not know yourself or your enemy, you will always lose.

Giuliani does not know our enemy.

Nevertheless talking heads and bloggers are having a field day over this. Some Republican Party officials are demanding Paul be barred from future debates. This is patently absurd. I can understand some of the outrage in response to Ron Paul’s comments. It implies that we had it coming; it is almost blaming the victim.

Such drawn implications should matter little, what should matter is the cold, dispassionate analysis of knowing your enemy. That we as a public, near six years after September 11th are still squabbling over such trite matters is an implication that we are dangerously behind the curve. Put simply--know your enemy to destroy him easier. It is evident that this does not matter to both our political parties.

New Brandon Bird Painting

2007-05-07T09:19:00.000-07:00

Brandon Bird released a new painting recently, this one titled Battle of the Heroes.

I was a big fan of Coach growing up.

New War Nerd Column

2007-05-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

"Gary Breacher" War Nerd, Fresno's greatest military historian and data entry specialist has a new article out. This one "Who Won Iraq?", seeks to explain ...well, just who won in Iraq. As always its filled with dark humor, rich historical insight, and astute analysis. As always I like it.

Anyway, for those of you collecting War Nerd guidelines, here's what I think are some general rules for "Who wins wars?"

1) In a big bloodbath like the Thirty Years War or WWI, the winner is usually the powers that don't fight, but dabble in spycraft and wet ops, meanwhile consolidating their own economic power.

2) The biggest loser is almost always the country on whose territory the war is fought. (Note: You could argue that America entered WWII fairly early and still came out ahead, but on the European Front up to D-Day our role was supplying materiel to the Russians and letting them do all the bleeding for us. On both fronts we were far away from the action and that allowed us to pick where and when to commit money and troops, so the generalization still holds: the further away you are, the better.)

3) In a regional war, the big winner will be any neighboring states that can stay out of the war and work out supply contracts with the richer combatant (Thailand during Nam, Argentina in WWI, Switzerland in every war since Ur took on Ur South).

4) However, if there's an ethnic spillover, like Turkey has with the Kurds, this relationship can backfire.

5) The worst thing a major power can do is go to war alone for "moral" reasons. This is how medieval France wasted its huge advantages on pointless Middle Eastern crusades that did nothing but revitalize the Muslims and drive down the price of white slaves in the Cairo market.

Barrier Art

2007-05-07T08:47:00.000-07:00

Spiegel has an article up about Iraqi artists painting murals on the new barrier walls in Baghdad. Barrier walls which are referred to as “urban tourniquets” in counterinsurgency (COIN) work have been a controversial development in Gen. Petraeus’s strategy to control Baghdad by creating “gated communities” to stop the cycle of sectarian violence. David Killcullen who is an advisor to Gen. Petraeus had a great blog post about the barriers last week.

A political discussion about the walls is beyond the scope of this post. Nevertheless, I thought these pictures were great, and it sheds some much needed light on humanity on an otherwise dark world.

These pictures remind me of work by my favorite artist Banksy, he did much the same thing, albeit with a political and satirical aim at West Bank barrier wall in Israel.

Gas Boycott

2007-05-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

I have been getting dozens of email invitations for a May 15 gas boycott over the past month. I may agree with the motives behind it, but in practice it will do absolutely nothing.

Why one-day gasoline 'boycott' won't work: E-mails calling for May 15 service station drive-by will have zero impact
By John W. Schoen. MSNBC, May 6, 2007

Trailers for Upcoming Movies

2007-05-07T07:56:00.000-07:00

Ocean's 13

Brand Hauser (formally known as War Inc.)

Rush Hour 3

The Bourne Ultimatum

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry

Knocked Up

Greatest. Tshirt. Ever.

2007-05-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

Greatest. Tshirt. Ever.
Get it at Sully's

Iran Update

2007-05-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

Philip Giraldi who is a former Clandestine Service Officer hits it center mass in regard to what is happening in DC these days with his latest article.

Politicians who are ignorant of the Middle East frequently confuse advocacy with intelligence and allow the former to become the basis for policy formulation, sometimes by default. Lacking good intelligence resources, much so-called information that is reaching policy-makers in Washington comes from émigré groups and lobbyists with an agenda – again very much like what happened in the lead-up to the Iraq war. These groups are all interested in emphasizing the threat from Iran, not in objective analysis that might exonerate the mullahs.

Nicholas Kristof had an article recently on what I think is going to be one of the worst diplomatic blunders in our nations history.

Diplomacy at Its Worst
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In May 2003, Iran sent a secret proposal to the U.S. for settling our mutual disputes in a “grand bargain.”

It is an astonishing document, for it tries to address a range of U.S. concerns about nuclear weapons, terrorism and Iraq. I’ve placed it and related documents (including multiple drafts of it) on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.

Hard-liners in the Bush administration killed discussions of a deal, and interviews with key players suggest that was an appalling mistake. There was a real hope for peace; now there is a real danger of war.

Scattered reports of the Iranian proposal have emerged previously, but if you read the full documentary record you’ll see that what the hard-liners killed wasn’t just one faxed Iranian proposal but an entire peace process. The record indicates that officials from the repressive, duplicitous government of Iran pursued peace more energetically and diplomatically than senior Bush administration officials — which makes me ache for my country.

The process began with Afghanistan in 2001-2. Iran and the U.S., both opponents of the Taliban, cooperated closely in stabilizing Afghanistan and providing aid, and unofficial “track two” processes grew to explore opportunities for improved relations.

On the U.S. side, track two involved well-connected former U.S. ambassadors, including Thomas Pickering, Frank Wisner and Nicholas Platt. The Iranian ambassador to the U.N., Javad Zarif, was a central player, as was an Iranian-American professor at Rutgers, Hooshang Amirahmadi, who heads a friendship group called the American Iranian Council.

At a dinner the council sponsored for its board at Ambassador Zarif’s home in September 2002, the group met Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi. According to the notes of Professor Amirahmadi, the foreign minister told the group, “Yes, we are ready to normalize relations,” provided the U.S. made the first move.

This was shaping into a historic opportunity to heal U.S.-Iranian relations, and the track two participants discussed further steps, including joint U.S.-Iranian cooperation against Saddam Hussein. The State Department and National Security Council were fully briefed, and in 2003 Ambassador Zarif met with two U.S. officials, Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalilzad, in a series of meetings in Paris and Geneva.

