What

once lived here is

now taking wing at my main

website, brianbrownewalker.com. There

you'll find the blog, and also, before you know it,

some kinda cool electrofunkadelic rastachocolate hybrid

multimedia-ific versions of my books. And a new

church, maybe, where foolishness, skin, love,

Rumi and Richard Pryor are revered.

Perhaps a plan -- overdue, alas --

to overthrow the military

industrial complex.

Time will tell.

Come say hi.

Peace.

Sitting

work is called

quiet sitting because

it is a matter of cleaning

all the pollution from your mind.

Once the pollution is gone and your mind

is clear, truth naturally becomes evident.

The reason people cannot see truth is

simply because their minds are too

noisy and they cannot see

through things and

events as they

really

are.

...I

always tell

people that the

first essential of practice

is to even the temper well. You

should not practice sitting hastily;

wait until positive energy rises

and the medicine is

produced -- only

then is the time

right.

When

it comes to

contemplating

emptiness, it is essential

to attain reversal of attention

inward, the state of turning the light

around. Rolling the eyes up into the head is

not reversal of attention, or is it turning the light

around when the eyes see darkness. You must reach

the point where the eyes do not see, the ears do not hear,

and the breathing in the nose is very subtle. Then you

have no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind;

you are aware only of the existence

of the primary opening,

nothing

else.

When

you arrive here,

the light of your true

nature emerges. This is called

the celestial monarch of

the four elements

offering a

bowl.

The Old Man of Clear Serenity

Obama

says, "I feel very

confident that when the

American people hear a clear

rationale for what we're doing there

and how we intend to achieve our goals,

that they will be supportive." If there’s a clear

rationale for what we’re doing in Afghanistan

why haven’t we heard it yet? If Candidate

Obama kept telling us Afghanistan was

the “war of necessity,” how come

President Obama never

told us why that

is?

Obama’s

strategy team already

went through one high-level strategy

session in March and came with a paper pile

of trash. We would disrupt terror networks,

turn Afghanistan and Pakistan into

real countries, and get the

international community

involved.

Sure.

...Speaking

of boots, the Washington

Post reports that shortly after

President Obama announces his latest

Afghanistan plan, as many as 9,000 Marines

will deploy to resume an offensive in Southern

Afghanistan, the one that stalled out when McChrystal

first took over. The current official explanation of why

the original offensive went flat is that we didn’t have

enough troops at the time. But the time, the story

was that the Taliban fighters faded away in the

presence of a superior force and struck

elsewhere. How many shiny Ohio

quarters would you care to bet

that they’ll fade away

this time

too?

Pen and Sword

Will

Tiger Woods

finally talk to the

police? Who will replace

Oprah? (Not that Oprah can

ever be replaced, of course.) And

will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple

who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state

dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of

dollars they want for an exclusive television

interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of

former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s

grandson, get his wish

to be a contestant on

“Dancing With the

Stars”?

The

chatter that

passes for news, the

gossip that is peddled by the

windbags on the airwaves, the noise

that drowns out rational discourse, and

the timidity and cowardice of what is left of

the newspaper industry reflect our flight into

collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one

of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations

in human history, one that is radically

reconfiguring our economy as it

is the environment, and our

obsessions revolve around

the trivial and the

absurd.

What

really matters

in our lives—the wars

in Iraq and Afghanistan, the

steady deterioration of the dollar,

the mounting foreclosures, the climbing

unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps

and the awful reality that once the billions in

stimulus money run out next year we will

be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into

the cheerful happy talk that

we mainline into our

brains.

We

are enraptured

by the revels of a dying

civilization. Once reality shatters

the airy edifice, we will scream and yell

like petulant children to be rescued, saved and

restored to comfort and complacency. There will be

no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah

Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face

our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial

projects and discover a new simplicity, as well

as a new humility, or we will stumble

blindly toward catastrophe and

neofeudalism.

...I

spent two

years traveling the

country to write a book

on the Christian right called

“American Fascists: The Christian

Right and the War on America.” I visited

former manufacturing towns where for many

the end of the world is no longer an abstraction.

Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged

the working class into profound personal and economic

despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of

demagogues and charlatans of the radical

Christian right who offer a belief in

magic, miracles and the fiction

of a utopian Christian

nation.

Unless

we rapidly

re-enfranchise these

dispossessed workers, insert

them back into the economy, unless

we give them hope, these demagogues will

rise up to take power. Time is running out. The

poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they

grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the

bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed,

once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that

the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will

react with a fury and vengeance that will

snuff out the remains of our

anemic democracy and

usher in a new

dark age.

Chris Hedges

Nasruddin

earned his living

selling eggs. Someone

came to his shop one day and

said, “Guess what I have

in my hand.” “Give

me a clue,” said

Nasruddin.

“I

shall give

you several: It has

the shape of an egg, the

size of an egg. It looks like an egg,

tastes like an egg and smells like an egg.

Inside it is yellow and white. While it is

liquid before it is cooked, it becomes

thick when heated. It was,

moreover, laid

by a hen.”

“Aha!

I know!” said

Nasruddin. “It is

some kind of

cake!”

...

Red Meat

click it to enlarge it

Married to the Sea

click it to enlarge it

White Ninja

click it to enlarge it

To

calm the mind

means to find the right

balance. If you try to force your

mind too much it goes too far;

if you don't try enough it

doesn't get there, it

misses the point

of balance.

Normally

the mind isn't still,

it's moving all the time,

it lacks strength. Making the

mind strong and making the body

strong are not the same. To make the

body strong we have to exercise it, to push

it, in order to make it strong, but to make the

mind strong means to make it peaceful, not to

go thinking of this and that. For most of us

the mind has never been peaceful, it has

never had the energy of samadhi, so

we establish it within a boundary.

We sit in meditation, staying

with the One who

knows.

If

we force

our breath to

be too long or too

short we're not balanced,

the mind won't become peaceful.

It's like when we first start to use a pedal

sewing machine. At first we just practice pedaling

the machine to get our coordination right, before we

actually sew anything. Follow ing the breath is

similar. We don't get concerned over how

long or short, weak or strong it is,

we just note it. We simply let it

be, following the natural

breathing.

When

it's balanced,

we take the breathing

as our meditation object.

When we breathe in, the beginning

of the breath is at the nose tip, the middle

of the breath at the chest and the

end of the breath at the

abdomen.

This

is the path

of the breath.

When we breathe out,

the beginning of the breath

is at the abdomen, the middle at

the chest and the end at the nose tip.

We simply take note of this path of the breath

at the nose tip, the chest and the abdomen, then at

the abdomen, the chest and the tip of the nose.

We take note of these three points in order

to make the mind firm, to limit mental

activity so that mindfulness

and self awareness

can easily

arise.

When

we are adept

at noting these three

points we can let them go

and note the in and out breathing,

concentrating solely at the nose-tip or

the upper lip where the air passes on its in

and out passage. We don't have to follow the

breath, just establish mindfulness in

front of us at the nose-tip, and note

the breath at this one point --

entering, leaving,

entering,

leaving.

