10. You have more empty takeout containers than P.F. Chang’s

9. You’ve lost three pets to indoor avalanches

8. Your refrigerator mold and your oven mold are caught in a life-and-death struggle

7. Even Jehovah’s Witnesses won’t come inside

6. You check to make sure cheese isn’t supposed to fizzle

5. Your bathroom has hot and cold running roaches

4. When you accidentally moved your Christmas tree, you finally found out where Gramps has been all this time

3. The odor has that certain ‘skunk-in-an-outhouse-getting-a-perm’ mystique

2. Your “bean bag chair” is made of accumulated lint

1. Your “dust bunnies” are actually breeding
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. All your chocolate is of the ‘baking’ variety

9. Your Easter eggs have little fuses coming out of them

8. The grass he uses in your Easter basket is from the Dog Park

7. He has “F.U.” shaved into the fur on his back

6. He starts each day by egging your car

5. He told you that Santa wasn’t real

4. He says he wants to cut off your foot to carry around for luck

3. He’s always dissin’ your peeps

2. The eggs hidden on your lawn are six feet deep

1. Those ain’t Raisinets
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. “Yes, that’s a snake in my pocket, and I’m glad to see you!”

9. “My lips aren’t the only things that are magically delicious.”

8. “You sure know how to turn a guy’s blue balls green!”

7. “My small statute makes some things appear much larger by contrast!”

6. “You sure know how to put the Irish spring in my step!”

5. “I’ll grant ye one wish – as long as it involves my pants.”

4. “In today’s market, do you have any idea what a pot o’ gold is worth?!”

3. “You sure are cute! Part of me is Dublin already!”

2. “Top of the mornin’ to ya! Or would you rather be on the bottom?”

1. “What to see my shillelagh?”
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Whitney Houston is dead at 48 due to a self-administered overdose of warm, soapy water; to which she was addicted. It is unclear when she set off down this path. Many observers blame her widower, Bobby Brown, saying that before he came along Whitney took showers, ran through the car wash or just re-applied her hairspray. What cannot be denied is that hers was a daily habit involving gallon upon gallon of the substance she clearly felt was so sweet and embracing but wound up taking her precious life at a tender age. There has been some confusion and dissembling. It should be obvious why Big Bath would be interested in diverting attention from their own intoxicating wares and onto the drugs prescribed for Ms Houston by her doctors or perhaps onto those medicinal preparations from her herbalists. These monopolist robber-barons are already in a stink owing to the epidemic of bath-salts snorting among teens. They fear that their decades…. nay, CENTURIES of sloshing murderous tubs and fragrances onto a hapless humanity (at a tidy profit) might finally come to an end.

Hopefully this will be so. More current numbers seem not to be available but in 2000 there were nearly 400 deaths due to bathing, most of them children! How have we let this menace continue for so long? Many responsible commentators are asking that question. One of the foremost is well-known statistician and advocate for the dead, Jamie Lee Curtis. Sporting a degree from John Carpenter University, and a spotless Hollywood pedigree, Doctor Curtis has the cure for what ails us. All of it.

“There are millions of people in the world addicted to something. Food, shopping, porn, alcohol, prescription drugs and illegal drugs…”

Indeed there are. The levels of food addiction here at home and abroad are truly shocking; at least in the double-digits percentage-wise. Shopping addictions are the silent epidemic revealed only in rustling bags and elevated credit card charges. Alcohol is quite the scourge as the doctor informs us. If there were any malady that could inspire a national program of banishment one would think it would be alcohol, John Barleycorn being the second-oldest blight of man (after food), but no. Let this be the starting clarion on Action Against Alcohol at all levels of government and society. We can call it Proscription. Or something. Finally we get to the nub; drugs, of one sort or another.

How we define “drugs” is a murk. Left out of Dr Curtis’ list of horribles is tobacco. Odd, since that weed plausibly killed her father though booze and coke are more officially blamed. What and whom are specifically absolved of blame?

“It is not fame’s fault. It is no one’s fault.”

The Hollywood BS factory is immediately cleared but then so is the “victim” and everybody else. No one is to blame but EVERYONE is responsible. “Addiction” hovers over even the infant’s bed, besotted as the little imp might be with his pacifier and diaper cream. “Addiction” takes on a spectral, malignant and implacable form, much like Michael Myers.

It is a disease and like cancer, diabetes and depression, it is everywhere. Alcoholism and addiction is ever present and it wants you dead.