Encouraged, Iran transmitted its “grand bargain” proposals to the U.S. One version was apparently a paraphrase by the Swiss ambassador in Tehran; that was published this year in The Washington Post.

But Iran also sent its own master text of the proposal to the State Department and, through an intermediary, to the White House. I’ve also posted that document, which Iran regards as the definitive one.

In the master document, Iran talks about ensuring “full transparency” and other measures to assure the U.S. that it will not develop nuclear weapons. Iran offers “active Iranian support for Iraqi stabilization.” Iran also contemplates an end to “any material support to Palestinian opposition groups” while pressuring Hamas “to stop violent actions against civilians within” Israel (though not the occupied territories). Iran would support the transition of Hezbollah to be a “mere political organization within Lebanon” and endorse the Saudi initiative calling for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Iran also demanded a lot, including “mutual respect,” abolition of sanctions, access to peaceful nuclear technology and a U.S. statement that Iran did not belong in the “axis of evil.” Many crucial issues, including verification of Iran’s nuclear program, needed to be hammered out. It’s not clear to me that a grand bargain was reachable, but it was definitely worth pursuing — and still is today.

Instead, Bush administration hard-liners aborted the process. Another round of talks had been scheduled for Geneva, and Ambassador Zarif showed up — but not the U.S. side. That undermined Iranian moderates.

A U.S.-Iranian rapprochement could have saved lives in Iraq, isolated Palestinian terrorists and encouraged civil society groups in Iran. But instead the U.S. hard-liners chose to hammer plowshares into swords.

White House Seeks Lying Czar

2007-05-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

From the Borowitz Report:

White House Seeks Lying Czar
Would Coordinate Distortions about Iraq, Afghanistan

The White House in recent weeks has been quietly searching for candidates for the position of “lying czar,” a high-level administrator who would oversee all distortions and misrepresentations about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a White House source confirmed today.

News of the administration’s search for a “lying czar” raised eyebrows in official Washington, where many insiders believe that the White House already has enough personnel to handle the creation and dissemination of war-related lies.

Specifically, many insiders wonder why an administration that already has advisor Karl Rove and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would also need a “lying czar.”

“The Bush administration has a lot of world-class manpower, lying-wise,” one insider said. “This whole ‘lying czar’ thing seems like an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.”

But White House insiders disagree, saying that those who believe a “lying czar” is unnecessary are oblivious to the overwhelming volume of distortions that are sorely in need of coordination at a high administrative level.

“On any given day, the Defense Department and the State Department will produce lies that are directly in conflict with each other, and that’s counterproductive,” one insider said. “A ‘lying czar’ would change all that.”

Professor Davis Logsdon, who holds the Clifford Irving chair at the University of Minnesota’s School of Communication, says that the need for a “lying czar” reveals certain weaknesses in the current Bush cabinet.

“When I hear that the White House is looking for a lying czar, one thing becomes clear,” Dr. Logsdon said. “They really miss Rumsfeld.”

Elsewhere, responding to criticism, the National Gardening Association said it would no longer use the term “hoe.”

The Power of Nightmares

2007-05-02T08:16:00.000-07:00

Everyone should watch Adam Curtis’s documentary series The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. I have been speaking its praise of months now. I cannot begin to explain how great it is.

Peter Bergen a terrorist expert and also one of the few western journalists to have met with bin Laden sums it up:

The kernel of Curtis's argument is that Western politicians claim "the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a war on terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media." Curtis says that this illusion was set in motion by two seemingly very different groups, American neoconservatives and radical Islamists, whose war with each other conceals a history of tacit alliance, and even some ideological resemblances. As Curtis reminds us, the neoconservatives and the Islamists came together in the 1980s in Afghanistan to expel the Soviets, and they share a hostility to the Middle East's authoritarian dynastic regimes (although they seek to replace them with altogether different kinds of government). What is more, both groups view Western liberalism with distrust, fearing that it will erode traditional and especially martial values, thus weakening their societies from within.

Part One: Baby It's Cold Outside

Part Two: The Phantom Victory

Part Three: The Shadows in the Cave

Just the Facts Ma'am

2007-04-20T12:53:00.000-07:00

Fact: The run time of the Beastie Boys classic Sabotage is 2:58

Fact: Each person in the United States consumes 24 barrels of petroleum a year

Fact: That’s roughly 3 gallons of petroleum—derived products each day

Fact: Rapper Ice Cube’s real name is O’Shea Jackson

Fact: There are 946 billionaires around the world

Fact: They have a combined net worth of $3.5 trillion

Fact: I am not one of them……….yet

Fact: 36% of Americans aged 18 to 29 have at least one tattoo

Fact: The University of Alaska Southeast team name is the Humpback Whales

Fact: Consumers in the United States spend $65 billion per year on illegal drugs

There is a God, and He Is Just

2007-04-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

Few things bring great amounts of joy in my life. One of these is the annual release of Sam Adams Summer Ale. It is a monumental event for me, on par with Christmas morning when I was a child. Its release, and that magnificent first gulp, unleashes a torrent of great memories – most of them fuzzy. In the words of the great Frank Riccard: Once it hits your lips, it's so good!

Quotes Update

2007-04-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

Massive update in the Book Quotes section.

Dark Times at the FBI

2007-04-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

Fast Company has fantastic article by Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist J.J. Brazil on the FBI’s abysmal modernization effort, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a devastating expose on how the Bureau’s counterterrorism efforts come at the expense of fighting crime. This all comes as a drama unfolds in a Manhattan courthouse; were learned observers see the FBI’s reputation (whatever remains) at stake.

Bottom-line: The FBI should not have the primary domestic CT mission. The FBI should have been torn down and rebuilt from the ground up before 9/11.

Brandon Bird Interview

2007-04-14T17:52:00.001-07:00

An interview with one of my favorite artists: Brandon Bird.

Market Outlook

2007-04-14T17:23:00.000-07:00

Buy: Abita Beer Amber Sell: Dos Equis Amber
Buy: Peak Oil Sell: Global Warming
Buy: Chuck Hagel Sell: John McCain
Buy: Trader Joe's Taquitos Sell: El Monterey Taquitos
Buy: Skulls Sell: Hearts
Buy: Dice-K Sell: Pedro
Buy: Candy Necklace Bikini Sell: Polka-Dot Bikini
Buy: Barack Obama Sell: Hillary Clinton
Buy: MS-13 Sell: Guardian Angels
Buy: The Rum Diary Sell: Fear and Loathing Las Vegas
Buy: Sailor Jerry Sell: Captain Morgan
Buy: Pepe Escobar Sell: Thomas Friedman
Buy: St. Bernard's Sell: Chihuahua's

quotes and quotes....