There's

no need to think

of anything special,

just concentrate on this

simple task for now, having

continuous presence of mind.

There's nothing more to do, just

breathing in and out. Soon the mind

becomes peaceful, the breath refined.

The mind and body become light.

This is the right state

for the work of

meditation.

Ajahn Chah

drawing: Juul Krajier

I

believe

that many a

person has examined

man with a microscope in

every age of the world; has found

that he did not even resemble the creature

he pretended to be; has perceived that a civilization

not proper matter for derision has always been and must

always remain impossible to him -- and has put away

his microscope and kept his mouth shut. Perhaps

because the microscopist (besides having an

influential wife) was built like the rest

of the human race -- ninety-nine

parts of him being moral

cowardice.

I

am such

a person myself.

I used my microscope

during fifteen years, and then

put the result on paper five years ago.

When ever I wish to account for any new

outbreak of hypocrisy, stupidity, or crime

on the part of the human race, I get out

that manuscript and read it, and am

consoled, perceiving that the

outbreak was in obedience

to the laws of man’s

make, and was not

preventable.

My

wife does

not allow the

manuscript to be

published, and as ninety-nine

parts of me forbid me to make myself

comprehensively and uncompromisingly

odious, it has not been difficult to

persuade me to restrict the

reading of it to

myself!

But

you shall

read it when you

come to see me; then

perhaps you will believe

with me that civilizations are

not realities, but only dreams;

dreams of the mind, not of the heart,

and therefore fictitious, and perishable;

that they have never affected the heart and

therefore have no valuable progress; that the

heart remains today what it always was, as

intimacy with any existing savage tribe

shall show. Indeed the average of the

human ‘brain’ is not a shade higher

today than it was in Egyptian

times ten thousand

years ago.

Samuel Clemens

PostSecret

click it to enlarge it, enroll to enlarge yourself

Hark! a Sexy Vagrant

click it to enlarge it

Try

with all your

might and work

very, very hard to make

the world a better place. But

if all your efforts are to

no avail -- no hard

feelings.

the Dalai Lama

Start

a huge, foolish

project like Noah;

it makes absolutely

no difference

what people

think of

you.

Rumi

Cities

should provide

service opportunities

and training for all ages to

instill confidence, self-reliance,

and pride. One of these programs

could be an Edible Schoolyard that is

cared for by students and led by professional

farmers and volunteers. It would provide 100 percent

of the school meals to the student body, and excess

food would be delivered to the ill and elderly.

In addition, schools would produce zero

waste by composting all bio matter.

The school could also compost

neighborhood bio matter to

fund its agricultural

efforts.

Ideas for Cities

Because

I am a woman,

I must make unusual efforts

to succeed. If I fail, no one will say,

‘She doesn’t have what it takes’;

they will say, ‘Women

don’t have what it

takes’."

Clare Boothe Luce

Amid

the pages of

the September issue

of Details was the article

"How Internet Porn Is Changing Teen

Sex," in which writer Eric Spitznagel quoted

a young man barely able to drink legally

as saying, "Pubic hair is disgusting.

Girls should keep their

vaginas porn-star

trim."

Elsewhere,

in a recent column

on Salon.com, Mary Elizabeth

Williams detailed the obnoxious, belittling

effect pornography has had on her sex life: "'You

like that, baby? You like that?' he asked, though he

didn't notice I wasn't answering. And then,

somewhere around the 18th time he said

it, it hit me — I wasn't just having

bad sex. I was having

bad porn

sex."

Blame

it on the ease

with which any plugged-in

American can access porn of all types,

from amateur to violent to bestial. Across the

country, sexually active straight men of all ages

are taking bedroom cues from skin flicks, getting

wrongheaded ideas about how women's bodies

should look and bad information about

what's sexy. Subsequently, they're

pissing off — and, according to

Williams, smacking their

erections on — their

lovers.

That

all being

said, you might

assume women don't

like porn. You'd be wrong.

According to a 2007 Nielsen survey,

a third of people visiting XXX websites

were female, with almost thirteen million

women admitting to looking at Internet porn

at least once a month. And physiologically, men

and women differ little in their response to pornographic

images. One 2006 McGill University study found that females

shown porn clips reached maximum arousal just one minute

after their male counterparts, while both genders began

displaying signs of arousal within thirty seconds

of exposure. Dick-smacking aside, there's

definitely something women appreciate

about porno, so there must be

something men looking to

please those women can

learn from. The

question is,

what?

A

general

agreement among

most of my friends is that

if we watch porn, we kinda prefer

to watch lesbian porn," said a straight

female friend of mine from Manhattan, echoing

a sentiment I heard a lot when asking women what

lessons guys should actually take from their porno.

"I guess that stems from the fact that we'd

rather watch footage of women actually

enjoying themselves, not being

sexually exploited by

some hairless

dude."

It's

the stuff

panty raids are

made of. Turns out

that many women are doing

exactly what horny teenage boys

fantasize they do: dimming the lights,

locking the door and turning themselves on

with movies of other naked women. "Men should

watch lesbian porn to see how the woman on

the receiving end is actually enjoying

herself," said another friend, "not

being ridden like a horse

while standing on

her head."

Nerve

Filament

is the only women’s

magazine in the world currently

doing erotic male pictorials designed especially

for a female audience. We also include a range of

intelligent sex- and non sex-related articles,

and we’re completely free from

fashion, diets and

celebrity

gossip.

Foreigners

must frequently

look at the United States

and shake their heads, wondering

how such a great nation could have sunk

so low due to a disproportionate and essentially

misguided response to a terrorist attack eight years ago.

The attackers who carried out 9/11 succeeded

through a lot of luck and a mixture of

complacency and incompetence on

the part of America’s intelligence

and law enforcement

agencies.

Terrorism

did not threaten

our form of government

or our way of life then and does

not do so now. An assessment by France’s

highly regarded Paris Institute of Political Studies

last week suggested that Osama bin Laden’s

al-Qaeda has likely been reduced to

a core group of eight to ten

terrorists who are on the

run more often

than not.

Philip Giraldi

Let

us say,

hypothetically,

that American forces kill

or capture Osama bin Laden and

Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama

to declare victory and bring our troops home.

Would he? Not according to the Pentagon's plan for

a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency

spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,

the Horn of Africa, the

Philippines and

beyond.

Military

intellectuals envision

a prolonged cold war against

Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way.

It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands

rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines.

The Pentagon identifies them as hostile

terrain where Al Qaeda and

its affiliates are

hidden.

Among

the top experts

responsible for this

fifty-year war plan, concocted

in 2005 in windowless offices in the

Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former

Australian soldier, an anthropologist,

former top adviser to Gen. David

Petraeus and current aide

to Gen. Stanley

McChrystal...