Setting aside depression as a prime facet of addiction itself, it is curious and revealing that Dr Curtis uses cancer and diabetes as her models. It is always the “cure for cancer” that is held out as the object of all charity and research. It is cancer that justifies the control scheme used for tobacco and it is cancer that is the symptom when no other symptoms can be found. Yes, cancer is always with us but it could be mitigated mightily by, say, eliminating cigarettes from public consumption. Likewise diabetes is caused, or said to be caused by the easy availability of sugar, especially to children. A control of diabetes and obesity (another murk) is what sparked the recent conversion of Mars Inc. into Jenny Craig, which is to their liking as Big Candy now gets to reduce their ingredient costs without complaints from their actual customers. The doctor’s list seems to imply that a drug is anything that you do, consume or perhaps cogitate over. Is an addiction to salacious memories or fantasies distinguishable from an “addiction” to pornography? Anything can be “addicting” therefore everything is a drug. Except coffee, that’s a miracle!

We might need a new taxonomy. I recall a Michael Cain movie where he was aboard a ship, trying to explain the little plastic squares of white powder to a crew of primitive pirates. “Oh that? That’s cocaine.”

“What’s cocaine?”

“It’s a drug.”

“A drug? What does it cure?”

And with a moment’s thought Cain replies, “Indecision.”

But cocaine IS a drug. What does it cure? Pain.

Again the doctor’s credentials are impeccable. She became entranced by legal painkillers after a peculiarly arduous eye-job though she blatantly jumped over into illegality by stealing drugs prescribed for her sister who whined of phantom pain from fractured bones. All Curtis’ drugs or other vices were liberally lubricated with alcohol. While she doesn’t mention cocaine consumption here, we know of her fondness for it from other sources. All this self-dosing was for legitimate pain mitigation, also, as the story says, to get high and to combat loneliness.

What is the doctor ordering? The illegal drugs are already illegal and the penalties severe, if unevenly applied. Perhaps she wishes that law enforcement had come up her circular drive, knocked down her doors with rams and carted her off as they do for many a user and trafficker in cocaine, heroin or oxycontins across her LA stomping grounds. There. There goes another storm door off the hinges. Would Dr Curtis prefer that she had been arrested, flex-cuffed, tased, fingerprinted and arraigned? That she had made bail and then plead guilty to a lesser charge for court-ordered supervision? We know she would not subject herself to the ordinary round of public “treatment” for addiction or she would have done it. Would she want it for her beloved brother? Or father?

Or even Lindsay Lohan?

Her record is unblemished by any snitching or any sort of discipline imposed by her on others or on herself. An up-tempo version of the Drug War is no folk-remedy in Hollywood so we can assume Dr Curtis does not mean, make more arrests, incarcerate the addicts longer and under more severe conditions. Certainly she is not saying that the sentencing norms in Compton should be reproduced in Beverly Hills. On close reading, she doesn’t seem to be saying anything at all, although she names The Administration the most likely agent for Real Change. Now, we are onto something. Dr Curtis is no medical doctor but a sociologist, perhaps an epidemiologist and she wants Addiction, like cancer, diabetes, obesity, depression, gonorrhea, shyness, bulimia and nerdism to be treated as a public health issue, meaning subject to medical coverage.

The infinite nature of such a project, we have addressed but there could be a way to introduce a true health-issue based philosophy to our treatment of the drugs predicament that would be dramatically better than the system we have or that a Dr Curtis might impose. First thing is to address first principles. The government, high or low, has no standing to prohibit drug possession, production, traffic or use. None. But that is not the world we are living in. Our society and reality is bifurcated. We have the wealthier, whiter, recreational drug culture and we have the poorer, blacker and vocational drug culture. One is allowed their drug use, even to the point of self-harm, delusion, violence, theft or public lewdity so long as they pay lip service, community service and legal services. Another is allowed their drug use so long as they occasionally disgorge a patsy, often the only man left with no one to betray, who will be sentenced to a stretch that even malice murderers rarely serve. Both now are to be brought into the public health system, treated and hopefully sent out into the world to work and not to re-offend. The high-class drug offender is already in this situation. The idea is to make the treatment of movie-bigwigs the norm, something that is desirable if only because it means less lives of men spent in lockdown. Yes, many many lives of men.

Now, to apply our principles. All criminal drug laws are struck down as Unconstitutional. The FDA will concern itself with advertising claims and the dose safety of patented drugs; their purity and consistency. That is it. The efficacy of any prescribed drug will be a matter of competitive, open medical testing, including non-clinical but voluntary use for off-label purposes; meaning for maladies they were not conceived to treat. If that sounds like Frankenstein in the pediatric ward, you should know that this is the way it was until recently. Any drug approved for market sale could be prescribed by any physician for any use, the only limiting factors being the dose safety and medical liability. Only recently and still, not fully, has the FDA been opposing off-label use. Now the medical apparatus declines to pay for those uses but they have yet to be banned and many people with desperate medical conditions are glad it is so, since they would die without such innovations. The pharmacist’s position in our lives will scarcely be effected. They will still dispense medicinal drugs by doctor’s note, as it has been. But once legally in the hands of an end user no criminal penalty will apply to any other consensual use whatever. If this seems a chaotic prospect to you, imagine instead a regime where every pill is accounted for under penalty of imprisonment either for the dispenser or the consumer for that is the state of the law today, awaiting only the technology to enforce it.