2007-04-11T19:15:00.000-07:00

No one ever said it would be simple.
And so, on we go, blindly – as so many people do, always, in their own time – through the age of terror.
Suskind, Ron
The One Percent Doctrine

In California, Frank noticed, “east” was synonymous with certain things, like “education” or as Boyd put it, “learning shit.”
Buckley, Christopher
Boomsday: A Novel

I was frustrated as much by respect and attempts at understanding as by unfeeling ignorance. The worst were blanket accolades and thanks from people “for what you guys did over there.” Thanks for what, I wanted to ask – Shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes? There wasn’t any pride in simply being there. The pride was in our good decisions, in the things we did right. I hoped that I’d done more right than wrong, hoped that I hadn’t been cavalier with people’s lives. I was learning that sometimes the only way to fight evil is with another evil, however good its aim.
Fick, Nathaniel
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer

Staring down at the water, I measured my words, running through a justification I’d given myself a thousand times before. The good was abstract. The good didn’t feel as good as the bad felt bad. It wasn’t the good that kept me up at night.

“You sound so unprincipled,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t you find peace in what you and your men sacrificed so much to do? Why can’t you be proud?

I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home. I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn't beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that's not why we did it. We fought for each other.

I am proud.
Fick, Nathaniel
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer

Book Quotes Added

2007-04-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

"Perhaps I likened myself to Kurtz in Heart of Darkness when, far from the trading company offices in Europe, he was faced with the ultimate horror. I do remember imagining myself in a pith helmet and white linen jodhpurs, my face enigmatic behind of a veil of mosquito netting."
Toole, John Kennedy
A Confederacy of Dunces

"... somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow ... you've got to have some faith in what you're trying to do. It's easy to have faith as long as it goes along with what you already know. But you've got to have faith in us all the way..."
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

"... We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened atleast 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't."
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs.
Sowell, Thomas
The Vision of the Anointed

Widespread personification of 'society' is another verbal tactic that evades issues of personal responsibility. Such use of the term 'society' is a more sophisticated version of the notion that 'the devil made me do it.' Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin air.
Sowell, Thomas
The Vision of the Anointed

The Turks were stupid; the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

Being unconquerable lies with yourself; being conquerable lies with your enemy.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is master of his enemy's fate.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

If you wish for peace, understand war.
Liddell Hart, B.H.
Strategy: The Indirect Approach

War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.
Bobbitt, Philip
The Shield of Achilles

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.
Byron, Lord George Gordon
Don Juan

Samuelson on Boomsday

2007-04-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

Robert Samuelson has an article in the WAPO on 'Boomsday', both the novel and the public policy part. Good read.

Key Quote:

I was born in late 1945 and count myself a part of this failure. In our careless self-absorption, we are committing a political and economic crime against our children and perhaps -- when they awaken to their victimization -- even ourselves.

2007-04-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

"You Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Shall Set You Free."

ABC News reports that all charges are being dropped against the Duke Lax Three. Durham-in-Wonderland has a fantastic Case Narrative (Parts: 1,2,3).

No Giant Rabbits For NORKS

2007-04-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

A few months ago it was reported that gianourmous rabbits grown in Germany would be exported to famine ridden North Korea. A dozen were sent to the country to begin breeding operations, and these monster Peter rabbits were going to be a Hail Mary play for the Somali's of Asia. Soon the citizens of would the DPNK would have tasty rabbit to with their dinner of dirt and rocks.

Now one again the people of North Korea find themselves Munsoned. Why so, you ask?

Well according to the TimesOnline they "were eaten at a birthday banquet for Kim Jong Il", and because of this the breeder of these rabbits will no longer export them to North Korea.

I've said it before and will say it again, no matter how bad your day may be - at least you don't live in North Korea!

New JibJab Video

2007-04-06T19:29:00.001-07:00

What We Call the News | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

Barber: Overselling Capitalism

2007-04-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

Overselling capitalism: Why today's markets are headed for disaster unless there is a shift in focus, by Benjamin Barber. Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2007.

Barber is the author of Jihad vs. McWorld and his newest Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole a book I am looking forward to reading.

THE CRISIS IN subprime mortgages betrays a deeper predicament facing consumer capitalism triumphant: The "Protestant ethos" of hard work and deferred gratification has been replaced by an infantilist ethos of easy credit and impulsive consumption that puts democracy and the market system at risk.

Good Article.

Black Globalization

2007-04-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

Hold for a post on Black Globalization.

.......no Steve, it has nothing to do with hip-hop.

Iran Update

2007-04-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

A whole lot of ugly is brewing right now between the U.S. and Iran (has been since ’79). The U.S. is attempting to contain Iran’s growing power in the region. To do so the White House is trying to provoke Iran to action, so it can bomb them. Bomb the crap out of them, and then bomb them again. They see this as necessary since Saddam is no longer around to contain Iranian power, and Iran is becoming too powerful in the region. It’s beyond the scope of this blog to into the thick of it, but here is an update:

- ABC News has just reported that the U.S. is secretly working with Jundullah a Baluchi guerilla organization that has been conducting assassinations and car bombings in eastern Iran.
(Backgrounder: Violence and Rebellion in Iranian Balochistan, Jamestown Terrorism Monitor June 29, 2006)

- NPR and der Spiegel has an overview of a tit-for-tat game of kidnappings playing out between the U.S. and Iran.

- Christopher Dickey in Newsweek writes of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah growing role in the region to stem the brewing crisis.

- Asia Times is covering the diplomatic and economic fronts.

Friday Drink Recipe's

2007-03-30T13:00:00.000-07:00

Its Friday, you've had along week, its time to tie one on. Here are some good drinks you may not have heard of.

Dixie Car Bomb
Ingredients
1/2 oz Old Crow bourbon whiskey
1/2 oz butterscotch schnapps
15 oz Pabst lager

Directions
Done just like an Irish Car Bomb, pour the whiskey on top of the schnapps in a shot glass, and drop it into a pint of Pabst beer.