Kilcullen's

recent book, The

Accidental Guerrilla,

presents the case for a Long

War of fifty or even 100 years' duration,

with chapters on Iraq (a mistake he believes was

salvaged by the military surge he promoted in 2007-08),

Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a five-to-ten

year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees

as the center of the terrorist threat) and even

Europe (where, he says, human rights laws

create legislative "safe havens"

for urban Muslim

undergrounds).

...Civilian

casualties strewn

across these battlefields have

been obscured by the fog of war, but

hundreds of thousands of people, mainly civilians,

could ultimately die in Iraq, Afghanistan and

Pakistan, each of them leaving

a legacy of vengeful

violence.

These

projections reveal

a staggering audacity--not Obama's

audacity of hope but an audacity of martial

commitment. A fifty- to 100-year military campaign--

the subtitle of Kilcullen's book is Fighting Small Wars in

the Midst of a Big One--will span thirteen presidential

terms and twenty-five Congressional sessions,

casting a long shadow over generations

of politicians not yet

running for

office...

The

audacity

becomes ever more

dangerous without checks and

balances. Without his acknowledging it,

Kilcullen's plan plays directly into what he believes

is Al Qaeda's strategy of exhausting the United

States militarily and economically.

And yet he thinks the

Long War is

inevitable.

The

world

counterterrorism

community that is planning

the Long War, Kilcullen

has said, is "small

and tightly

knit"...

But

of course,

these accidental guerrillas

are no accident at all. They inevitably

and predictably emerge as a nationalist force

against foreign invaders. Their resistance to imperialism

stretches back far before Al Qaeda. In fact, Al Qaeda was

born with US resources, as a byproduct of resistance

to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and

earlier oppression of hundreds

of Islamic radicals

in Egyptian

prisons.

...Adherence

to the model also

forces Kilcullen and other

counterinsurgency devotees to downplay

the secretive and violent underside of their approach.

The cult of clandestinity is symbolized by General

McChrystal, whose entire career in

Iraq remains a classified

secret.

What

we do know

about McChrystal comes

from the leading mainstream

narrator of the Iraq War, Bob Woodward,

in his book The War Within. Woodward writes

that the key to the Iraq surge, in addition to buying

off the Sunni insurgency, was a top-secret program of

extrajudicial executions run by McChrystal, which was

"possibly the biggest factor in reducing" Baghdad's

violence during that election year. One US adviser

in charge of tracking down and killing

insurgents, according to Woodward,

said the efficiency of the

program gave him

"orgasms."

...That

Kilcullen may be

the true progeny of the

"best and brightest" is evident from

his attempt--in 2004 writings--to salvage the

US Phoenix program from its discredited image in

histories of the Vietnam War. Kilcullen has written that

he favors a "global Phoenix program" against

insurgents today. "Contrary to popular

mythology," he believes that the

"maligned" Phoenix program

was "highly effective" in

disrupting the Vietcong

infrastructure.

Under

Phoenix, according

to the 1971 Congressional testimony

of William Colby, the former pacification

director in South Vietnam, more than 20,000

Vietcong suspects--many of them the civilian infrastructure

in Vietcong-controlled areas--were killed from 1968 to 1971.

Run by the CIA through South Vietnamese police units,

the program employed methods of torture

including electric shocks to testicles

and vaginas, and truncheons

to the ears.

Tens

of thousands

of South Vietnamese villagers

were uprooted and resettled in fortified

"strategic hamlets," in accordance with the

counterinsurgency doctrine of protecting the civilian

population. Thirty years later the Iraq surge seems

to have included another version of the Phoenix

program, directed by McChrystal.

Countless Iraqis were

targeted and

killed...

This

may be the part

where an inbred secrecy

ultimately leads to a brilliant but

delusional Apocalypse Now sensibility,

expressed in the Joseph Conrad character Kurtz's

exclamation "Exterminate all the brutes!" The

further tragedy of counterinsurgency is that

it does not stop in the face of failure

but starts all over again

from its own

ashes.

In

the end,

its secrets will

not be kept from its

victims in Afghanistan and

Pakistan, who suspect and know all too

well who is killing them, but from well-meaning

Americans living in our own gated communities

amid democratic structures that seem

unable to save us from a remote

controlled, engineered

ignorance.

The Long War

I’d

like to see

him go on TV Tuesday

night and say, “My fellow Americans,

I was wrong. Our war in Afghanistan has nothing

to do with national security anymore and we can’t afford

it, and I’m not sending one more kid into harm’s way

to fight there. As of tonight, I’m ordering a

complete withdrawal.” But the odds of

that happening are slimmer than a

licorice rope. Obama

couldn’t take

the heat.

Former

four-star Barry

McCaffrey, the military-industrial

ghoul who was the worst of the retired military

media analysts who helped sell the Iraq war to the

American public, is, incredibly, back on the air

with NBC. He’s pushing the “no exit strategy,

no timeline in Afghanistan” line. McCaffrey

has ties to DynCorp International,

a company that has a five-year

contract to support bases

in Afghanistan.

A

swell fellow,

that McCaffrey is,

but he’s really just a symptom

of a larger American disease. Our wars,

even though they’re destroying our economy,

are making a lot of people rich. The cash caisson,

the gravy ship and the wild blue budget continue

to grow. War is our only export, and counter-

insurgency is the perfect tool of the Long

War mafia because counter-

insurgency wars are

unwinnable.

Pen and Sword

"I love you but shut the fuck up"

Doublefine

How lucky
the heart where
love makes its home,
for love makes it forget the
cares of the world! Love is like
a bolt of lightning, which sets
fire to patience and reason
and reduces them
to nothing.

The lover
becomes careless of his

own safety. Mountains of blame
weigh no more for him than
a straw; criticism only
increases his
passion.

Jami

Felipe Lima

When

will it occur

to our foreign policy

wonks just how counterproductive

our foreign policy practices are? The only

things our military interventions overseas

accomplish are to provide our enemies

with targets and give them

superb reasons to

hate us.

The

neocon cabal

warns us of all the horrible

things that will happen if we withdraw

our troops from the Middle East and Central Asia.

The worst of their campfire ghost stories describes how a

regional war will break out if we don’t stay around. Heh.

These people can’t do anything to each other worse

than what we’re doing to them. Let a regional

war break out. Let them fight among

themselves. We don’t need to

be in the middle

of it.

Sages

from the ancient

stoics to our parents have

admonished us time and again not

to worry about what other people think of us.

To continue to pour blood and treasure into AfPak is

mindless shame, and it’s a shame we’re going

to keep doing it. Let them have their

propaganda victory. We’ll sit

around and enjoy

our holiday

dinners.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Ret.)

This

is sad.

We’re watching

a man -- a fundamentally

decent man, from what I've seen

in the six-plus years I've been watching

him -- lose his soul. And lose it

to what Jeff Huber rightly

calls "campfire ghost

stories."

I’ve

thought

about murdering a

couple of people in my life.

My reasons were good ones, if

there is such a thing, like someone

mucking about with my daughter in a way

that gets a person impaled in a lot of places.

