Mayan New Epoch Celebration - Party Like It's 2012

Spare no blood sacrifice this Mayan New Year!  This one is keeps, at least for the expiring epoch, which was not a kind one to the Mayans themselves, maybe they didn't sacrifice correctly, let that be a lesson.  The Bible itself advises us that the God finds pleasing a unblemished roasted sacrifice, and who doesn't.

I just finished scavenging the turkey sacrifice from last week, so today I dedicated and sacrificed a cheese to the diety. The haruspices inspected the entrails of the cheese and declared the omens favorable.  

Change Is. It is what it is.

The Obama team 2012 has a new slogan for this round, "Change Is".  O is already using this in speeches, he lists his accomplishments using the phrase "Change Is ... Passing the first health care reform in 100 years".

"Change Is" as a bumper sticker slogan is too cute by half in these tough times.  It's also easy to make fun of in simple ways:  "Change isn't", "Change is as change does",  depends on what the definition of "is" is, "Change This".

"Is" is a form of the verb "to be", sounds static.  Like saying it's already finished.

Too slick, lads, back to the brainstorm room with you for another go at a bumper sticker.

Extreme Shakespeare Fan Fiction

Lear's three daughters become weird sisters who tell Hamlet to kill his new uncle, (Hamlet survived his previous wounds), after Hamlet and his long lost twin brother were shipwrecked and had disguised themselves as twin sisters.  They then meet twin sisters disguised as twin brothers, whom they marry, and then the ladies convince them to kill King Duncan, who turns out to be Beatrice in disguise.  The merry farce continues until everybody is dead in Act II, and a whole new group of charactershappen by.  Kate must marry Romeo. so Juliet shipwrecks herself.  Bottom and Falstaff mistake each other for animals, and Oberon gives Richard III a mule head, and in his madness he wanders the heaths in a raging storm that symbolizes Kate's hatred of marriage.  Romeo smothers her with his pillow, and then sleepwalks and tries to wash the blood off his hands in the storm on the heath.  The MacDuff invades and everybody dies again, which leaves Act V with no living characters, but a great cast of ghosts.

An ancient Chinese plate of observed comets. There may have been more comets in the past, as the body whose remnants today are Comet Encke and the various Taurid meteor streams, is estimated from projectories to have contained far more mass when it first entered the solar system ~ 14,000 years ago. All the mass was lost as the gravity of the Sun and the larger planets tugged at the initial body and its components, creating fragments that themselves were pretty big and apparently impacted somewhere - maybe here. Maybe at Saginaw Bay, splattering mountains of glacial slush over the areas where we now see northwest-pointing shallow ovals, which can be miles across, called Carolina Bays (thanks to Google Earth), in the Carolinas and neighboring states and also in midwest, where they point northeast This is not accepted science but great internet speculation. Anyway, note the image at the bottom right, which resembles a notorious political symbol of the 20th century that itself was based on an ancient widespread motif in Eurasian pottery. This image is in fact a head-on view of a comet, a head-on view! This is not something you want to see in the sky. This may be the origin of the notorious political symbol, ironically a symbol of ancient dread, an omen of evil, the portent of an impact event.

I've spent some years mapping the Big Bang background radiation of our culture and after another 5 quintillion observations I will prepare a summary, so don't wait up...

The American Dream
We all want 100% of it.
Selfish people want 110%.
With finesse, you can be happy with less.
Contentment at 70% makes life better by (100/70)%.
You can work to lower your contentment threshold.
To 50%, 45%,....30%?
Under 10%, that's 90%+ all gravy.
O% is called nirvana

Boston 10K 4-15-07

I did not run in the Marathon because it is far too inconvenient crowded and pricey, but my athletic supporters will unimpressed to know that I started a new tradition that will surely last a lunchtime by completing a 10K on the boston esplanade on Sunday under similarly ideal conditions, 50 degrees and drizzly.

Watching the stalwart marathon runners at Coolidge Corner on Patriot's Day, I observed everybody wears white running shoes. However, I wore my black running shoes on Sunday. When I ran the Adirondack Marathon 9-30-03, I wore my bright blue heavy Fila test sneakers, a present from the former Fila R&D office in Peabody, MA - I worked across the hall from them, and was a size 9, then their testing size (I believe they told me Nike tests in size 10). They were heavy like boots but the cramps are gone now and all that remains is the fading glory.

I completed a marathon in the week leading up to the Big Race, but it was over the course of 4 days, but they were windy drizzly days for sure.

Allston, Best Damn Neighborhood Period

I come to overpraise Allston, not to underbury it.

In the globally under-achieving winter '07, my gas-fed money-wasting car has been obsoleted by my bicycle, because I live in Allston, the logical alternative for Boston. Because of some snobbery concerning our home, one of the only areas named for an artist (Washington Allston; okay more art history than art), rents are modest by Boston standards, especially if you view rodents as fellow higher mammalian inheritents of the modern condition, as we do.

Here music makers feel free to play loudly, to the utter delight of their neighbors. Also the birds sing loudly; one night in 2002 on Ridgemont St. I heard a mockingbird gloriously splurt Mozartian bits, learnt up from some odd Allston window no doubt, figuring the musical density of this place.