Flaming Dr. Pepper*
Ingredients
3/4 shot of amaretto
1/4 oz 151 proof rum
1/2 glass of beer

Directions
1. Fill a shot glass about 3/4 full with amaretto and top it off with enough 151 proof rum to be able to burn.
2. Place the shot glass in another glass and fill the outer glass with beer (right up to the level of the shot glass).
3. Ignite the amaretto/151 and let it burn for a while. Blow it out and slam it. Tastes just like Dr. Pepper.

*Also a great way to set your kitchen counter on fire.......as I have........on multiple occasions

Apple Manhattan
Ingredients
2 oz Makers Mark bourbon whiskey
1 oz apple liqueur

Directions
Stir the whiskey and liqueur in a mixing glass with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a slice of apple, and serve.

Good Reads

2007-03-30T12:47:00.000-07:00

- Review of Mike Davis's Planet of Slums and his newest Buda's Wagon in the London Review of Books.
- How to Recover from Identity Theft (H/T: Bruce)
- Is a U.S.-Iran War Inevitable? By Robert Baer. Time, Mar. 29, 2007
- Capital Warfare by Heidi Crebo-Rediker, Douglas Rediker. The Wall Street Journal, 29 March 2007

If the U.S. is to maintain its leadership in a new multipolar world, policymakers must recognize that there is no guarantee the U.S. will remain the world's center of financial gravity forever and must plan accordingly. American lawmakers, financiers and companies must rise to the occasion and engage in the global war for capital by working together to make certain the U.S. remains an attractive destination and market for capital.

- Serving at His Pleasure: America's 10 horniest presidents By Karl Shaw. Radar Online
- THE MANHATTANIZATION OF BOSTON By THOMAS C. PALMER JR. Boston Globe March 24, 2007

Boomsday

2007-03-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

I'm currently reading Christopher Buckley's new book Boomsday. Its pretty funny, Buckley wrote Thank You for Smoking which was made into a movie last year, and was one of the best 2006.

Book Description
Outraged over the mounting Social Security debt,
Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger
and member of Generation Whatever, incites massive
cultural warfare when she politely suggests that Baby
Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves
by age 75. Her modest proposal catches fire with
millions of citizens, chief among them "an ambitious
senator seeking the presidency." With the help of Washington's
greatest spin doctor, the blogger and the politician
try to ride the issue of euthanasia for Boomers
(called "transitioning") all the way to the White House,
over the objections of the Religious Right, and of
course, the Baby Boomers, who are deeply offended by
demonstrations on the golf courses of their retirement
resorts.

NYT Review

PhilaLawyers Got A New One Out

2007-03-30T09:46:00.000-07:00

You Can't Go Back - Part 1

Hit and Run Linking

2007-03-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

Hit and Run:
New War Nerd column on 300
Ralph Peters - Strategic invisibility: The folly of ignoring our Latin American neighbors
Conference Report: The Militarization of Energy Security
Hoffman - We Can't Win If We Don't Know the Enemy

-Book quotes updated

Zbig Gets It

2007-03-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Terrorized by 'War on Terror':How a Three-Word Mantra Has Undermined America
By Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Washington Post. Sunday, March 25, 2007; B01

We've taken the wrong direction in "GWOT" since Anaconda.
We need:
-Everybody to be cool like the Fonz
-Rigorous intelligence and risk-threat analysis
-Shrewd diplomatic maneuvering
-Ruthlessly aggressive intelligence and special ops work
UBL knew the damage done in response to 9/11 by our military-industrial-congressional complex would dwarf 9/11. We fell right into the bastards trap.

(h/t: Lustick)

Obama and Duke Lax

2007-03-26T07:26:00.000-07:00

Obama: Investigate Nifong

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in a written response to a constituent, said that an "independent inquiry is needed" into the conduct of Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong.

The Blue Devils beat a solid Georgetown this weekend bringing their record to 6-2.

Baghdad Country Club

2007-03-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

Baghdad Country Club

In the world of chaos which is Baghdad there is an oasis of calm. If James Bond were to walk off the pages of a book; if Hemingway was again reporting on the world's troubles they could probably both be found relaxing over a drink at the Baghdad Country Club. So if you happen to be in Central Baghdad and know a person, who knows the whereabouts of the BCC, you too could be sitting in the cool shade with a vodka martini, mojito or your own personal favorite.

The Restaurant is arguably the finest in Baghdad and one has the choice of dining al fresco in the secured gardens or in the main restaurant adorned with mahogany walls and a clean and simple décor. The menu is a fusion of European and Arabic cuisine and the extensive wine list boasts such classics as vintage Margaux and Chablis through to Australian Shiraz, Chilean Cabernet and Californian Zinfandel. All of which can naturally be enjoyed with a choice of Cuban cigars from our walk in humidor.

So if you ever find yourself in Baghdad and need to escape the hustle, come and rub shoulders with some of the more interesting and intriguing individuals that the world has to offer.

"No weapons are allowed in club. The management is happy to secure any firearms, grenades, flash bangs or knives in the club armory."

Reminds me of Rick's Cafe Americain in Casablanca. "Mohammed, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

(h/t: RYP)

Apollo Sunshine

2007-03-25T12:54:00.000-07:00

Saw this group Apollo Sunshine for the first time last night. These guys can rock out. Great show, they sound like The Black Crows meet The White Stripes. They are musicians of amazing talent, an incredible live show.

Church and State

2007-03-22T13:13:00.000-07:00

"As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."
--Treaty of Tripoli, 1796

Burberry Scarves for Darfur

2007-03-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

I can't claim this as my own work but I think its great. It's a Facebook group I found.

Burberry Scarves for Darfur

You know what Darfur has too much of? Genocide. You know what Boston has too much of? Burberry scarves. I know these places might seem far away, but, at the end of the day, genocide and fashion atrophy affect us all.

This is your chance to help kill two birds with one stone. For every person that joins this group and sends me a Burberry scarf, I will donate one Burberry scarf to a Darfur charity of that person's choosing.

If a group member specifies a charity that does not accept clothes, I will liquidate the scarf on ebay and donate 100% of the proceeds to that charity instead.

I am dead serious about this. If you send me a Burberry scarf, I guarantee it will end up in Western Sudan. I think it's a fine opportunity to take a stand against atrocity while making Bostonians easier to pick out at a distance.

burberryscarvesfordarfur@cosmocatalano.com
Back Bay Station
Boston, MA

Ok, so 24 hours later, I have received zero Burberry scarves. But I understand that there is probably a significant minority of people who can afford a $250 scarf but can't pay for same day shipping.