But I didn’t do it because ultimately I felt

like it would set me back personally,

in my soul development. I sat with

it long enough that I could

actually feel that.

Sitting is good

that way.

I’ve

lived long

enough now to

have absorbed a lot of

killing stories, and I very honestly

don’t know of one where the murderer,

however “well” motivated or within his or her

"rights", benefited from the act. I know some

people who've killed in war, know them

well. However they felt about

it then, they don't feel

good about it now.

Not one of

them.

And

war is murder.

Send guys with M4s

and Predators somewhere,

they're going to kill people. So this

is about ordering murder, Mr. Obama.

And we aren't pursuing Adolf Hitler here, sir,

we're maiming and killing innocents, by and large,

people who farm in valleys which they reasonably want

us to leave. Are you willing to order the murder of these folks

and their daughters so you can please the Pentagon and the

bloodthirsty part of the public? So you can be a successful

politician and "enjoy" a second term? Would you be

willing to have the skin burnt off of, or the life

chased out of, one of your own girls so you

could look "strong"? Because that seems

to be, generally, the way things

work in this world of ours.

What goes around

seems to come

around.

Killing

should be the province

of the great executioner alone.

Trying to take his place and kill is like

cutting wood in the place of the

master carpenter: the odds

are you’ll hurt your

own hand.

Tao te Ching

The general

who advances without

coveting fame, who retreats without

being ashamed, whose concern is to keep the

people safe and honor the sovereign --

she will be the treasure

of the nation.

The Art of War:

Sun Tzu, Barack Obama,

and the Modern

Moment

So

I was

thinking,

what’s the context

of museums? I guess it’s

the religion of the empires, it’s

capitalist temples of looted shit that

we’ve isolated and made worth a lot of money

by removing it from its context, somehow.

And it’s not necessarily negative, cause

I love museums. I love taking

things out of context and

isolated.

Jim Jarmusch

painting: Sam Jackson

Kunduz,

Afghanistan —

Far from the heartland

of the Taliban insurgency in

the south, this once peaceful northern

province was one place American

and Afghan officials thought

they did not have

to worry

about.

Afghan

officials cut the

police force here by a third

two years ago and again earlier this year.

Security was left to a few thousand

German peacekeepers. Only one

Afghan logistics battalion

was stationed

here.

But

over the last

two years the Taliban

have steadily staged a resurgence in

Kunduz, where they now threaten a vital NATO

supply line and employ more sophisticated tactics.

In November, residents listened to air raids by

NATO forces for five consecutive nights,

the first heavy fighting since the

Taliban were overthrown

eight years

ago.

The

turnabout

vividly demonstrates

how security has broken down

even in unexpected parts of Afghanistan.

It also points to the hard choices facing American,

NATO and Afghan officials even if President

Obama decides to send more soldiers to

Afghanistan, as he is expected

to announce next

week.

Even

under the most

generous deployments now under

consideration, relatively few additional

troops are expected in the north; most will

be directed to the heartland of the

Taliban resistance in

the south and

east.

...the

Taliban have

re-emerged with such

force that during the presidential

election in August, police officers were

fending off attacks on the outskirts of the

city of Kunduz, and militants were

poised to overrun the

center, officials

said.

They

haven’t “re-emerged”.

They’re enrolling, and rolling.

Because it's their house.

Because we’re

in it.

"We

did not have

a terrorist attack on

our country during

President Bush's

term."

Dana Perino

"dumber than a sack of hammers"

Partially Clips

click it to enlarge it

A

true

revolution of

values will lay hand on

the world order and say of war,

"This way of settling differences is

not just." This business of burning human

beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes

with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs

of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane,

of sending men home from dark and bloody

battlefields physically handicapped and

psychologically deranged, cannot

be reconciled with wisdom,

justice, and

love.

A

nation

that continues

year after year to spend

more money on military defense

than on programs of social

uplift is approaching

spiritual

death.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The

general is

the bulwark of the

nation. When the bulwark is

strong, the nation is strong.

When the bulwark is

weak, the nation

is weak.

The Art of War:

Sun Tzu, Barack Obama,

and the Modern

Moment

MM:

Have you seen

the most beautiful

woman in the

world?

RB:

Yes, sometime

around 1984 when I

worked at a store. The store

was empty and in came a Hindu

woman. She looked like a princess

and well could have been one. She bought

some hanging costume jewelry from me. I was

at the point of fainting. She had copper skin, long

red hair, and the rest of her was perfect. A timeless

beauty. When I had to charge her, I felt embarrassed.

As if saying she understood and not to worry, she

smiled at me. Then she disappeared and I have

never again seen anyone like her. Sometimes I

get the impression that she was the goddess

Kali, the patron saint of thieves and

goldsmiths, except Kali was also

the goddess of murderers, and

this Hindu woman was not

only the most beautiful

woman on earth, but

she seemed also to

be a good person,

very sweet and

considerate.

Roberto Bolaño's Last Interview

One

morning,

while I was still

in grad school and

driving back into the city

after a weekend in the country,

I sat at a stoplight and watched two

young men in dress shirts cross the street.

I'll never forget it, the contempt and revulsion

that flooded me as I thought "I bet if I knew

what gets you off, I'd want to vomit." I was

despairing because that's what's deep

under the overwhelming anger that

comes with despising half

the human race:

despair.

My

work on cam

was making everything

toxic. Anal was de rigueur,

the request for it perpetual, rude,

clueless; people sent me links to women

being fucked with baseball bats and Coke cans;

and none of my customers could spell. I was trying to

stay raw and capable of writing poetry by listening to In the

Aeroplane Over the Sea constantly, "Communist Daughter"

and "Two Headed Boy Pt. 2" particularly, over and over

again. Semen stains the mountaintops, semen stains

the mountaintops. Maybe that's the first stage

of becoming familiar with the male mind;

go to the dark places and stay

there until you're brave

enough to strike a

light.

Nightmare Brunette

painting: Karim Hamid

MM:

If you hadn’t

been a writer, what

would you have

been?

RB:

I would like

to have been a homicide

detective, much more than being

a writer. I am absolutely sure of that.

A string of homicides. I’d have been someone

who could come back to the scene of the crime

alone, by night and not be afraid of ghosts.

Perhaps then I might really have become

crazy. But being a detective, that

could easily be resolved with

a bullet to the

mouth.

M.M.:

Have you shed one

tear about the widespread

criticism you’ve drawn

from your

enemies?

R.B.:

Lots and lots.

Every time I read that

someone has spoken badly

of me I begin to cry, I drag myself

across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop

writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke

less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the

edge of the sea, which by the way is less

than 30 meters from my house and

I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors

ate the fish who ate Ulysses:

Why me? Why? I’ve

done you no

harm.

The

2010 Pentagon

budget means “every man,

woman and child in the United States will

spend more than $2,700 on [defense] programs

and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the

average Japanese spends less than $330; the

average German about $520; China’s

per capita spending

is less than

$100.”