We have the New Balance outlet, 30% off sneakers.

The new book "The Absolutely Worst Places to Live in America" named Allston, MA 14th worst; the author spent time while in college, so perhaps he saw the puky side of life here, but this is not the whole story. I would like to counter that Allston is in fact the 14th Best Place to Live in America, maybe 13th.

I have the advantage of living in Lower Allston, the most underrated neighborhood in Boston, maybe even more so now that Harvard is going to knock down a huge part of it, But for now, it is as quiet as the forest deep, yet everywhere that matters, from the Waterfront to Cambridge to JP, is but a half-hour's bicycle ride, downtown is a half-hour bike commute along the esplanade bike path, as fast as the green line but relaxing instead of irritating.

I don't mind the preponderance of the young in Allston, they dress funny and say and spraypaint the darndest things. I used to live on Linden St. and got to enjoy their paleolithic merry-making late into the wee hours, but in Lower Allston we sleep like babies in a bubble.

I am proud to be in a neighborhood where the suburban cult of the perfect lawn is truly unwelcome; the lawns of Allston are keeping it real with a rich biodiversity of invasives.

For one's out-of-state visitors, it is a major advantage to live right off a turnpike exit instead of having Aunt Mabie negotiating the swirling oneway deadend fog of Boston's street layout.

Also, we have a Super 88 Market

What's not to like?

English has peculiar spellings, unhelpful to people trying to learn it, as so many overseas must do these days in order to telemarket to us, to be considerate to their foreign feelings we ought to think about rationalizing to metric English, which is already available, it's the pronounciation keys in the dictionaries. Imagine a language where a pronouciation key is not needed. Looking at some keys, seems nearly every vowel has some sort of caret, umlaut, or cone over it, what a pain, I withdraw the petition. You say Dunkin' Donuts and I say Dunking Dough Nuts.

Boston Community Sailing

I'm a sailing hacker, can't hardly make proper knots, but there is a place for sailors like me.

I have one original painting, bought on a Brookline Open Studio day several yeas back, now on loan to my sister, it's a colorful landscape of Beacon Hill from the Cambridge side of the river, with lots of sailboats, I bought it in commemoration of summer 2001 sailing those Mercury bathtub-hulled sailboats from the Boston Community Sailing, that place on the Esplanade near the Longfellow bridge. It's a classic Boston thing, because the views are great, the wind is New England weird, it changes all the time, there are can be dead zones in the shadow of the the Pru and the Hancock, you see cloud patterns divide over Boston-Cambridge, this heat pocket, with the broad Charles as a cooled subpocket within. I got a little tired of it after that summer because you can't go past the Longfellow Bridge or the Mass Ave Bridge, you end up sailing the same places over and over. You can buzz the sweeties sunbathing on the Esplanade. These sailboats are fairly indestructible, I've banged up against the wall on the Cambidge side, smacked into the dock, run aground. I've seen people capsize and take a bath in the Charles, you need to let off on the tension when big gusts come up, some people don't get it. In Jamaica Plain in 2004 a Boston DPW worker flushed flourescent green dye down my toilet, and discovered my poop drained into the storm pipe which led to the Charles, not the sewer pipe at all. He told me "Oh yeah there are thousands of places in Boston attached to the wrong pipe". Oh geez and I see naive people fishing on the Charles. So you definitely want to avoid capsizing, but learning how to let off is part of the beauty of the analog non-digital practices of sailing. I would never buy a motorboat. That's like driving, whereas sailing is subtle and much more rewarding. But you can't haul a waterskier, so motorboats have their place. Anyway Community Saling boats are deliberately heavy and hardy because they know there's going to be a bunch of knuckleheads out there. They give you a training of about 2 hours and then you're on your own, it's strange they don't require life-jackets, seems like the ambulance-chasing lawyers would be salivating about this. The Mercury's are pretty easy to sail. But there is a lot of traffic, lots of sailboats, 40-something from Community Sailing, dozens of MIT's little sailboats, those wake-raising Duck Tours, worst of all the obnoxious motorboaters from Watertown and Waltham who come zooming down the Charles as fast as they can. And the chubby tub Mercury's do not perform in low wind. In 2001 Community Sailing cost $75 for 45 days, you can get more expensive yearly memberships, but the 45 day deal is sufficient, I think the best thing is start June 15th and take the whole month of July, you can sail almost to 9pm, it's warmest, and August is disliked in sailing for its humid windless days. It's a fun thing for a date, depending on the person.

Once I was aboard as ballast on one of the higher end sailboats that Community Sailing also offers, it had 3 not 2 sails, and V of a half-dozen Canada geese crossed us right off the bow, it was so David Attenborough.

They have a bike-rack on the dock, you can ride your bike down the Esplanade, or just take the mole-train, excuse me I mean the T.

The deadest spot wind-wise seems to in the area of the dock itself, so sometimes I would listlessly drift in. The only other sailing I've done is on a bantumweight Sunfish, which you can drive by blowing on the sail, these Mercury's are a bit more unwieldy, but it's fun to get out there on the Charles and review Back Bay and MIT, if you live here try it at least for one summer, it's quite a novelty for a month or two.