So we make the distinction between medicinal or patented drugs and, let us call them, agricultural drugs. Dr Curtis does not even distinguish abusive self-knowledge from the plagues of addiction but we shall. What is an agricultural drug? It is one that grows out of the ground, whether with coaxing or without. Again, this is a return to a time not long ago when opiates and other preparations were available from any corner store. Those who gaze on such a situation with horror should understand that all these prohibitions “for your own good”, are also infinity traps since the perfection of “your own good” is never realized. Recent studies reveal that black gentlemen have superior longevity and health outcomes in prison than out. For Your Own Goodism would imply a national round-up is in order so we know it is an absurdity even before we consider that the most troublesome of drugs, tobacco and booze, ARE available at every corner store and that stern prohibitions of agricultural drugs would have to include nutmeg, cinnamon, coffee and many another leaf or powder in your possession. Agricultural produce must all be treated equally; inspected for cleanliness and integrity but otherwise available without impediment.

This would be Whitney’s Law, not because she would advocate it but because she lived it due to her wealth and notoriety. We all deserve the same opportunities. But she killed herself with her opportunities! Indeed she did and indeed many of us will whether skateboarding or tripping in the tub but, as Whitney demonstrates, that can happen now. Few admit something everyone knows, Whitney was in a tiny minority. No, not black chicks with green eyes. Those were contacts. Whitney was one of that tiny minority to reveal serious issues with her use of any substance or indulgence of any vice. Dr Curtis reminds us of the poor shopaholic but the shops are full every day. Is that rampant shopaholism? Of course not. It is the same with patent and agricultural drugs as it is true with alcohol, pornography or self-righteous sermonizing in that vast numbers of people indulge and yet a tiny fraction is ever treated, demonstrably needs treatment or is ever afoul of the law. Among this small cohort, the vast majority who “quit” or otherwise deal with their consumption habits do it “cold turkey” as they say. This includes even those slaves to the most addicting substance: tobacco. No patch, no nothin’. They just stop. Crazy. So rather than inflict a coercive regime that can only benefit a tiny few at a great expense to liberty and public accounts, instead let’s have an expansion or just more energetic application of the laws of civil commitment even to the point of commuting the sentences of already imprisoned persons in great numbers. Neither Whitney nor Bobby nor the Curtis Clan would want any of their addicts thrown in the slam but they might commit that spouse, child or parent to confinement and treatment as a danger to themselves or others. There would be public AND private facilities, some charities. The judge would intervene on a complaint from kin or the State that would not lay a criminal conviction; something that removes the offender from honest employment ever after if he is less than a stage sensation. Those who saw Whitney destroying herself could have done something about it. Now, that would mean Bobby Brown would have to be the adult in the room, a prospect that would be terrifying if not so unlikely, but the alternative is to invite the State to be that adult with all its myopia, contempt and cruel apathy. And if you are going to do THAT, might as well outlaw bathtubs. They are deadly.

A pile of links to help end your weekend in Big Fun.

• Glenn Greenwald at his fiery best: “Indeed: is there even a sin­gle lib­eral pun­dit, blog­ger or com­men­ta­tor who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly tar­get­ing American cit­i­zens for exe­cu­tion with­out due process, or slaugh­ter­ing chil­dren, res­cuers and funeral atten­dees with drones, or con­tin­u­ing indef­i­nite deten­tion even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these peo­ple can even look in the mir­ror, behold the ooz­ing, lim­it­less intel­lec­tual dis­hon­esty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mys­ti­fy­ing to me.”

• If you’re not following Slim Goodbody on Twitter, then you’re missing out.

• Jack Shafer discussing Newt Gingrich‘s thin skin: “Journalists are easy to vil­ify because they’re emi­nently vil­i­fi­able. Their job is to intrude, to ignore deco­rum and to sow chaos where har­mony pre­sides. Show me a jour­nal­ist and I’ll show you some­thing not to like. Put me in front of a mir­ror and I’ll show you some­thing to despise. It’s that sort of pro­fes­sion. But for Gingrich to com­plain about intru­sive ques­tions at a debate is a lit­tle like a patient who com­plains that his doc­tor touched his pri­vate parts dur­ing a sched­uled phys­i­cal exam: Hey, buddy, the probes come with the appoint­ment!”