Cato Institute

During

the presidential

campaign I called Afghanistan

"the right war." Let me say this: with

the full information resources of the American

presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that

to be the case. I know a president isn't supposed to say

such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to

change his mind. In fact, more than most people,

it's important that he do so based on the best

information available. No false pride or

political calculation should

keep him from

that.

And

the best

information

available to me

on the situation in

Afghanistan is sobering.

It doesn't matter whether you

are listening to our war commander,

General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press

reports have indicated, believes that with approximately

80,000 more troops -- which we essentially don't have

available -- there would be a reasonable chance of

conducting a successful counterinsurgency war

against the Taliban, or our ambassador to that

country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general

with significant experience there, who

believes we shouldn't send another

soldier at present. All agree on

the following seven

points:

We

have no partner in

Afghanistan...

Afghanistan

floats in a culture of

corruption...

Despite

billions of dollars of

American money poured into

training the Afghan security forces,

the army is notoriously under-

strength and largely

ineffective...

The

Taliban

insurgency is

spreading and gaining

support largely because the Karzai

regime has been so thoroughly discredited,

the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and

corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent.

Under these circumstances, American and NATO

forces increasingly look like an army of

occupation, and more of them

are only likely to solidify

this impression...

Al-Qaeda

is no longer a

significant factor in

Afghanistan...

Our war

in Afghanistan has

become the military equivalent

of a massive bail-out of a firm determined to

fail...the American people will be spending $100 billion

a year or more on this war, probably for years to

come. Simply put, this is not money we can

afford to squander on a failing war

thousands of miles from

home...

Our

all-volunteer

military has for years

now shouldered the burden

of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000

more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question

be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or

even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the

best in the world, wears down under

this sort of stress and

pressure...

The

way to

safety in our

world is, I believe, to

secure our borders against

those who would harm us, and to

put Americans back to work. With

this in mind, next month I've called

for a White House Jobs Summit, which I

plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as

a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs

that were not only popular across the political spectrum in

the desperate years of the Great Depression, but were

remembered fondly long after by those who took

part in them -- the Civilian Conservation Corps

and the Works Progress Administration.

These basic programs put millions of

Americans back to work on public

projects that mattered to

this nation and saved

families, lives,

and souls.

We

cannot afford

a failing war in Afghanistan

and a 10.2% official unemployment rate

at home. We cannot live with two Americas,

one for Wall Street and one for everyone

else. This is not the path

to American

safety.

As

president,

I retain the right

to strike at al-Qaeda or other

terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no

matter where they may be, including Afghanistan.

I would never deny that there are dangers in the

approach I suggest today, but when have

Americans ever been averse to danger,

or to a challenge either? I

cannot believe

we will be

now.

It's

time for change.

I know that not all Americans

will agree with me and that some will be

upset by the approach I am now determined to

follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility

for whatever may result from this policy departure.

Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am

convinced that this is the way forward

for our country in war and

peace, at home and

abroad.

The

Speech You

Won’t Hear from

Barack Obama

on Tuesday

As

protests

resounded outside, the

University of California Board of

Regents approved a 32 percent fee increase for

students attending the state's premier public schools.

The vote in a windowless University of California, Los

Angeles, meeting room took place Thursday as

hundreds of students and union members

gathered nearby, waving signs, pounding

drums and chanting "We're fired

up, can't take it no more"

and "Shame on

you."

The

$2,500 increase

will push the cost of an

undergraduate education to more

than $10,000 a year by next fall, about triple

the cost of a decade ago. The fees, the equivalent of

tuition, do not include the cost of housing, board and books.

"Our hand has been forced," UC President Mark Yudof

told reporters after the vote. "When you

don't have any money, you

don't have any

money."

Armed

police, some with

beanbag-firing shotguns,

lined up behind steel barricades,

watching over the protesters...Board members

said the 229,000-student system had been whipsawed

by years of state budget cuts, leaving no option other

than turning to students' wallets. Yudof has

said the 10-campus system needs a

$913 million increase in state

funding next

year.

Golly,

that's almost $1B --

think what we accomplish in

Afghanistan in a week or

so for that kind of

money.

This Modern World

click it to enlarge it

M.M.:

John Lennon,

Lady Di or Elvis

Presley?

R.B.:

The Pogues.

Or Suicide. Or Bob Dylan.

Well, but let’s not be pretentious:

Elvis forever. Elvis and his golden voice,

with a sheriff’s badge, driving a

Mustang and stuffing

himself full of

pills.

Toothpaste for Dinner

click it to enlarge it

Natalie Dee

He

who knows

the opponent and

knows himself need not fear in

a hundred battles. He who knows only

himself and not the opponent will

lose one for each that he wins.

He who knows neither

will fail every

time.

The Art of War:

Sun Tzu, Barack Obama,

and the Modern

Moment

President

Barack Obama is

about to step on his own dick --

and on yours, and on mine -- if all the

leaking is true about adding 34,000 troops to

the 68,000 already in Afghanistan (that's American

troops -- General Stanley McChrystal, who is short

on honor, also commands 42,000 NATO and

200,000 Afghan troops.) And the leaking

wouldn't be going on, nor be so

uniform, if it weren't true,

so consider this one

fait accompli.

There

are, by our own

intelligence estimates, less

than 100 members of Al Qaeda in

Afghanistan. Al Qaeda constitutes and

organizes itself all over the world,

sort of like the Terminator after

taking a whupping. The 9/11

attacks were hatched

in Hamburg, not

Afghanistan,

by the

way.

There

are people shooting

at us and bombing us in Afghanistan,

to be sure. As former CIA agent Robert Baer and

retired USMC captain and formerly highest-ranking

U.S. civilian in Zabul province Matthew Hoh

explain here, that's because

we're there:

(Brave New Conversations)

Afghans

are a tribal hill

people. This is

their country

from the

air:

And

they like --

no love -- to fight.

Their national game is

buzkashi, which is a little like

polo, except they tear the head off a goat

and race back and forth on horseback

trying to heave it across each other's

goal lines, losing plenty of teeth

and eyeballs, and no small

number of lives,

along the

way.

They

are a version

of hard with which

folks like us ought not fuck.

They kicked the ass of the British when

what was then the world's greatest empire tried

to occupy and control their country. They kicked the ass

of the Soviet Union when what was then one of the

world's two greatest empires tried to occupy and

control their country. Britain and the Soviets

left their blood and their treasure

all over Afghanistan,

like so --

-- and

they left with

dick. Dicks in hand,

those lucky enough to

still have them. Hugely,

hugely impoverished.

Roundly defeated.

Idiots. Ass-hats.

Fools.

And

that is the fate to

which Barack Hussein Obama

is now consigning America: the latest in

the long line of idiots, ass-hats, and fools who

tried to conquer a country that has never

been conquered in history and lost

their asses, literally and

figuratively, in the

process.

Along

the way, we --

by which I mean

Commander in Chief Barack

Hussein Obama, and by inescapable

extension you and me -- have

done and are doing this sort

of thing to the daughters

of Afghanistan:

That

particular little

girl was ruined for life

by a U.S. helicopter attack.