How come there is no 'heavy gauge' for acoustic guitar strings, just 'light' and 'medium'. Tonight I broke strings 4 times only because I was trying to play as it should be played, I broke lower E, and broke D 3 freaking times, I'm all out of D. Is it because most acoustic guitar players are prancing and sashaying, not thromping? 'Heavy gauge' strings should be made.

If you are in a group of peopleat Christmas time, have them all stand in a circle holding hands. Then start singing "Welcome Christmas" from "The Grinch that Stole Christmas" like all the Whos in Whoville and see if everybody doesn't smile.

"Fah who for-aze dah who dor-aze" is basically pseudo Latin that just sounds good, it brings out that we are in Suess's world, for my heart grew 3 sizes larger that day.

From Suess.com, hope this isn't tantamonting to copyright crime.

Welcome Christmas (both versions)

Author: Dr. Seuss

This is the song sung by the Whos of Whoville on Christmas. The first version is probably more suited for simple caroling, and the second for more choir oriented activities. The first is sung while the Grinch watches from on high, and the second is at the end (maybe during the closing credits - I don't recall off-hand).

Welcome Christmas		Welcome Christmas (Reprise)
Fah who for-aze!		Fah who for-aze!
Dah who dor-aze!		Dah who dor-aze!
Welcome Christmas,		Welcome Christmas,
Come this way!		Come this way!
Fah who for-aze!		Fah who for-aze!
Dah who dor-aze!		Dah who dor-aze!
Welcome Christmas,		Welcome Christmas,
Christmas Day.		Christmas Day.
Welcome, Welcome		Welcome, Welcome
Fah who rah-moose		Fah who rah-moose
Welcome, Welcome		Welcome, Welcome
Dah who dah-moose		Dah who dah-moose
Christmas day is in our grasp		Christmas day is in our grasp
So long as we have hands to clasp		So long as we have hands to clasp
Fah who for-aze!		Fah who for-aze!
Dah who dor-aze!		Dah who dor-aze!
Welcome, welcome Christmas		Welcome Christmas
Welcome, welcome Christmas		Bring your cheer
Day		Fah who for-aze!
		Dah who dor-aze!
		Welcome all Who's
		Far and near
		Welcome Christmas, fah who rah-moose
		Welcome Christmas, dah who dah-moose
		Christmas day will always be
		Just so long as we have we
		Fah who for-aze
		Dah who dor-aze
		Welcome Christmas
		Bring your light
		(Bridge (about 65 sec))
		Welcome Christmas
		Fah who rah-moose!
		Welcome Christmas
		Dah who dah-moose!
		Welcome Christmas
		While we stand
		Heart to heart
		And hand in hand
		Fah who for-aze
		Dah who dor-aze
		Welcome welcome
		Christmas
		Christmas
		Day

Copyright © 1957, Dr. Seuss.

---

Return to the The Dr. Seuss Web Page. Or just send me some email.

Page maintained by David Bedno (drseuss@seuss.org).

Comprehensible geological strata? I live in Massachusetts a complex continental pressed-together fringe where the rocks are crushed and hard to figure, it is not easy for this totally amateur dilettante to discombobulate, unlike the flattened strata of upstate NY and other inland sendimental inland areas here in USA , but a the Helderburg exposure seen above Altamont, NY at Thatcher's Park, so classic Ordovician-Silurian Gondwana, Agassiz worked here in the day, it is exposed so well anybody can come and heck you may find a trilobite. If you want a trilobite fossil come to NY, we got plenty come here with digging tools and look.

Less than 50% of the real learning you can get comes from college, you have to get up into a library and really read, you have to follow an urge to know something, just following directions is no way to learn, you have to want to know about something, otherwise it's just a lacking career move.

Let us face the facts of historical economical geography, all of our historical narratives although souding dramatic like plays have been inevitable. If the Anerican Revolution hadn't happend in 1776 well it would have happened in 1777, because a little island like England could never control a big place like the American entity between Georiga and Maine, cuz it was big enough to struggle free of an island 2000+ miles away when sea-travel took weeks, and the American backwoods was impossible for the Brtish to control, they couldn't even subjicate the Iroquois, the colonial whities did that cuz they had a base here, they lived nearby, but it was not for the sake of the distant King George. it was to ruthlessly get land out in upstate New York and Ohio. Oh we destroyed a real nation during the American Revolurion with the campaign thru upstate New York that burnt out and stampeded the Iroquous. From 1619 to 1776 the Iroquois controlled the balance of power in this region, although really after the Seven Years War they had no leverage because the French were out of Canada, but it is fascinating how they controlled such a vast region in the 17th and 18th centuries, won and lost the Midwest, maintained the respect of the tribes and colonials, and their languages, directed related to that of the Cherokee which as we know (I say 'we' to be polite) has a syllabary created by Sequoyah (English is too convoluted to be spelt by syllabary, English needed an alphabet with strange spellings to accomodate the Greek, Latin, French, Norse, etc decesdent wordings), and is a noble set of languages; some say the best speakers (Mohawk, Seneca) had a cadence and speech not unlike Castillian; god bless the Iroquois, the native people of the region I myself grew up in, upstate NY, the gateway to the west, and a beautiful place. Go out to Cayuga Lake and you see what the Seneca saw. Or the Mohawk Valley, where the Mohawk and Oneida peoples lived and some still live, a classically glacially terraformed landscape. Hey go dig some quartz crystals while you're out there. That's where the best double-termnated ones come from. Anyway the Americans wanted this land so the second-sons of New England could have farms while the eldest scions held the stony little ancestoral properties back in useless non-profitable Massachusetts, where nowadays there are no more than 150 farms in the whole state, cuz who would want to farm in soil full of stones.