• Los Angeles Times: “Police were able to lure a naked man who spent hours atop a downtown radio tower with McDonald’s hamburgers.”

• Pravda: “The fem­i­nists’ move­ment in the 1970s and the efforts of the American Conservative gov­ern­ment under President Ronald Reagan helped the tri­umphant return of vibra­tors in the hands of American house­wives. Under the frame­work of the cam­paign to com­bat AIDS a civil ser­vant, U.S. mil­i­tary doc­tor, General Everett Koop in May of 1988 pub­lished an eight-page brochure where along with the use of con­doms he also rec­om­mended to use vibrators.”

• Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier: “The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?“

Lastly, the fan boy in me remains incapable of waiting for this film. I’ve watched the trailer nearly 50 times. If indeed there are #Occupy elements to it, as some have posited, then the movie makes #Occupy look a lot sexier, darker and more enticing than real-life #Occupiers do. (Also, the Bane character wears the same sheepherder jacket and sports the same haircut that I do, so I feel excellent about that.)

When you’re working in a group, it’s hard to know what you truly think. We’re such social animals that we instinctively mimic others’ opinions, often without realizing we’re doing it. And when we do disagree consciously, we pay a psychic price. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that people who dissent from group wisdom show heightened activation in the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the sting of social rejection. Berns calls this the “pain of independence.”

Take the example of brainstorming sessions, which have been wildly popular in corporate America since the 1950s, when they were pioneered by a charismatic ad executive named Alex Osborn. Forty years of research shows that brainstorming in groups is a terrible way to produce creative ideas. The organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham puts it pretty bluntly: The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups. If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

This is not to say that we should abolish groupwork. But we should use it a lot more judiciously than we do today.

Author Susan Cain interview with Gareth Cook, Scientific American Jan 24, 2012

A while back, I did a post on politics over at the Defeatists (In full disclosure, I post my stuff several places at a time if it fits, and that’s my primary place. It’s also the easiest to throw in videos and such…so if you think there may have been tune-age that you missed, check it out.) One of my frustrations with blogging and one reason that I have cut back is the lack of feedback, by the way. Comments are welcome, good, bad or indifferent. Anyway, most of the comments over there seem to come from people who are trying to sell something like Gucci handbags but have been fascinated by some brilliant thing one of us said, either recently or a couple of years ago. We’re about due for the annual “How dare you say anything bad about boy bands, you misogynist bastards, especially you, Commandante!” which has some interesting semiotic undertext in it. However, this one was from a real human being who was interested in what I said and conflicted…I might be right, but what the hell…

Here’s the conversation. Any emphasis is mine…

Good post, good post…but what if the “middle” is, objectively moronic and absolutely wrong? The middle says:

“We need to invade Iraq and kill or displace a million people and turn the country over to the Shiite theocrats, but we will do so with properly audited spending and well-trained troops who will follow the letter of the rules”

The middle says: “Medical care funding in this country is broken so let’s require people to buy overpriced private insurance with their minimum wage jobs”.

Sometimes, to parpaphrase Jim Hightower, “the only thing in the middle of the road are yellow lines or dead armadillos”

And…do you really see any Democratic Party politicians with any position or any influence in the party (which means…Jesse Jackson does not really count) as being anywhere near as crazy as the current GOP? Really? Which ones? I can’t think of any…I’m a little younger than you but I remember Jimmy Carter and Dukakis and their ilk…and they are NOT Santorum or Gingrich, let alone Bachmann.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:48 AM

The middle is also gung ho about the upcoming hot war with Iran…either run driectly by the United States or by our good buddies in Israel. (Another nuclear power. Hmmmm….why is Israel “allowed” to have nuclear weapons?”

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 10:59 AM

Not sure where the middle is…you see it further off to the right than I do. Oddly, we could take either Eisenhower or Nixon and their social policies as a starting point for the middle, and we’d look pretty leftist today. Imagine the New Deal or the Fair Deal or the Great Society in swing today…but, of course, what we got is what we got and determines what we’re gonna get near term and possibly long term. What that doesn’t do is allow us to just give up. I remain convinced that the lesser of two evils is the better choice. By having Bush beat Gore, how did Nader make things better? Devolve for 8 years and here we go again? (Nader is not to blame completely for Bush — lots of things conspired to make things this bad.) However, the difference between John Kerry and George Bush can be summed up with two names — Samuel Alito and John Roberts as well as one Supreme Court Decision — Citizens United. A Democrat wins in 2000 or in 2004, even an uninspiring Democrat like Kerry, and money doesn’t equal speech. However, it’s probably time for my periodic Yeats post…

Posted by: Crusader AXE | 31 January 2012 at 11:47 AM

I guess I am gloomier than you.