But we have a lot of ways of chewing

up little girls -- read about the drone programs

going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and all the innocents

they kill, and read about the covert mercenary army at

work there on your nickel and mine. Wake up

tomorrow and read about the next hot

new program, because there will

be one, evidently, thanks to

Barack Obama and his

masters in the

Pentagon.

People

get a certain look in

their eye when you occupy

their land and set their

daughters on fire.

It's sort of like

this --

-- but

turned up to 11.

That guy's only turned up

to 6, because he's just playing buzkashi.

Kill, rape, or maim for life his daughter, and

you don't want to see the look in his eye.

America ain't stronger than that.

Nothing is stronger

than that.

Why

is this happening,

and how is it possible? Well,

partly because of evil, is my guess,

and partly because of stupid.

Here's the stupid we've

become:

That's

the extreme version,

but the principle pertains.

And the evil part, well, perhaps that

goes something like this. Because

there is a lot of money in

war. A whole lot of

money.

Welcome

to Earth, planet of

gun-runners. And say hello

to the new Gun-Runner

in Chief, Barry

Magic.

Avoiding

the well-organized and

the aligned, evading the impassioned

and the confident, not attacking uphill nor

charging at the dug-in, refusing to be baited, not

being drawn into ambush by a force feigning flight,

not interfering with troops headed for home,

leaving surrounded armies an outlet,

not pressing desperate foes --

this is the true art

of war.

The Art of War:

Sun Tzu, Barack Obama,

and the Modern

Moment

The Big Pics

Ice jets

venting on Saturn's

moon Enceladus.

click it to enlarge it

In

days of

yore, gay men

had to develop a form

of intuition known as gaydar.

Today gaydar lives on the iPhone and

relies on global positioning satellites to

accurately locate the ready and

the willing. There are

other variations of

iBoinkology,

too.

Our

eyes assess

by comparison,

not direct evaluation.

You see blue and

green spirals

here:

Mais non!

It's the exact same

color:

Evidently

humans are easy

to fool.

Chainsawsuit

click 'em to enlarge 'em

Doublefine

Beyond

our occupation,

each of us has a vocation,

a calling toward sacred service.

This calling may be understood as our

life’s purpose, our personal contribution to

the transformation of the world. Spiritual chivalry

is the cultivation of our capacity to answer the call.

It is to swear oneself body, heart, and soul to the

ideals of truth, justice, peace, and beauty —

and thus sworn, to go forth

into the battle

of life.

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan

“I

don’t oppose

all wars,” an Illinois state

senator had famously told a rally on

the very afternoon in October, 2002, that the

Iraq War Resolution was introduced in Congress.

“I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Iraq was a

dumb war; Afghanistan was, or

could be, a smart

one.

There

was considerable

truth in the narrative. But

it contained an almost subliminal

suggestion that somehow the clock could

be turned back—that the events of the Afghanistan

war’s first months could be replayed, this time with a better

outcome. When Obama moved into the White House, he

brought the narrative with him. In August, at a Veterans

of Foreign Wars convention, he said of the conflict,

“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of

necessity.” By October, he had ordered in

thirty-four thousand more troops,

doubling the overall American

deployment in

Afghanistan.

But...

does it make

sense, for example,

to spend lives and treasure

trying to eradicate “safe havens” in

Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many

other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg?

Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation

advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist

terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million

dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to

fight for themselves or prompt them to leave

the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s

nominal government, with its

President elected by fraud

and its recent rating as the

second most corrupt on

earth, be finessed

or somehow

remade?

The

sum we are

already spending

annually on Afghanistan

is greater than its gross domestic

product. Are there nonmilitary ways we

could deploy that sum which would advance our goals

as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops

suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation building

program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military

commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counter-

insurgency theory suggests that it would take

more than ten times that many; would

forty —or ten, or twenty—thousand

be only a first installment?) Any

counterinsurgency campaign,

we’re told, requires

a very long

commitment.

Is the

voluntary association

of democracies called NATO,

organized to deter war more than to

wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty

years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—

a decentralized populist democracy struggling

with economic decline and political

gridlock—have that capacity?

And what about

Pakistan?

Hendrik Hertzberg

The arc.

In

my memoir,

I talk about a buddy who,

whenever he was about to get jumped, use

to recite the last half of Rakim's Microphone Fiend.

It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that

whenever I hear society mocking the mask which

young black boys don in urban America.

We manufacture the conditions, and

then rail at kids for creating

a code of survival in

response.

In

my time,

hip-hop was an

art-form based on that

code. If you were a kid living in

a city, and thus acclimated to the rules

of that city, if you spent time trying to understand

which blocks were off-limits, if you ever assembled friends,

in the manner of land-lords assembling vassals, if you

never went to see your girlfriend solo, if, in

other words, you lived with the threat

of random violence, then hip-hop

was the language of

your life.

Hip-Hop,

at that point, took

the pose and iconography

of the streets and melded it with

the traditional job of the party MC --

moving the crowd. From that fusion, you

got a mythological figure--the MC as a literary

swordsmen who, in a violent world, dispatched

his enemies with words. Rakim, to me, was the

first person who really took that imagery,

that melding, off into the

stratosphere.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

So follow me or were you thinking you were first?

Let's travel at magnificent speeds throughout the universe.

What can you say as the earth gets further and further away,

Planets as small as balls of clay.

Astray into the Milky Way, world's out of sight,

As far as the eye can see, not even a satellite.

Now stop and turn around and look,

As you stare into darkness, your knowledge is took.

So you keep staring and suddenly you see a star,

You better follow it, cause it's the R...

Rakim

To

all my

nonbelieving,

sort-of-believing, and

used-to-be-believing friends:

I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am

sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has

been Christians. Christians who have had so much to

say with our mouths and so little to show with our

lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten

the Christ of our Christianity. Forgive us.

Forgive us for the embarrassing things

we have done in the name

of God.

...At

one point

Gandhi was asked

if he was a Christian, and

he said, essentially, "I sure love

Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike

their Christ." A recent study showed that the top

three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young

non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay,

2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we

have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much

of that reputation is well deserved.

That's the ugly stuff. And that's

why I begin by saying

that I'm

sorry.

Now

for the good

news.

I

want to

invite you to

consider that maybe

the televangelists and street

preachers are wrong — and that God

really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit

really are beautiful things like peace, patience,

kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the

ugly things that have come to

characterize religion, or

politics, for that

matter.

...God

may indeed

be evident in a priest,

but God is just as likely to be

at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute.

In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like

a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named

David...at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam

through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam

through his ass and has been speaking through

asses ever since. So if God should choose

to use us, then we should be grateful

but not think too highly

of ourselves.

Shane Claiborne

The

really beautiful

thing about the culture

war, from an entertainment

standpoint, is that it is fundamentally

irresolvable. There isn’t a concrete set

of issues involved, where in theory

both sides could give in a little

and find middle ground,

reach some sort of

compromise.