Another problem may be that the address listed below is Burberry Scarves for Darfur Mission HQ. It's in Back Bay Station, as that location probably sees the greatest number of people who both have Burberry Scarves and want to help Darfur.

For the correct mailing address, send an email to the address above. Response times may vary due to heavy volume, but I hope to contact all interested parties within 24 hours.

And don't forget to invite your friends! The more people who join this group and send me scarves, the more we can make the world a better place!

30 Jan 2007
=============
Still no scarves? C'mon people, this is getting ridiculous. I counted seven scarves in my Red Line car alone this morning. Surely that's enough scarves that one could be let go to help Darfur.

I know for a fact the this dearth of scarvery is not a result of insuffient overlap between Burberry scarf-wearers and Darfur genocide want-to-stoppers. They interviewed a Burberry-scarved gentleman on Fox news last night about Darfur! He was upset about the genocide!

For that matter, there's over 40 people in this group. I simply refuse to believe that my peers would join a Facebook group that proposed a certain social change without ever acting on that proposal! Let's get off our asses and see some scarf love!

On the Post-Sexual Revolution and The Worlds Best Grilled Chicken Sandwich

2007-03-20T18:46:00.000-07:00

Going over my notes recently and found this gem of a quote from Phila Lawyer:

"Debate the place of chivalry in a post-sexual revolution world all you like - holding the door's the only way to check out her ass."

His wisdom is sage.

On an unrelated matter, ring the bell for Spikes Junkyard Dogs, thanks Spikes for being so delicious and affordable, money is much better spent on booze than food.

2007-03-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

The Well Read Economist - check it

Book Quotes and Passages

2007-03-16T08:53:00.001-07:00

Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with new ones.
Bierce, Ambrose
The Devil's Dictionary

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Bierce, Ambrose
The Devil's Dictionary

War is not a pathology that, with proper hygiene and treatment, can be wholly prevented. War is a natural condition of the State, which was organized in order to be an effective instrument of violence on behalf of society. Wars are like deaths, which, while they can be postponed, will come when they will come and cannot be finally avoided.
Bobbitt, Philip
The Shield of Achilles

Juarez is one of the world centers of this vigorous business. It is a model of the New Economy, stateless, borderless, global. It rewards merit, ignores class origins, hires and fires at will. It despises regulations and ducks tariffs. It is color-blind and judges the work, not the skin color.
Two thirds of the streets in Juarez are unpaved.
Bowden, Charles
Down By The River

Always, it is really the same: Outside forces are causing our misery and this reality explains why there is such suffering and also that Mexico matters, matters enough to have a host of foreign and occult enemies.
Bowden, Charles
Down By The River

In California, Frank noticed, “east” was synonymous with certain things, like “education” or as Boyd put it, “learning shit.”
Buckley, Christopher
Boomsday: A Novel

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.
Byron, Lord George Gordon
Don Juan

"Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...no, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone..."
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness

"Often, when a man is young and idealistic, he believes that if he works hard and does the right thing, success will follow. This was what Boyd's mother and childhood mentors told him. But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military's value system. Those who do not conform will one day realizes that the path of doing the right thing has diverged from the path of success, and then they much decide which path they will follow through life."
Coram, Robert
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

"Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road," he said. "And you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go." He raised his hand and pointed. "If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments." Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. "Or you can go that way and you can do something--for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference. "To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?"
Coram, Robert
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

"Generating a rapidly changing environment--that is, engaging in actively that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy--inhibits the adversary's ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives."
Coram, Robert
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

The way circus elephants are trained demonstrates this dynamic well: When young, they are attached by heavy chains to large stakes driven deep into the ground. They pull and yank and strain and struggle, but the chain is too strong, the stake too rooted. One day they give up, having learned they cannot pull free, and from that day forward they can be "chained" with a slender rope. When this enormous animal feels any resistance, thought it has the strength to pull the whole circus tent over, it stops trying. Because it believes it cannot, it cannot.

This opera is being sung in homes all over

America

right, the stakes driven in to the ground, the heavy chains attached, the children reaching the point they believe they cannot pull free. And at that point, they cannot.
De Becker, Gavin
The Gift of Fear

“You sound so unprincipled,” she said, shaking her head. “Why can’t you find peace in what you and your men sacrificed so much to do? Why can’t you be proud?

I am proud.
Fick, Nathaniel
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer

" A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: 'There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired'"
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther...And one fine morning--
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.
Gladwell, Malcolm
The Tipping Point

White-trash pathologies are almost never seen as a response to environmental factors, while the behavior of impoverished non-Euros is always viewed this way. There’s no shortage of socio-illogical alibis for any other group’s aberrant acts; with white trash, it’s seen as some form of innate rottenness. If you’re going to argue that rednecks simply don’t have the “right stuff” – that they breed violence, stupidity, and other undesirable character traits – you’re wandering into a eugenical argument and undermining any pretense toward liberalism or egalitarianism. If you embrace equality, sooner or later you’ll be forced to hug white trash, and don’t blame me if you can’t handle the smell.
Goad, Jim
The Redneck Manifesto

History itself is an endlessly unfolding S&M novel. History is much more sick, bloody, and unjust than historians will ever let on. When they finally get around to writing some real history, we’ll all need medication. It’ll be too depressing.
Goad, Jim
The Redneck Manifesto

Religion has always been a sponge mop to absorb class tensions. It’s a safety valve. Without it, class matters would come much more sharply into focus. Those who belittle pork-faced stupid rednecks and their primitive caveman religions should be HAPPY that the trash has been placated with false creeds and phony promises. For if these hardcore believers were ever to focus their gaze earthward, they might realize how badly they’ve been screwed and would turn from reactionary religion to radical politics.
Goad, Jim
The Redneck Manifesto

Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of the future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

‘Love’s a Western word,’ I said. ‘We use it for sentimental reasons or to cover up an obsession with one woman. These people don’t suffer from obsessions. You’re going to be hurt, Pyle, if you aren’t careful.’
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Insanity is a kind of innocence.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

"And do you, Monseiur Fowlair, know who will trimuph? Surely someone you prefer?"
"I'm a reporter. We merely report exactly what we see. We don't take sides."
"But, you see, one has to take sides, if one is to remain human."
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American

“Ask for my loyalty and I’ll give you my honesty. Ask for my honesty and you’ll have my loyalty.”
Hammond, Grant T.
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