Why don't we think nothing of nudity? Because of weather, because we aren't all haired up like dogs and cats, we are for some reason a rather hairless species, which is odd since hominids have lived in the northern regions for a long time, although we are all descended from the African branch that found brains less than 100,000 years ago, but wouldn't you think Cro-Magnon or the proto-Asians developing during the Wisconsian Ice Age (the last one - until the next whichc is imminent) would have been selected for hairiness? Why, I ask myself during this New England winter, can't we have some kind of hair covering? Maybe their was a sexual selection preference, which is a strong factor in evolutions, (girls don't like the hairy? Guys don't like the hairy girls.) like the male peacock tail, which serves no other survival purpose. I'm not completely up to date on the thinking on this , but read 'Descent of Woman' by Ellen Morgan years and years ago and she spelled out the Aquatic Ape theory, the idea that there was a phase in the evolution of homo sapiens, during some awful hot arid stage in Africa, the last interglacial I suppose, when our ancestors dwelt only on the coastline and spent a real lot of time in the water, and thus lost hair in order to aid swimming, like other rather unhairy mammals like whales, and quadropeds like rhinos. And pigs. Pigs are a real analog to humans, rather unhairy, sweaty, pretty smart for a beast. Some other interesting ideas in 'Descent of Woman' was that women have bigger butts because they spent so much time sitting on the beach with kids in their laps, and that underarm hair is there cuz swimming is not negatively effected by it.





OK next post

Force everybody to take up a musical instrument as a requirement of citizenship, with weekly jams amongst the coerced, and I'm sure people would be nicer; it's for their own good.

The Big Easy is not easy or even that big anymore. Apparently it's not very important to restore this place. Now useless boring stupid dreadful suburbs with franchise restaurants and cookie cutter structures are being built all across the US, while the rebuilding of truly uniquely American New Orleans is stalled in perplexion. Now that N.O. has been wacked, the most vulnerable American unharmed city is ... Las Vegas? Or another sea level city, like NYC, Honolulu, or Miami?
Or crowded little Boston with its impossible traffic, no evacuation possible.

From the majik year 2003, back when I was young and backpacked all summer:

Sunday 7-13-03

A postmodern life.

Brooks babble in SQL

Foibles. fobbles, fubbles, enfoible, befoible,

follify, follyman, follymonger, defolliate,

follying, follier, folliest, refollify.

Retrospire, despire, misspire

Frog diplomacy, frog love, toadage.

I think a bird is alternating keys.

A 2-bar phrase, taking it up a fifth?

Mon 7-14-03

Today's theme: Broken (camera, diet, resolve, etc.)

This week, am I simply throwing myself at the mountains just to escape the city.

8pm Moss Pond - Doodlebugs, barflugias, foolish little circling flies.

Bird song - Questioning, changing volume, changing attitude, reversing phrases; communicating.

Little things bite and itch, nothing major.

Twilight, when changing light excites our chromatics, our light perception, hunger, our need for darkness.

No bushwhacking after 8pm.

AT ThruHikers have mechanistic notions, their goals must be Maine or Georgia.

They clink down the AT with 2 poles like mechanical spider from Johnny Quest.

Tribes send their young men out to the woods to "look for their vision", or as we would say, live out their psychosis.

My water source is Bear Wiz Creek.

Tues 7-15-03

Woodpeckers working their way up a tree, like Canada geese working across a lawn, looking for bits of food.

There's 3 together on one tree by Gentian Pond. I don't know species or genus. Bluejay-sized. Debris falls.

Smoking rhymes with coffee drinking.

Worrying rhymes with ignoring.

Anxiety tics rhymes with running away.

At the stream, this place is mine for now.

The stream is clothed in filters, gravel and moss.

Decaying leaf, doodlebugs, and mud.

I'm walking it to Wocket Ledge, the edge.

Staying high on the plateau today.

Hike but not exhaust, to the perspective.

Moss Pond - a little snake, dragonflies, pollywogs.

Not enough coffee to satisfy physical dependency.

A great boon and benefit I don't see as such.

Already thinking of first Dunkin Donuts

Ice coffee, probably the pseudo-hazelnut.

Tomorrow morning, it will help me descend boring

Austin Brook Tr., which is a timber road still

maintenanced. This is not as isolated as those boutique Wilderness Areas, Great Gulf and Pemi.

So many of the living trees have exposed roots.

Action of water on thin soils, where trees anchor on rock or rocks.

I attract flies at every step. New ones, I hope.

This is my softcore nature walk. I've already observed my furies so they need not follow.