That’s

because there

are no issues at all.

At the end of this decade

what we call “politics” has devolved

into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera

about dueling cultural resentments and the really

cool thing about it, if you’re a TV news producer

or a talk radio host, is that you can build the

next day’s news cycle meme around

pretty much anything at all,

no matter how

irrelevant —

It

doesn’t

matter what the

argument is about. What’s

important is that once the argument

starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce

around the various instant-cocoa talking points

and scream at each other until they’re

blue in the face, or until the

next argument

starts.

And

while some

of us are old enough

to remember that once upon

a time, these arguments always had at

least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e.

the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of

real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve

now got a whole generation that is accustomed to

screaming at cultural enemies as an end

in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it.

Start fighting first, figure

out the reasons

later.

Sarah

Palin is the

Empress-Queen of

the screaming-for-screaming’s

sake generation. The people who dismiss her

book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings

of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk

completely miss the book’s significance, because

in some ways it’s really a revolutionary

and innovative piece of

literature.

Palin —

and there’s just no

way to deny this — is a supremely

gifted politician. She has staked out, as her

own personal political turf, the entire landscape of

incoherent white American resentment. In

this area she leaves even Rush

Limbaugh in the

dust.

...Sarah

Palin’s battlefield,

on the other hand, is whatever

is happening five feet in front of her face.

She is building a political career around the little

interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding

her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects

with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America

on a plane that’s far more elemental

than the mega-ditto

schtick.

...Palin’s

extraordinary ability

to inspire major national controversies

around these injustices done to her immediate

person is going to guarantee her some kind of major role

in American politics for the next dozen years. In this regard she

is going to have a willing ally in her supposed keen enemy,

the mainstream media, which likewise loves

nothing more than a political narrative

that has nothing

to do with

politics.

...With

Going Rogue,

the 2012 reality show

has already begun. As brainless

political theater, she can’t be topped.

It’s just too bad for conservatives that she

happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as

Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently

marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed

off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters

on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s

Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire,

she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s

gonna end our careers,

but still.”

Matt Taibbi

Troubletown

click it to enlarge it

A Softer World

click it to enlarge it

The Oatmeal

So

we say true

understanding will

come out of emptiness.

When you study Buddhism you

should have a general house cleaning

of the mind and spirit. You must

take everything out of your

room and clean it

thoroughly.

Shunryu Suzuki

As

long as we

have some definite

idea about or some hope

in the future, we cannot really

be serious with the moment that exists

right now. You may say, "I can do it tomorrow,

or next year," believing that something that exists today

will exist tomorrow. Even though you are not trying so hard,

you follow a certain way. But there is no certain way that

exists permanently. There is no way set up for us.

Moment after moment we have to find our

own way. Some idea of perfection, or

some perfect way which is set up

by someone else, is not

the true way

for us.

Shunryu Suzuki

Tenderness

contains an element of

sadness. It is not the sadness of

feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived

but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so

full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. Your eyes

are full of tears, and the moment you blink, the tears

will spill out of your eyes and roll down your

cheeks. In order to be a good warrior, one

has to feel this sad and tender heart.

If a person does not feel alone

or sad, he cannot be

a warrior at

all.

Chogyam Trungpa

It

is with

such activity

in mind that the

words of the late John

F. Kennedy come back to

haunt us. Five years ago he said,

"Those who make peaceful revolution

impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role

our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful

revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges

and the pleasures that come from the immense profits

of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we

are to get on the right side of the world revolution,

we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution

of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from

a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented

society. When machines and computers,

profit motives and property rights, are

considered more important than people,

the giant triplets of racism, extreme

materialism, and militarism are

incapable of being

conquered.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We

live in a

fallen world.

On rare occasions,

an emotion other than greed

motivates someone, and

the world changes

a little.

David Denby

This

is the great

abyss between

what our politicians

say and what actually

happens. I don't think that

death is recognized by the leaders

of our free world. The word "death"

doesn't apply. There's no body count in

Iraq. Nobody knows how many people have

been killed. Even the American soldiers who have

been killed have been kept under wraps. As for the

mutilated, Americans I'm talking about for the

moment, they are mutilated for life -- again,

countless thousands of people -- not

referred to, ashamed, and they

cannot recognize the reality

of what war is, what

bombs are, what

missiles do.

Harold Pinter

Pat Tillman Foundation

When

there is an

advantage to be

had, then strike. When not,

abstain. Do not fight if you are not

yourself endangered. Do not fight out of spleen.

Anger may give way to happiness again; irritation may

ease into well-being. But a kingdom destroyed can

never be restored, nor the dead returned to life.

An enlightened ruler should be careful,

and a good general is ever cautious.

This is the way to keep

peace and save

lives.

The

Art of War:

Sun Tzu, Barack Obama,

and the Modern

Moment

Congressional Research Service

McCain,

Graham, Lieberman,

Skelton, McConnell and the

rest of the G.I. Josephine crowd

don’t have national security on their agenda.

They just like war. President Obama was Bugs Bunny

class maroon for calling Afghanistan a “war of necessity.”

We no sooner need to deploy troops to Afghanistan than

we need to deploy them to Pluto. Al-Qaeda is all but

gone from everywhere, and who gives a rat’s

rhetoric about the Taliban? The Taliban

just wants us to leave

Afghanistan.

We’re

funding militias

in Afghanistan to fight the

Taliban. We’re also funding the Taliban.

We’re so screwed up we can’t figure out which way

to point our pistols. I’d love it if Obama could un-funk

American foreign policy, but fear that he punted

the game away when he called Afghanistan

a “war of necessity.”

Alas.

Obama

has made some

good moves. Talking to

Iran was one of them. Cancelling

the Bush administration’s rope-a-dope

deal to deploy a missile defense system that

didn’t work to Poland and the Czech Republic

was another one. Committing to leave Iraq

was also good, though I’m not sure the

Pentagon and its paramours in

Congress and the press are

going to let that

happen.

I’m

hoping Obama

has finally realized that

Afghanistan is a bad investment,

and that he can’t fix a violent, corrupt

country by pouring arms and money

into it. Unfortunately, I

don’t think he’s

there yet.

I

also don’t

think he’s reached

the point where he’s ready

to stand up to his generals and

his Secretary of Defense. The singular

failing of the Obama presidency may turn out to be

that he kept David Petraeus, Ray Odierno, Mike

Mullen, and Robert Gates on the job and that

he put Petraeus protégé McChrystal, who

was Dick Cheney’s personal

assassin, in charge of

Afghanistan.

The

open warfare

between the Pentagon

and the White House needs to

be stomped, and the White House needs

to have won. The egotistical four-stars and their

stooge boss Gates got too used to the idea that they ran

the country, and that kind of thinking in military circles

has to stop. We’re Americans, for heaven’s sake, not

Prussians. We don’t exist to support our military.