This gave Boyd a rather perverse glee in finding that all was not right with the world, for in that reality, he saw the possibility of continuing to improve it. He did not fall victim to the ultimate heresy of the Enlightenment, in believing in earthly perfection. He did not shrink from what he saw as the continuing need for improvement and adaptation. For Boyd, discontinuities were the norm and harmony the exception. That doesn’t mean we should seek to abolish discontinuities in pursuit of a widening gyre of harmony. It means rather that there is a sort of yin and yang balance between the two in the long run and that we are the agents of transformation among them. Humankind is responsible for much of the change that has been wrought on the planet, though by no means the bulk of it, thus it is incumbent on us to muddle through as best we can.
Hammond, Grant T.
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

Boyd paid particular attention to the moral dimension and the effort to attack an adversary morally by showing the disjuncture between professed beliefs and deeds. The name of the game for a moral design for grand strategy is to use moral leverage to amplify one’s spirit and strength while exposing the flaws of competing adversary systems. In the process, one should influence the uncommitted, potential adversaries and current adversaries so that they are drawn toward one’s philosophy and are empathetic toward one’s success.
Hammond, Grant T.
The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security

Most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

All pretensions to theological knowledge should now be seen from the perspective of a man who was just beginning his day on the one hundredth floor of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, only to find his meandering thoughts—of family and friends, of errands run and unrun, of coffee in need of sweetener—inexplicably usurped by a choice of terrible starkness and simplicity: between being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping one thousand feet to the concrete below.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not "cowards," as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense. They were men of faith—perfect faith, as it turns out—and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Faith is rather like a rhinoceros, in fact: it won't do much in the way of real work for you, and yet at close quarters it will make spectacular claims upon your attention.
Harris, Sam
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. When hopes and dreams are loose on the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. Though ours is a Godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with him or against him, it is well we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

"When hopes and dreams are loose in the street, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed."
Hoffer, Eric
The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements

"I have seen something of this world," she said over the crowded trays, "and there are but two sorts of women in it - those who take the strength out of a man and those who put it back. Once I was that one, and now I am this."
Kipling, Rudyard
Kim

The Turks were stupid; the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge, anyhow; and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

In a real sense, maximum disorder was our equilibrium.
Lawrence, T.E.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom

"Wall Street makes its best producers into managers. The reward for being a good producer is to be made a manager. The best producers are cutthroat, competitive, and often neurotic and paranoid. You turn those people into managers and they go after each other. They no longer have the outlet for their instincts that producing gave them. They usually aren't well suited to be managers. Half of them get thrown out because they are bad. Another quarter get muscled out because of the politics. The guys left behind are the most ruthless of the bunch. That's why there are cycles on Wall Street--because the ruthless people are bad for the business but can only be washed out by proven failure.
Lewis, Michael
Liar's Poker

The Piranha didn’t talk like a person. He said things like “If you fuckin’ buy this bond in a fuckin’ trade, you’re fuckin’ fucked.” And “If you don’t pay fuckin’ attention to the fuckin’ two-year, you get your fuckin’ face ripped off.” Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off. We had never before heard of people getting their faces ripped off. And he said it so often, like a nervous tic, that each time he said it again, the back row giggled. The Human Piranha, a Harvard graduate, thought nothing of it. He was always like this.
Lewis, Michael
Liar's Poker

If you wish for peace, understand war.
Liddell Hart, B.H.
Strategy: The Indirect Approach

I'm sorry, but I stand by my decision. I am now a member of the elite club of people that have fought a professional team mascot. You sir, are not in that club.
Max, Tucker
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
O'Rourke, P.J
All the Trouble in the World

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

Cockfighting has always been my idea of a great sport— two armed entrées battling to see who'll be dinner.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners— two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.
O'Rourke, P.J
Holidays in Hell

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom", a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions— North and South, black and white, labor and management— but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.
O'Rourke, P.J
Republican Party Reptile

Every generation finds the drug it needs.
O'Rourke, P.J
Republican Party Reptile

"Every addiction, she said, was just a way to treat this same problem. Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple. Language, she said, was just a way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss. She said people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained or understood."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it was all just another way to find peace. To escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

Without access to true chaos we'll never have true peace.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

"I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise. In a way, being an addict is very proactive."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Choke

One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. You wake up, and that's enough.
Palahniuk, Chuck
Fight Club

"Disaster is a natural part of my evolution," Tyler whispered, "toward tragedy and dissolution"... "I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered, "because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit"...
"The liberator who destroys my property," Tyler said "is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Fight Club

"People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were too scared of being alone."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Survivor

"Reality means you live until you die," the agent says. "The real truth is nobody wants reality"
Palahniuk, Chuck
Survivor

"I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.
The agent said that sounded pretty realistic."
Palahniuk, Chuck
Survivor

The conscious mind - the self or soul - is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Language is re-created every generation as it passed through the minds of the humans who speak it.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

A nonblank slate means that a tradeoff between freedom and material equality is inherent in all political systems. The major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the tradeoff. The Social Darwinist right places no value on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom. While reasonable people may disagree about the best tradeoff, it is unreasonable to pretend that there is no tradeoff.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Liberal democracies appear to be the best form of large-scale social organization our sorry species has come up with so far... this relative success of constitutional democracy... suggests that something may have been right about the theory of human nature that guided its architects.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Though there are many reasons why countries differ in their willingness to wage war, one factor is simply the proportion of the population that consists of men between the ages of 15 and 29.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Hobbes's observation that men fight over "a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue" is as true now as it was in the 17th century.
Because of the logic of deterrence, fights over personal or national honour are not as idiotic as they seem. Dialing 911 is an option not always available. It was not available to people in pre-state societies, or on the frontier in the Appalachians or the Wild West, or in the remote highlands of Scotland, or the Balkans.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

Western societies are good at providing things that people want: clean water, effective medicine, varied and abundant food, rapid transportation and communication. They perfect these goods and services not from benevolence but from self-interest, for the profits to be made in selling them. Perhaps the aesthetics industry also perfected ways of giving people what they like - art forms that appeal to basic human tastes, such as calendar landscapes, popular songs, and Hollywood romances and adventures. So even if an art form matured in the West, it may be not an arbitrary practice spread by a powerful navy but a successful product that engages a universal human aesthetic.
Pinker, Steven
The Blank Slate