Grass grows up here in distinct clumps, but sometimes there are stands, and it is lawn to me, to us.

I'm not crazy about the platforms at G. Pond.

Some flies like that I take my boots + socks off.

O yes, there is inexhaustible beauty for the eyes that can see it.

Silvery slivery sunned cobwebs.

Fluttery greenery, graceful woods, blue skies.

I'm walking through the woods like Thoreau, except I'm not thorough, I never do the whole 9 yards, I'm a "3-yards and a cloud of dust" performer.

Above Wocket Ledge - A dragonfly!

Bravo for things that can cling to an open summit.

In the swirl of my absurdity, sometimes I hit upon a pleasing novel insight. You can hike barefoot!

I took my water from a streampool with a frog looking out at me.

At Dream Lake I had a close encounter of the moose kind, a big female was taking a bath in the center. My camera is not working.

I can't totally hate my trips, because I always see new things.

Tuesday, 7:37PM - One last time to Moss Pond, a mere 25 minutes from my tentsite but guaranteed isolated.

Where the dragonflies and doodlebugs play. Dragonflies patrol the shoreline.

This is a real Craig trip, dreadfull, amusing, schizophrenic depressed whimsy.

'Because I can' may be an irresponsible reason.

I'm not hearing SQL on the wind anymore.

Not a lot of writing, story ideas, tales, pr rather not what I might have hoped.

It's not quiet - there is a white noise of mixed insect hum and buzz.

What is the mysterious ticking sound?

At Moss Pond there is a big cliff behind, and the Pond shore is a converted talus pile, trees on rock, holes between rocks, cascading duff and moss.

I'm too noisy to be a good nature watcher.

Now, at 8:20PM, at last I discovered the flat sitting rock the situation required.

As Mercury has turned direct, I guess earth caught up with it, it's a punk planet too hot too small, I will mercuriously create anew. Let us all stop, sit, think, and talk this stuff out. Okay we got a dust-storming, car-bombing, infrastructure-chancy, spirit-sucking updated version of Vietnam happening once again on our nightly TV. Witness the entropy of America's strength - we couldn't stand not exercising our powers, but in all the past there have been regrets over throwing the troops against a distant coast, what a sad example the Alcibades invasion of Sicily during the Peloponesian Ware obviously sets, the Vietnam analog is palpible, but now look at at us. Sure casualty levels are at manageable levels versus the 300-dead a week I saw every Thursday in my paper when I was a kid, but the end-result of this adventure is hardly defined, We opened a can of worm, a freaking can of jumbly wigglies, squiggling borders and messing relationships. We did Iraq but Iran was always more powerful and dangerous, and the invasion of Iraq put them on High Alert, and probably convinced them that they must have nukes in order to deter invasion. Whereas after the Gylf War Saddam was basically mad and there was no serious WMD's happening there cuz the underlings knew they mustn't implicate themselves aginst the US-UK-etc in any way or suffer. So we conquered a country we knew we could beat, for reaons of location location location, the so-called fertile crescent is a croosroads, but how to rule? - Saddam made the trains run on time, and smashed down separatism, but give them the vote and maybe federalism seems lousy.

If we withdraw now as my lib friends (I don't have conservative friends because I like people who can think, even if I disagree, and conservatives think from the gut and their talk by and large is uninteresting and they should all take Logic 101 and then reflect) urge, what happens - civil war? Something bad, Iraq goes psycho, the whole mideast blows up? Like leaving a toddler in charge of the cutlery. I defer to the Colin Powell Pottery Barn doctrine. And it's definitely broken, it's been in sad shape since the Gulf War, with the sanctions and the drift under the deluded killer mandarin.

Walking is a third-class exercise but has demonstrable benefits. After 15 minutes on a cold day's walk you begin to feel like your body had marshalled itself to resist the freeze.

Running, lifting, bicyling or swimming as hard as you can is first-class exercise. In first-class exercise your mind wraps around the activity and you think about breathing, and you feel the limits.

Normal bicycling or hiking is second-class exercise, I speak for myself here, these activities have a mental component of exploration that impels the curious to slow down and look around.

Walking is the most over-rated but also the most under-rated exercise. It is the minimum level of activity but is sufficient to continue fair health.

The Golden Rule should just be "Be nice!"

On Roatan Island, off the coast of Honduras, settled by peoples from Jamaica and Grand Cayman, there is an obeah practice of reciting certain Old Testament psalms while thinking about the person you wish to bring bad luck upon; this is the use of the Bible as a magical fetish. Of course with the full realization of the coded nature of the Torah, as popularized by the smash book "The Bible Code", and the widespread belief of many of our 21st century contemporaries of the literal truth of The King James's Version, including the mistranslations, and such famous contradictions as the conflicting genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, perhaps the belief in Bible magick is not so strange. Every unscientific culture knows the world is permeated by magic, in the most decentralized every mountain or spring or even tree has an associated spirit.
In the Homeric world, a world of city-states, a world with social roles and stratifications, with trades and guilds, there is a group of gods who have some independence of action, who exemplify some social modeling which would have been familiar to the people of that day.