I wished I believed things could be “reformed”. I think Chalmers Johnston nailed it. Even as things devolve and crash and burn, the people that benefit from the system still have plentiful opportunities for looting and rent seeking. And, the system promotes sociopaths (no…I am not saying everyone in government is a sociopath…but still, there are a lot of ‘em).

People like Obama merely provide a cover, a gloss, for the ongoing predation. Arguably, Obama has made things worse in that the “anti-war left” (a feeble force given America’s history as a violent culture based on conquest)) was lulled to sleep and ineffectiveness.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 02:04 PM

From a guy who calls himself “The High Arka”

You can refuse to play either of their terrible games. You can resist them. Most of all, you have the power to give up the deception that Barack Obama is a hero because he might murder “fewer” innocent people. The crucial difference between voting for Obama in the real world, and choosing to allow him to murder only 3 preschoolers in the example above, is that the example above describes a terrible choice being made one time only. The presidential farce is recurring. Imagine the preschool example, but this time imagine that it happens every day. Times ten or fifty or a hundred. Every day, you go by the preschool, and every day the madmen execute either 3 or 5 children–your choice. At what point do you stop choosing? At what point do you stop playing along and say, “Enough”? At some point, it must become apparent to you that the game is never going to end.

The children are going to keep dying–there will always be new madmen willing to take the hostages, make the speeches, and carry out the killings. Choose your decade. Choose your war. Choose your murders. Choose your “party.” How long can you justify this morbid farce? How long will you play the terrible game with the killer? Go back to Vietnam, if you like. Go back to Hiroshima and “choose” which rich, powerful national leader you want to press the button. Go back to the invasion of the Philippines. Go back to the Mexican American War. The fucking crusades, or the genocide of the neanderthals. Count the bodies. Is it ever going to end? Are you ever going to say, “Enough”?

Every day you walk by the school. Every day the madmen are there. When are you going to stop giving them what they want? When are you going to stop validating not only the deaths they cause, but their entire horrific game? It will never stop unless we stop it. If we keep supporting it, year after year, always justifying it as “a little less murder than we could otherwise commit,” it will never end. When you refuse to vote, or vote for someone else, you are a grain of sand. But at some point, change has to happen, and it will take individual people willing to refuse to support the killing. A few crazies, at first, who refuse to compromise by saying, “I guess it’s fine if Obama kills people, because he’ll kill fewer than Gingrich will.” (This is, essentially, what that haughty piece of shit George Clooney is saying as the televised 2012 contest approaches) A few crazies, and maybe someday, more. It’s as daunting a task as any, but it has to happen for the killing to stop: human individuals–without an automatic, reassuring group consensus–refusing to support killing any longer.

Posted by: Brian M | 31 January 2012 at 04:31 PM

I’m guessing Brian isn’t the High Arka, but HA is definitely invited to the conversation…

This bothered me, and I was blogging about it. However, I was composing on Typepad, which my Defeatist brothers continually caution me against because a couple of times a year the Google or the Typepad Hobbits decide to fuck me over and eat everything I had written. I learn for a while, and then revert to form…so, I have brief moments of sanity, interspersing the Einsteinian standard insanity of doing something again and again and being surprised when it goes wrong. Terribly wrong. So, I dropped it for a while.

However, it’s still bugging me. I’m a lifelong Democrat who thinks that Jefferson, Jackson, both Roosevelts and Truman were among the great presidents, but the greatest was Lincoln. Lincoln would have serious problems in today’s Republican party of course. In fact, he’d probably either be a Democrat or possibly something further left. It’s fun to imagine him with David Boies, arguing Citizen’s United against some Koch brothers mercenary. Of course, as Jesus wouldn’t be allowed to preach in modern Christianity, Lincoln could never be admitted to the bar. Paul Tillich, the Existentialist Christian theologian and philosopher wrote in the introductory remarks to his most approachable work, The Dynamics of Faith, a series of lectures given at Cambridge in the 50s that “Today, faith is more productive of disease than of health. It confuses, misleads, creates alternately skepticism and fanaticism, intellectual resistance and emotional surrender…”

One reason that I admire Lincoln is simple – he personifies human compassion. Lincoln wasn’t overtly religious publicly, but he was a man of deep spirituality and concern. Tillich contends that “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. The dymanics of faith are the dynamics of ultimate concern…” Lincoln’s ultimate concern was justice which he saw as fairness, compassion, compromise and the acceptance of the other side’s humanity. He was generally disappointed, but he strove to achieve that world by doing what he could to maintain the union based on that idea of justice – not because the Union was itself just, but because he saw the potential for justice as lying in the Union, depending on it, deriving it’s future from it. And, in order to preserve it as source of ultimate good, he was willing to risk everything, including his soul and sanity and sense of self to preserve it. Had the South been victorious, would he have been treated like a hero by the North? He’d have been hung…he was risking his life, and the irony of his assassination lies in the reality that Wilkes egotistical madness created.