Our military exists to support us, and it’s

not doing a very good job of it. It creates

more terrorists than it kills

or captures.

Our

military has

turned putrid. We did

pretty darn good during the post

Desert Storm years when we leaned largely on

naval and air forces to show the flag and perform

surgical strikes. Boots on the ground have led

to quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan,

just as they did in

Vietnam.

The

last thing we

want to do is put tens

of thousands more boots in

Afghanistan. We’ve already made this

mistake in Korea and Vietnam

and Iraq. How many more

times will we

make it?

Commander Jeff Huber, (USN Ret.)

Those

who can make you

believe absurdities can

make you commit

atrocities.

Voltaire

photo: Chris Hondros

There

are some

614 coal-fired

power plants in the

United States, and it is

up to us to shut them down.

No one in the White House will

do it. No one in Congress will do it.

And no one at the coming U.N. climate

change conference in Copenhagen will do it.

We will build local movements to carry out acts

of nonviolent civil disobedience to halt the burning

of coal, or the polar ice caps will continue to dissolve,

the Greenland ice sheet will disappear, the glaciers in the

Alps, the Himalayas and Tibet will melt, and widespread

droughts, rising sea levels and temperatures, acute food

shortages, disease and gigantic mass migrations will

envelop the globe. We are killing the ecosystem on

which human life depends. One of the major

polluters is coal, which supplies about half

of the country’s electricity. NASA’s James

Hansen has demonstrated that our only

hope of getting our atmosphere back

to a safe level—below 350 parts per

million CO2—lies in stopping the

use of coal to generate electricity.

We are currently at 390 parts

per million carbon

dioxide.

...The

average American

family uses more energy

between the stroke of midnight

on New Year’s Eve and dinner on

Jan. 2 than the average

Tanzanian family

uses all

year.

Chris Hedges

Natalie Dee

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Red Meat

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Double Fine

You

have to

disappear.

The world has

to be left behind,

the body has to be

left behind, the mind

has to be left behind, and

then you have only one thing

to lose -- yourself. You have enjoyed

everything. You have enjoyed the purity of

individuality; now you have to enjoy the disappearing

of individuality. You have seen the beauty of

individuality; now you have to see the

disappearance and its beauty, and

the silence that follows, that

abysmal serenity that

follows.

This way,

each individual will

go on moving into nothingness.

And one day, the whole existence moves

into nothingness and a great peace, a great night,

a deep, dark womb, a great awaiting for the dawn...

And it has been happening always, and

each time you are always born

on a higher level of

consciousness.

Try

to be so

wakeful that

you don't fall asleep

again. Remain so alert that

the future is not allowed to deceive

you again as you had allowed it before.

What has become past is nothing, but once

it is your future then you get deceived by it. Now

it is past; now another future is arriving. Every moment

future is arriving, and future can deceive you only if you are

asleep. Then again it will become past. Now let me tell you

one thing: if you remain alert and you don't allow

the future to deceive you in the present, the

past disappears. Then there is no memory

left of it, no trace of it. Then one is just

a clean slate, a sky without any

clouds, a flame without

smoke.

That's

what the state

of enlightenment is --

so alert that only the witness is

real and everything else is nothing but ripples

on the surface of the water. Everything is passing,

everything is a flux. Only one thing remains

and remains and remains, and that is

your consciousness, your

awareness.

...You

have to

understand

one thing: that

enlightenment is not

an escape from pain but

an understanding of pain, an

understanding of your anguish, an

understanding of your misery -- not a cover-up,

not a substitute, but a deep insight: "Why am I miserable,

why is there so much anxiety, why is there so much anguish,

what are the causes in me that are creating it?" And to see those

causes clearly is to be free from them. Just an insight into your

misery brings a freedom from misery. And what remains is

enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something that

comes to you. It is when pain and misery and

anguish and anxiety have been understood

perfectly well and they have evaporated

because now they have no cause to

exist in you -- that state is

enlightenment.

Enlightenment

is the ultimate peak of

sanity -- when one becomes

perfectly sane, has come to a point

where silence, serenity, consciousness

are twenty-four hours his, waking or sleeping.

There runs a current of tranquility, blissfulness,

benediction which is a nourishment, food from the

beyond. Eastern psychology accepts mind as the lowest

part of human consciousness - dismal and dark. You have

to go beyond it. And enlightenment is not the end, because

it is only individual consciousness. Individuality is still

like two banks of a river. The moment the river

moves into the ocean, all banks disappear,

all boundaries are annihilated.

You have gone beyond

enlightenment.

With

thought the

mind has boundaries.

But without thought the mind

is just infinite space. That is why in

thoughtless awareness one stops to be a

drop and becomes oceanic. And then there is

great energy. This energy wipes out everything

which is dead. It wipes out the whole karmic

past, and with no effort at all.

The greater absorbs the

lesser and remains

untouched.

Osho

Hoover Dam Bypass

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The

book’s most

frequently dropped

names, predictably enough,

are the Lord and Ronald Reagan

(though not necessarily in that order).

Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,”

running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts

from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of

Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s

understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith

and trust in God. But Palin did not write her

letter to God; she wrote the letter from

God, assuming His role and voice

herself and signing it “Trig’s

Creator, Your Heavenly

Father.”

...The

fact-checking

siege of “Going Rogue” —

by the media, Democrats and aggrieved

McCain campaign operatives alike — is another

fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had

anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The

more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy

headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as

an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry,

the editor of National Review, has correctly

observed, “She represents less a

philosophical strain on the

right than an affect and

a demographic.”

...Yet

among Republicans

she still ties Mitt Romney in the

latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with

65 percent giving her serious presidential

consideration, just behind the 71 for

her evangelical rival, Mike

Huckabee.

Frank Rich

In

the enemy’s

version of history,

the West—meaning the United

States, Israel, Britain and what used to

be called Christendom—has a long history of

exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands

to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their

rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness

and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves.

In this warped worldview, we deserve any

atrocities that jihadist “warriors”

might commit against

us.

Protesting

that all this is absurd

and obscene does not make it go

away. And our troops’ military success

actually helps to further the

jihadist narrative about

a “crusade” against

Islam.

It’s

ironic that

many of the officials

and commentators who are

so upset about the decision to

give KSM a civilian trial were also

quick to call the Fort Hood killings an

act of terrorism. If the suspect, Maj. Nidal

Hasan, is indeed a terrorist—and not just a

deranged man who snapped—then his awful

rampage helps demonstrate the point I’m making.

Hasan reportedly considered the U.S. military deployments

in Iraq and Afghanistan a war against Islam, at one point

arguing that Muslim soldiers should be excused from

combat as conscientious objectors. In other words,

he apparently bought at least part of the

jihadist line. If killing a terrorist in

Kandahar creates one in Killeen,

we’ll never make

progress.

Eugene Robinson

Why

Rudy Giuliani

wants to run for public

office again when pictures like

this are circulating in the world is

a mystery to me. We'll have

to stay tuned, I

suppose.

Perry Bible Fellowship

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