The New England Patriots are a very fine organization, they seem to have mastered all the best organizational theory, all corporations can learn from them, Bill Belichick seems to be a master of organizational theory. Did I say 'organizational theory'? Yes. I did. I predict a 41-10 victory for the NE Patriots in the Super Bowl, because of the superior organizational ability.

The Iraqi elections were a success because they happened. The Shiite 'secular' slate will take power as expected. The power of democracy is a scary thing. In some countries in the region democracy would mean a scary government comes to control, because religious fundamentalism is so pervasive in the 'middle east'. In Egypt a free election might result in an Iran-style regime. In Saudi Arabia a free election would shock the West because the fundamentalists would easily win in the home of Islam. Would we be prepared for that? The introduction of free voting into the middle east raises these questions.

We are all waiting on the results of the Iraqi election. Of course Iraq has had elections before, just a couple years ago they had one and Saddam Hussien won 99.9% of the vote, it makes you wonder what kind of lunatics voted against him. It looks like the Shiite and Kurd vote may be heavy and the Sunni vote will be only extremely brave people. Very sad, such a chaotic situation, we can't protect our own embassy or green zone, 150000 troops are not hardly enough, remember in the 1991 Gulf War we had 400000 troops available, we even had a French armored division helping, if Bush Sr. had decided to occupy then we would have avoided the whole ugly decade of sanctions and the UN Oil-for-Food fiasco., saving many innocent lives.

Well, everybody complains about Iraq, I suppose that's not blogable news.

Why did we need to invade when we did? Not to avoid the sandstorms, since they hit during the invasion; to avoid the heat of summer, that's the most plausible answer. The UN inspectors had found nothing by February, 2003, and their judgement has proven all too true. But the Bush adminstration had faith in their instincts, they were sure Saddam was hiding things. Now we know that the Iraqi-omnipotent Saddam had entered into a phase of madness some absolute dictators fall into and was spending most of his time writing romantic novels during his final years. He may even have thought he was developing WMDs but it has been revealed that any such program was a corrupt sham his scientists were pulling, because corruption becomes the way of life in a degenerate regime.

Many people want us to pull out immediately from Iraq, what kind of country would result from that? It is an unknown unknown.

The invasion of Iraq ranks as a major roll of the dice with history; it seems to be a Pandora's Box of history, the whole consequences cannot be known. Great just what we want for our future, major uncertainties, after 9/11 we did not need to mess up our image which was highly sympathetic with unnecessary invasions of third party countries just because they had oil, or defied the father of the current president.

Is there a need for the United States to style itself as the active agent for the advancement of democracy in the world, and if so is the current administration to right team for the job; this is a loaded question, of course, for those of us dismayed at the inadequate, hopefully not too disastrous nation-building in Iraq. But the Iraq model of occupation cannot be the template because our military does not have flexibility anymore, it is tied down to the existing commitments. If it were possible to bomb a nation into democracy, we still have plenty of uncommitted naval and air force power to shine that torch, and before you laugh remember Afghanistan; success there involved leveraging alliances with groups that served as the boots on the ground.
However, the progress of the establishment of democratic institutions in this world has been steady and very encouraging for the last 20 years, since the remarkable and template-forging People Power revolution in The Phillipine overthrew the archetypical strong man Marcos regime. Without any American military deployments, there has been what you might call successful organic native democratic movements in a very significant number of countries, upending right wing power monopolies in South Korea, Argentina, Chile, Taiwan and South Africa; the transformation of the entire Soviet bloc with another famous people power revolution in Romania and the submission of the Communists to Yeltsin in Russia, and the formation of stable responsible governments in formerly no-hope places like Uganda and El Salvador. Spain and Portugal are completely Europeanized, Serbia and Croatia tired of their demogogues, Turkey is a model of Islamic democracy, and even Mexico elected an oppostion government. Three years ago Indonesia lost its dictatorship, two years ago Georgia had its Rose Revolution, and this year Ukraine decided it was a modern Europrean nation. Every nation that modernizes finds itself transforming into a democracy. The Communist Party of China has found a way to ride the wave, but really the clock is ticking on their extended control. That nation has loosened up quite a bit from the bad old days, the party that crushed the students in Tientamin Square 16 years ago will have their day of reckoning, I predict it will be no more than 16 years from now, and Vietnam too. Still there are many places where democracy is a dirty word, particularly in the areas of religious fundamentalism, and we all know what I'm talking about. Is this what George W. Bush is talking about? Well, President Tunnel Vision is envisioning Iran and Syria, but awkwardly for him that region also contains friends, yes even family friends, who rule with very few pretenses about humoring the democratic impulse. Actually in that region there are cases where the prospect of a free election raises the spector of elected fanatics who could carry a larger majority than Hitler's vote in 1933 (what was that, 34%?).