Today’s political world is based largely on something that goes back to the beginning – between those who are ALWAYS RIGHT and those who suspect quietly that they could have made a mistake. I don’t think Lincoln ever signed an execution order easily or without struggle; we know that George W. Bush had no such concerns, and that Rick Perry was almost gleeful about it at times. And, we know that the people who go to Republican debates cheer executions. Where would Lincoln have been on that? I suspect he’d have vomited…

I’ve been doing some reading about Afghanistan and our continued adventures there. Now, I have colleagues who are 9/11 Truthers, which I am not. I have colleagues who think Osama bin Laden was killed years ago and then dumped in the Ocean for a propaganda victory; I have colleagues that believe that Israel and the Mossad did 9/11 and got us into the various mid-eastern debacles. Well, if I were Israel I would probably have reacted to the news of 9/11 attacks with some restrained glee especially if I was concerned about the US cutting a separate deal that would be to Israel’s disadvantage. Churchill confessed to a feeling of relief and happiness when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Do we really think Churchill planned Pearl Harbor? I know that the Israelis and their various lobbies in this country really want Iran to go away – and, they’d like us to do it. However, as Zbigniew Brzezinski argued on Hardball on Friday we’re facing a reality. There is nothing that makes sense about backing an attack on Iran for us; lots to make it a really bad idea; and, exactly what does Israel get out of the attack? NBC’s chief “go get shot at” correspondent Richard Engle was in the same segment, and he indicated that the political leadership in Israel might be really excited by the possibility of an attack on Iran, but the actual soldiers and covert operators think it would be stupid, that their focus needs to be on Egypt and Jordan. Brzezinski argued that Iran may be crazy, but that particular empire in various incarnations has been around for 0ver 3000 years, and do we really think they’re suicidal? He also points out to those who say “Israel can’t live under the threat of nuclear attack” the degree of fatuous reasoning. We did it for over 40 years as did the Soviets and Western Europe. If Iran gets a bomb and uses it, do they expect to survive? Everybody in the neighborhood who counts, including Israel, has a credible nuclear deterrent, as well as delivery systems. The Iranians are depending in so far as they are on anything, on North Korean technology…what the hell. Let them spend themselves into oblivion, which was Reagan’s strategy in the 80s. It works…unless you screw up and spend yourself into oblivion.

This is relevant to Afghanistan for a number of reasons. I know that the administration has agreed to stop combat operations sooner than later, but I’m really wondering why not now! It really helps to have some historical awareness, and the only tactic that has worked with Afghanistan is the punitive raid. Get in, fuck up the bad guys and anybody in the vicinity, threaten worse if they do it again, unass the AO. Invade and try to make it better, and you’ll just make it a helluva lot worse, and you’ll suffer for it. By April of 2002, the Taliban is gone from power although still there; al Queida was severely damaged there; Pakistan is/was/will be totally fucked up; and we’re there because…we’re going to turn it into a Jeffersonian Democracy? As soon as the Taliban was defeated and Osama bin Laden et al were in Tora Bora, we should have declared victory, given them a check, possibly re-established the monarchy and gotten out. The Afghan people don’t want western culture; they don’t want women to have any rights; they don’t want to not kill each other. It’s that simple – we’re trying to impose an improvement on people who see no reason to change and regard the “improvements” as evil. NATO and the US would be further ahead to fund emigration to some reasonable location – Barstow, California for example – for those who want to live under something other than Sharia law. That’ll assuage some consciences. But whether we leave now or in five years or in ten years, it will be the same…only worse.