The psychologist William James argued a century ago that man had both more learning capacity and more instincts, rather than more learning and fewer instincts. He was ridiculed for this, but he was right.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives read Proust, or Trollope, or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with others' minds. Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy. Great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds. Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim. We are clever because we are - and to the extent that we are - natural psychologists.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she's pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women and every person inherits from those ancestors that same preference.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Because bodies do not replicate themselves, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

If we were chimpanzees we would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial and aggressive towards groups other than those we belonged to. In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist and belligerent, which we are.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock's tail - an ornament designed for sexual display, whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side-effect of the ability to charm.
I end with one of the strangest consequences of sex -that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expression for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness and individuality turn other people on.
Ridley, Matt
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

Given the torrential emotional outlay contests inspire on a daily basis, it’s amazing that human beings find time even to govern themselves. And yet—what is at the heart of every democracy but yet another contest—elections. We’ve even adopted the lingo of sports to describe our politics—the campaign is a “race”; and debates are scored like boxing matches. Constant polls amount to a sort of real-time scoreboard; election day is the buzzer. Perhaps this is the secret enduring quality of democracy: whichever way the ideological winds may be blowing, the public is always hungry for a good race. Even our judicial system is powered by contests—what is a trial but an intellectual sporting match? Everywhere you look, it seems, humans are compulsively gathering around to watch two sides battle it out. In this context, it was hard to see the couple aboard the Crimson Express as doing anything but steadfastly pursuing a universal human urge, third perhaps only to hunger and sex in its power over humankind.
St. John, Warren
Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer

No one ever said it would be simple.
And so, on we go, blindly – as so many people do, always, in their own time – through the age of terror.
Suskind, Ron
The One Percent Doctrine

"But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right... and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are the wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it... howling though a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica... letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge... The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones that have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later."
Thompson, Hunter S.
Hell's Angels

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
Thompson, Hunter S.
Fear and Loathing Las Vegas

My apartment in New York was on Perry Street, a five minute walk from the White Horse. I often drank there, but I was never accepted because I wore a tie. The real people wanted no part of me.
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

"At the time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

No matter how much I wanted all those things that I needed money to buy, there was some devilish current pushing me off in another direction -- toward anarchy and poverty and craziness. That maddening delusion that a man can lead a decent life without hiring himself out as a Judas Goat.
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

"Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got a hold of, and never would. It was a maddening image, and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum. Often it was easier not to wait, so the drinking would begin at noon. It didn't help much, as I recall, except that sometimes it made the day go a little faster."
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

"Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception --especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
Thompson, Hunter S.
The Rum Diary

They [psychiatrists] would try to make me into a moron who liked television and new cars and frozen food. Don't you understand? Psychiatry is worse than communism. I refuse to be brainwashed. I won't be a robot!... The only problem that those people [psychiatric patients] have anyway is that they don't like new cars and hair sprays. That's why they are put away. They make the other members of the society fearful. Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions."

"Ignatius, that ain't true. You remember old Mr. Becnel used to live down the block? They locked him up because he was running down the street naked."

"Of course he was running down the street naked. His skin could not bear any more of that Dacron and nylon clothing that was clogging his pores. I've always considered Mr. Becnel one of the martyrs of our age. The poor man was badly victimized."
Toole, John Kennedy
A Confederacy of Dunces

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.
Tzu, Sun
The Art of War

In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the heads of the people. As idealistic as that sounded, he followed with the even more practical advice that even though the Mongol Empire should be one, the subject people should never be allowed to unite as one. "People conquered on different sides of the lake should be ruled on different sides of the lake"
Weatherford, Jack
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

A bold thinker, Mattis’s favorite expression is “Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative”. On the battlefield, his call sign is “Chaos”. His plans for the Marines in Iraq would hinge on disregarding sacred tenets of American military doctrine. His goal was not to shield his Marines from chaos, but to embrace it.
Wright, Evan
Generation Kill

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books."
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

When you recognize who your enemy is, he can no longer brainwash you, he can no longer pull wool over your eyes so that you never stop to see that you are living in pure hell on this earth, while he lives in pure heaven right on this same earth.
Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

"Was, then, oil power an illusion, or was it a product of a particular constellation of economic, political, and ideological circumstances? Was it a one-time phenomenon, or will it prove to be a recurring fixture of international life? Control of, or at least access to, large sources of oil has long constituted a strategic prize.
Of that there can be no doubt. It enables nations to accumulate wealth, to fuel their economies, to produce and sell goods and services, to build, to buy, to move, to acquire and manufacture weapons, to win wars. Yet it is also a prize that can be overvalued. Moreover, the very reality of a world based on oil is coming to be questioned."
Yergin, Daniel
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

War Nerd on Cheney, Iraq, Iran

2007-03-13T09:39:00.001-07:00

“Gary Brecher: War Nerd” is a hidden gem of the internet. His stock in trade is a vast knowledge of military history and deadpan dark humor. Naturally, I like Brecher a lot.

His newest article If It Ain't Fixed, Break It All Up: Cookin' Up A New Me With Cheney is a pretty good survey of the current situation we are facing.

Simplest way to understand it is think about how religion plays out in a place you actually know. Take Europe: the Europeans used to have religious wars all the time, pretty serious ones like the Thirty Years War - a third of the population of Germany wiped out - right up till Europe stopped having religion. And those wars weren't really all about dry theological stuff like what Jesus' middle name was, or what color the priest's collar had to be. On the ground, religious hate like that always translates into tribal hate about sex and hygiene and how those people smell.
Even in California, where it's pretty calm in terms of religious wars, I grew up hearing Brother Art talk about Catholics - "Romans" he called them - worshipping idols and having too many kids and being generally Mexican and dirty. That was the main thing: they smelled, didn't have showers. Come to think of it, Shia are kind of like Islamic Catholic types: stay-behind, ignorant people with too many kids, no money, weird gaudy ways of making religion. That Shia festival where they slash themselves, whip themselves, try to get attention in the street by bleeding on law-abiding hardworking Sunni - it's a lot the way we thought about Catholics. Of course sometime back in the fifties American Catholics turned into just another batch of white people, cleaned up and got on the pill, but that never happened to Shia. For the Sunni, Shia are like rats, swarming up out of the sewers unless you keep them down every minute.
That's the real hate that keeps the power drills and suicide Plymouths powered up in Baghdad. The Sunni who blow themselves up in Shia markets see themselves as pest exterminators for God, cleaning up the neighborhood one bomb at a time. Truth is, it's not hard to understand how a suicide bomber thinks; a lot easier than understanding how an accountant thinks, if you ask me.