So with the world turning towards civil government, but with many stubborn cases in the Mideast and Africa, where is it profitable for interventions by the Bush administration, which the whole world knows as a group with simplistic hamfisted impulses backed up by fire power? The problem is provoking a backlash, and what is the insurgency in Iraq other than a backlash? Of course this coterie of American leadership has had opportunities in Haiti and Liberia to prove how much it loves democracy, without prompting much of a commitment from it. One must face the obvious conclusion that they just wanted to take out Iraq, and everything else has been postured around propping up this move, from The Roadmap to the recent bombastic second Inaugaral Address. The grand principles are just a show, a case of just say anything you have to in order to justify the invasion fo Iraq, either for Bush's father complex or Cheney's oil complex, probably both. Maybe the overall effect will be positive, with emerging democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the problem is maybe it won't, because the flaw is the unrevolsed conflicts in both of these places. Iraq seems to be a kind of Pandora's Box, the continuing consequences of this troubled occupation throwing all plans into doubt. Across the border in Iran there was a very promising democratic movement, currently hobbled, and the confrontational situation between the Bush crowd and the mullahs have probably done nothing but harm to the future of the once-strong Iranian democratic movement, just playing into the hands of those who thrive on facing down America. Well, that may be an unfair statement to the Bush people, the theocrats were never going to just let Iran go the way the people wanted, they are truly religious, and their God doesn't want democracy, and the flippant materialistic TV culture that always accompanies it. Yes, the problem with democracy is that most people have no taste. The more democratic America gets the less prestige is attached to acting classy, because the people are ruled by their guts and groins. Leveling and the least common denominator is a necessary phase of equalization, but as time passes we can hope for improvements in the general consciousness of the masses, with education it happens. A fatuous consumer culture is an improvement on tyranny and human rights abuses, because at least the people get the taste for thinking for themselves. If the people just want to enjoy life as they see fit they should be allowed to, without know-it-alls telling them what to do, that kind of treatment just leads to frustration and resentment, which isn't good for anybody.

But at this point are there benefits attached to the threatening Bush "doctrine" (geez is it a doctrine? That's kind of an educated word for the simple policies of the administration). It really seems to be just words addressed to Iran and Syria, it's hard to believe they care what goes on in Zimbabwe or Myanmar, they've never shown the slightest interest in places like that, the non-headline making oil-free corners of the world. Bush is from Texas and I'm sorry but the Texan attitude is frankly offensively simple, I've worked with Texans and the bad taste lingers, with their corny awful jokes and callous selfishness. So what we have is just rhetoric bent to a purpose, maybe if they're lucky it has some positive effect, but one look at the wonders they've worked in Iraq cures any person of the belief that Bush means what he says in any practical way.

Well, I don't feel confident predicting the future, maybe the hamfisted Bush approach will have some lasting positive effect; Jimmy Carter's ineffectual administration left a lasting impression because of the principles he put forth, though in practice he backed the Shah.

If a vote were held in Saudi Arabia tomorrow I wouldn't expect any result other than an intolerant theocracy, does anybody other than a Saudi want that for the world's most crucial oil reserve? Does anybody expect the best from a free election in Egypt or Jordan? Maybe this is unfair commentary but there is reason to fear the worst. Look at Algeria.

The simpletons will run America for another four years, I hope their God has mercy on the rest of us.

I live near Boston and have been following tonight's breaking red alert story about the dirty bomb terrorists who were smuggled over the Mexican border. The smuggler ratted them out? But why would such poeple reveal their plot to this guy and let him live? Are we seeing a feint to distract from another target?

On the John Batchelor radio show tonight he had a guest who said the Brownsville area smuggling king is connected with an East Boston gang of foul repute. Illegal aliens can't just drive to where they want to end up, somebody has to handle the domestic freight. This might make Boston a target of convenience.

Today is both Inaugaration Day and a Muslim Feast.

Rumination on The Flag

The US flag is all state glorification, the 13 lucky originals showing their red blood and whiteskins, and the current crop high in an orderly constellation; few flags in this world have an agenda of development as ours. I was born between the admittances of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 but I haven't seen the 49 star flag which surely must have flown during that summer; and at some point someone must have designed a contingent 51 star model for POOH purposes. Our flag is all about states asserting themselves as individuals, nothing could be more American.

You can't be a country without one. Even Antactica has a flag, although it is just a mindless silhouette of the continent, white on blue. The British Indian Ocean Territories has a cool one, a union jack in the upper left like other Brit-derived places, but with wavy blue stripes, like ocean waves, and a palm tree and the royal crown. Nepal is the only country that doesn't use a rectangle, they have a double golf-flag design. But only the US has this long orderly development where the design has systematically changed in order to accommodate the number of states; it engages one's geometric and compositional sensibilities.

In Jamaica Plain, MA, where I live, the gayest zip code in a state lurching headlong into what will be endless years of wrangling and legal conflicts over same-sex marriage, most of the flags I see fly in front of gas stations run by immigrants. But bleached by the sun the red strips fade to pink; lordy, this is indeed gay America... Out my window flies the noblest flag in the neighborhood, in front of the Mann-Mann (same sex again!) Funeral Home, where for a year has been festooned a big RW&B banner reading "We Support All Our Troops" - well, Of course a funeral home would support the war, good for business...