The piece from Susan Cain is very relevant here. We got into Iraq due to a rush to judgment and the influence of Ike’s military industrial complex combined with green, hubris and myopia. It’s interesting in comparing our Iraq-Afghanistan experience to the Soviet experience. Unlike the Soviets, we did have a reason for attacking within Afghanistan – they were harboring a threat, and we had a just reason for wanting to eliminate that threat. The Soviets had been dithering around with the Afghans for years and chose to invade because of the Brezhnev doctrine that once a Red Block Country always a Red Block combined with the belief that they could control matters. They sold themselves a bill of goods. The Soviet experience looks a lot like US experience in Vietnam – lots of people with good intentions and an absolute inability to see the consequences of their actions. I’ve been reading former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989 with a degree of déjà vu combined with a strong sense of WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? Working from Russian sources and interviews, Braithwaite has a history of a cosmic comedy of errors that looks and smells a lot like Vietnam. Lousy policy, self-delusion, group-think run amuck, combined with inefficient tactics, lousy planning, and dumbfounding mismatches between outcomes, methods and resources. The good news for the Soviets was that Spetznaz was really well honed in Afghanistan. The bad news is that they failed to achieve any of their goals while turning the Red Block essentially into Cuba and North Korea. We achieved our initial goals, dithered and screwed around for the next 10 years and are still looking for a goal that we can achieve. Somebody in power needs to stop talking, listen to the record and the history and start focusing on ultimate concerns, desired outcomes – I define a desired outcome as something that can be achieved within the reasonable constraints of blood, time, treasure and lost opportunity. The most desirable outcome today is not to listen to the congressional storm or the media tumult but to listen to the inner voice of reason and make the sort of courageous decision that Lincoln made routinely. And, don’t wait for elections or consensus. Do what’s right, now…for Lincoln’s sake.

Braithwaite begins the third portion of his book, the Long Goodbye with a poem by one the Russian Afghan veterans, Igor Morozov. It reads, in part –

Down from the heights we once commanded/ with burning feet we descend to the ground/ bombarded with calumny, slander and lies/ we’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

Farewell you mountains you know best/ what prices paid while we were here/what foes unconquered still survive/what friends we had to leave behind…

I generally find Russian poems and song lyrics somewhat of a blend of overly didactic and overly romantic…peasant and soldier poetry. The Soviet Army and its soldiers deserved a better use; so did the British with Lord Elphinstone in 1820. The Soviets in many ways repeated the British experience. We repeat the Soviety experience…if history repeats itself with the first time as tragedy and the second as farce, what exactly is our experience going to be? Tragical farce? We deserve better, and if someone listens not to the crowd but to the inner voices or reason, creativity and common sense, we may get it. I remain pessimistically hopeful…

From the cage beneath the cellar, a random spattering of hyperlinks.

Inside New York's abandoned leper colony

• Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a great profile of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady here.

• Do Republicans orgasm more than Democrats?

• Freeman Dyson‘s brain.

• Ice hockey in Turkey; skiing in Iran.

• Liz Hazelton takes readers to “the island that New York forgot.”

• Peter Singer: “The U.S. Navy has trained dolphins to detect mines. Now, they might be used in the conflict with Iran over its nuclear policies.” (Related: CETACEAN NATION!)

• Portland author Scott Farris: “Democracy is a fragile thing. The winners only govern with the losers’ consent. It would only take one candidate to say ‘I reject the results’ to plunge things into chaos.”

• “Seeing a human wrapped in cellophane with blood smeared around, it makes people think.”

• Soothing image of holstein being brushed.

• The Antiplanner reviews Margin Call.

• The Mother of All Saxophones.

• The Washington Post: 10 Reasons the U.S. is No Longer the Land of the Free.

And from my Favorite Links of All-Time pile: “A cat is gorgeous and wild Leopard which disguises itself! Dress a cat only with shawl. Shawl achieves the duty of a foppish muffler. Back cloth is a tartan check handle and a hat and shawl look dear.”

Recently I was browsing in a used book store when I stumbled upon a soldier’s Japanese phrasebook from World War II. Between faded orange covers I found a treasure trove of fascinating words and phrases- certainly it’s the most useful text published by the U.S. War Department I’ve encountered since that pamphlet on sexual hygiene for GIs I found in a Texas ghost town a few years back. It does lack for detailed diagrams of human genitalia, however.

Like most phrasebooks it contains all the standard terminology related to greetings, asking for directions and finding lodgings, but the structure and at least half of the language is strictly determined by the context of war. Thus it begins not with “Hello” and “My name is…” but rather a set of “Emergency Expressions” the very first of which is:

Help! ta-SKET-ay!

Now that is definitely useful, so long as you are talking to friendly Koreans or “Formosans” and not a platoon of Japanese soldiers. Other handy emergency expressions include:

Where are American soldiers? Ah- may-ree-ka no hay-ee-TA-ee wa DOAK-o-nee ee-MA-ska?

Are they our enemies? KA-ray-ra wa tek-ee DESS-ka?

And:

Don’t shoot! OO-tsoo-na!

Only once this type of thing is out of the way does the War Department get down to teaching the basics of polite conversation such as:

Good morning o-ha- YO

And

Will you have a cigarette? Ta-ba-ko o DOAZ-o?