He draws heavily from Ralph Peters’ Blood Borders. Also, see the conspiratorial version here for perspective.

Baer, Tim Spicer

2007-03-13T08:59:00.001-07:00

My man Robert Baer has an article in this month's Vanity Fair. It’s about Tim Spicer who is a most interesting dude that flies under the radar of the main stream media. Worth the read.

I knew my share of them: rogue oil traders, art forgers, exiled presidents, disgraced journalists, arms dealers. There was also the Jordanian prince who had once offered to smuggle me into Ramadi, in Iraq's anarchic Anbar Province, in exchange for 100 sheep. People like these are pretty much the currency of C.I.A. agents.
In London, the consensus was that if I wanted a good African yarn I needed to talk to Tim Spicer. He knew or could get to every mercenary, adventurer, or promoter who had ever cast a shadow on that continent.

Goad on The Clash

2007-03-12T21:44:00.001-07:00

This article came my way, It's by Jim Goad-a funny dude and damn good writer.

silver spoons and rotten teeth
remembering joe strummer, wealthy spokesman of the oppressed

By Jim Goad

I was close enough to see his teeth, those stumpy, rotten, yellow-and-brown tombstones that signified he'd lived a HARD life. That jagged mouth spat thunderous fury against the rich and powerful. A rabid Clash fanatic, I had muscled my way up to front-and-center stage and stood the entire concert about three feet away from Joe Strummer, that honest outlaw, that wrathful prophet of the dispossessed, that man whose bad teeth sought to leave deep fang marks in the ass of global injustice.
I'd never seen anyone sweat so much. The sweat poured from his face down his neck, down his guitar strap, and onto the stage. After a few songs, he stood on a sweat puddle three feet in diameter. I feared he might even electrocute himself.
It was like being attacked by an army, mercilessly pummeled by massive sonic steel artillery. I wondered how sounds of such magnitude could come from mere guitars. It was the most powerful musical performance I've ever witnessed. No one else ever came remotely close. The Clash had stolen Thor's hammer and beat me up with it.
This was back in 1980 at the Tower Theater right outside of Philly. The Clash were on tour to promote "London Calling," an album that didn't have nearly the force of their live show. The next night, me and some friends drove over to Jersey to see The Ramones, who had visited Britain in 1976 and were subsequently plagiarized by every British punk band that followed, including The Clash.
But there was no comparison. The Clash blew them away. The Ramones were a good rock 'n' roll band. The Clash were something blinding, something frightening, a primordial fist knocking out all your teeth.
At the time, rock critics led me to understand that the reason for this was because The Clash's music was POLITICAL, whereas The Ramones sang about sniffin' shoe polish with girls. Joe Strummer was described as "a highly articulate rabble-rouser for the dispossessed," a man who was "working-class," even "proletarian." Every Clash song was an anti-rich, pro-poor rave-up about how fucked-up the wealthy are, and isn't it great we're a little garage band from garageland, and the truth is only known by guttersnipes, and wouldn't it be cool if one day pasty-white Joe Strummer woke up as a dreadlocked Jamaican musician, à la Watermelon Man?
The problem, for me at least, is that Joe Strummer was born to wealth. His father was a British diplomat...a representative of the nation which colonized Africa and Asia and caused many of the Third World problems that fashionably leftist Joey-come-latelys could come along and decry...all while making millions and doing little to solve the problems. Joe spent his youth not in the Cockney London which he would later ape as part of his stage persona, but as a diplomat's son in Turkey, Egypt, Germany, and Mexico. When he returned to England, he enrolled in a private boarding school.
He learned the gentle art of slumming very well, though. He even dropped out of art school! As a London subway busker in the early 70s, he fused his birth name (John Graham Mellor) with that of American folk singer Woody Guthrie and called himself "Woody Mellor." He also spent some time squatting in flats, presumably to see how "real people" lived. In 1982, at the height of The Clash's popularity, millionaire Joe disappeared for three weeks to try "living like a bum." How cute! The pro-Marxist Clash even once tried to arrange a concert in communist East Germany, but German authorities were frightened of their "inflammatory" lyrics and denied them.
Wonderful! That stands right up there with psycho feminist author Andrea Dworkin helping to write such strict anti-pornography laws in Canada, her OWN BOOKS were seized by Canadian Customs as being obscene. The Clash, who waved a Red flag wherever they went, would have been silenced and probably jailed...or even lobotomized...in the sort of Red People's Utopia they championed from afar. Communism proposed to uplift common people but wound up killing and torturing those commoners in numbers that would have made the Nazis jealous.
Over the years following that transcendent live show in 1980, I watched The Clash devolve from an unstoppable force of nature to a cheesy arena-rock band whose horrible doodlings in 3rd World riddim were not only insulting to everyone in the 3rd World, but to anyone who was forced to endure their sloppy, embarrassingly self-indulgent three-album sets. When me and my droogies were tooling around Philly in our car and heard the insipid "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" for the first time on the radio, we laughed at how low the band had fallen. Still, we went to see them again in 1982, only to witness a heartbreakingly hollow, mannered performance sucked clean of all The Clash's prior atom-splitting energy. To compensate, they now had a fucking LIGHT SHOW with scary POLICE LIGHTS and everything. The Clash, probably because they now sucked, went on to become MTV stars and were touring with The Who. These strident anti-capitalists eventually allowed "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" to be used in a Levi's commercial.
Worst of all, there were even rumors that Joe Strummer had used some of his lucre to buy himself a spankin'-white new set of teeth.
Wealth doesn't bother me. Neither does celebrity. And I don't think it's wrong for rich people to feel BAD about the poor. But it bothers the FUCK out of me when they PRETEND they're poor. And I'm irked that Joe Strummer, who SEEMED so authentic, was just another in a long tradition of rich white kids pretending they're oppressed...and getting away with it. In the end, he was just a studio gangsta. Fool wasn't even FROM Compton.
He died of a heart attack right before Christmas, and officials were summoned to remove him from his million-dollar home. I was saddened. I'm also confused. If he was a phony, why was that show back in 1980 so powerful? I can only conclude that Joe Strummer was angry he WASN'T poor. REALLY, REALLY angry about it. Not angry enough about it to sell off his belongings and go live with poor people, but angry nonetheless.
It still doesn't explain the bad teeth, though.