I am somewhat disheartened, naively perhaps, that flag hygiene has declined since I was in the cub scout honor guard, and people do not replace worn flags or take them down at dusk, or declare Unclean one that has violated the touching-the-ground taboo. Perhaps it is because the scoundrels keep wrapping themselves in it; they can give it a bad name; jingoism leaves such a bad taste, if we asked to stop thinking in order be team players. Some of us Americans happen to believe in the legacy of the Enlightenment that the Founding Fathers bestowed to us. We have a nice flag, and it has been a powerful symbol for all that can be good in people when used for the proper purposes. Part of the origin of flags must be as an organizational battlefield tool, and in the past most were in truth no better than that; let not our Old Glory be just another military patch. Things by themselves have no meaning, only the meaning we put into them.

With some irony the flag of the Russia is now blue, white and red; no political party symbol like the USSR. Russia doesn't really have a ruling party anymore, anyway, just a Putinized coalition; he's the doctor and they were sick and they trust the cure. Hope it all works out. Who isn't disarmed by Canada's wise choice to honor the showiest of trees - that's a flag that doesn't seem well suited to fomenting bloodlust on the battlefield.

Having a flag out my window is a practical advantage as I always know the speed and direction of the wind. Flags depend on renewable wind power; no fossil fuels consumed as it represents the fluid patterns of the air; it brings us back to a basic, even as we may sit inside sealed buildings with false atmospheres and temps; remember, our flag cannot fly indoors, it can only hang. Is America changing from an outdoor to an indoor country now as we are up to our knees in the electrically driven things that enable modernity? Maybe soon they'll have a light-sensitive flag that can represent flying for the indoor people to enjoy, and sure that would be cool, maybe it would flutter flawlessly, and not get tangled and wrapped around the pole. But I agree with the central doctrine of American military thinkers since 1941, Air Superiority; air is superior.

Iraq is becoming something one does not want to think about. Who wouldn't want that nation to emerge as an exemplary democracy, a shining beacon on a hill to encourage the latent and hidden democratic aspirants of the region to endeavor to spread the good word in their own countries, and add nations of the Islamic homelands to join the happy worldwide trend since the late 1980's towards rule by the people that has transformed East Asia (S. Korea, Phillipines, Indonesia, Taiwan, many others), Africa (S. Africa, Uganda, some others), Latin America (Nicaraugua, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, many others), and of course East Europe.

But the continuing swirl of entropy and miscalculations in Iraq may undermine democracy in the region, even in poor Iran that seemed hopeful so recently with the reformist majority in its parliament that this year has been undermined by the fundamentalist Cromwellian imams. Although we might not blame that on the Bush administration, because the 'hardliners' in Iran are surely bullheaded and very resistant to reform, the attitude of the US determinators cannot have helped. In the run-up to the war in 2002-2003 the Bush administration managed to utterly alienate the mild Islamic nation of Turkey with hamfisted attempts to buy loyalty that insulted the elected officials of that nation and their constituents. Do we remember that diplomatic blunder? Did it disgust you? Does anybody remember that episode or does the bumper sticker mentality prevail in America? Turkey could be a great player in the democratization of Islam, and it is no friend of terrorism, having suffered much itself from it, but the Bush administration handwaved this asset in its blind confidence in the technologically unparalleled forces at its disposal. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld famously wanted no more than 75,000 armed US people on the invasion of Iraq out of confidence in superior highly-expensive military tech, and imagine the level of chaos in Iraq if this view had prevailed. Not seeing beyond the victory to the problem of occupation, pure hubris, which as students of the classical Greek view know is punished harshly by the gods.

Secretary of State Powell should have planned the invasion; recall the 'Powell doctrine' of the 1991 Gulf War: Overwhelming Force! If there were 450,000 US troops on the ground in Iraq, would we have the current headlines?

The average Iraqi was happy to see the end of the Hussein regime, but then suffered from lack of electricity (air conidtioners!) and the most basic service fo decent water for too many months, and their most often quoted complaint, "security", because there was and stilll is much lawlessness, and this can be blamed for the most part on the slackness of the US occupation force. Apache helicopters can't stop looting and muggings. So many doubts were raised in the populace.

The Iraqis suffered a lot from the sanctions leveled upon Iraq after 1991, which did not effect the higher-ups with their privileges who could always obtain what they needed from the oil revenue. The UN sanctions were a cowardly shame that only hurt the average people in Iraq. If Republicans need to blame the Clinton administration they should mention this, but since they supported the sanctions and they have no ability to think they don't and they won't. The Repbulicans do not care about humanity, only themselves, their families, their neighborhoods, their country, which is ostensible plausible morality, but lacking empathy for foreigners they cause problems because the US is the globe-straddling power and its actions fall out everywhere.

The lack of understanding of other peoples in the US is disheartening. I hear all the time "How come they don't appreciate that we liberated them" about Iraqis. Well, most Irquis DO appreciate this; but as there are many points of view in America, so it is in other countries, monolithic national attitudes do not exist in any country, there are always different points of view, because people are people and do not all line up to a strereotype; different points of view exist in every society, and in the middle east some always fall under the spell of fundamentalism or remember all too well the history of Western intervention, interference, and hostility; in America the simplistic formulas become conventional wisdom; those other places are far away and stereotypes are the default; what we see on TV is what is filmed, mad demonstrations, dreadful tragic violence, angry voices. Peaceful markets and daily life - not news.