Frequently the phrasebook offers both polite and imperative forms for the same expression. According to the foreword you should be respectful when addressing prisoners in the officer class, but bark at their underlings- that’s the Japanese way, apparently. Thus, when interrogating gentlemen of breeding you say this:

Please tell the truth hoant-o no ko-TOE o eet-TAY KOO-DA-sa-EE

But when it comes to enlisted men, you say this:

Tell the truth! Hoant-o no ko-TOE o ee-YAY!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, no polite form is supplied for the following:

Obey or I’ll fire! Kee-ka NA-eet-o OO-tsoo-zo!

Of course, there are long lists of vocabulary dedicated to rank, terrain and military hardware. A lot of the combat stuff would not be very useful today however…unless you are attacked by a rogue member of the apocalyptic Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo:

I was gassed doak-oo-GA-soo nee ya-RA-ret-ah

I was surprised to find that Section 3 was filled with detailed terminology related to fine dining:

I want it- – koo-da-SA-ee
Cooked or boiled nee-TAY
Raw NA-ma-day
Rare na-MA ya-kee-nee SHTAY
Well done YO-koo YA-ee-tay
Baked or fried YA-ee-tay
Fried in deep fat ah-GET-ay
Roasted RO-sto shtay

War is hell but evidently that doesn’t stop you from squeezing in a good meal whenever you can.

Next come “health” words, which for seriously wounded soldiers would surely have meant the difference between life and death, e.g.:

I am hurt in the crotch/privates ma-TA ga ee-TA-ee
Stop the bleeding shook-KETS o-toe-MAY-yo
Quick! HA-ya-koo!

In conclusion, I’d say that the U.S. War Department did an excellent job of putting together this little phrasebook. The only thing that’s missing is a section dedicated to prostitution, which would have been very useful for some of the GIs, I’m sure. Oh yes, and also: “Where did all these severed heads come from?” an essential phrase for any English speaker en route to Nanking while it was under Japanese occupation in 1937. But then again, America wasn’t in the war yet. Heck, there wasn’t even a war on!

As evocative of a soldier’s reality as any memoir or novel, the War Department’s Japanese phrasebook made me thankful I was born in a different time, and did not have to face death in a hostile jungle. Which reminds me: my well-thumbed copy came to me with the previous owner’s name still penciled on the cover: Captain Pilch. Thus as I flick through its well-thumbed pages (the Captain clearly saw a lot of combat) I draw even closer to that moment in history and ask myself: Did the captain survive? Which phrases did he use the most? Could the Japanese understand him? There’s no way to know. But I am grateful to the Captain for his notations, such as REI for zero which the War Department omitted even though Eastern mathematicians were using it in their calculations long before the turn of the first millennium.

Who knows, perhaps this book even saved Captain Pilch’s life! And just on the off chance that he is still knocking around, aged 95 or so, I have a request to make. On the front cover the phrasebook is marked RESTRICTED. The first page elaborates that “… restricted material may be given to any person known to be in service of the United States and to persons of undoubted loyalty and discretion who are cooperating in government work…” But otherwise that’s it.

Now I’ll admit that since anybody could have constructed this phrasebook out of a big enough dictionary, I don’t quite understand why the War Department felt the need to keep its contents confidential. But I shall defer to their wisdom. So don’t tell anyone I told you all this stuff, OK? For Captain Pilch’s sake (and mine, I suppose).

Unless you happen to know for certain that the RESTRICTED classification has been lifted. In which case tell anyone you like.

Originally published at RIA- Novosti, the home of awesome

10. I resolve to finish that pro-Catholic pornographic musical I’ve been working on

9. I resolve to eat my weight in marzipan

8. I resolve to finally find Waldo

7. I resolve to keep my ambitions within reach

6. I resolve to solve world hunger

5. I resolve to e-mail back that Nigerian prince who keeps trying to contact me

4. I resolve to think of another password for my computer besides ‘password’

3. I resolve to drive by a gym at least three times a week

2. I resolve to keep all my resolutions to myself this year

1. I resolve to limit my number of resolutions to nine
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

10. Instead of ‘Naughty’ or ‘Nice’ you’re on his ‘Asshole’ list

9. He leaves a note saying, “You better watch out! You better not cry! You better not shout while I’m torturing you!”

8. He smears reindeer poop all over your drapes

7. Your biggest gift is Newt Gingrich’s To Save America

6. He pours eggnog into your Christmas stocking

5. You’re constantly being tripped by sinister-looking elves

4. As he drives out of sight, he exclaims, “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night…except you, you bastard!”

3. All the candy canes he leaves you contain fish hooks

2. Instead of ‘jolly’ you’d have to describe his demeanor as ‘malevolent’

1. When you try to sit on his lap, he jumps out of the way
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.