Random bits for a fresh week; Oreo rockets; NSA dude says this "one of the darkest eras in American history"

As for me, well this week is pretty much make-or-break in the career department. Quite a few links have piled up that might be interesting:

An Oreo filling-powered rocket and silly Japanese inventions from XFM.net. Cracked.com presents Five Steps to a Horrible Comedy (as well as the less funny acing job interviews). It is kind of funny that Cracked itself is still alive. A.Norman sends along a nice cartoon. Check out the ten highest-radiation cell phones. My Sanyo falls right in the midrange, at about 1.13 watts/kilogram. I swear this shit is going to give me cancer. I have a wireless router next to the head of my bed and I wonder how my brain cells like all those damn packets.

The MacBook has motion sensors that can be used to make light saber sounds. Optical illusions have something to do with your brain only handling one part of an image at once. Both of these via XFM.

A student speaker at New School had the guts to go up against John McCain and generated a small media frenzy about it.

Valerie Plame bits: Newsweek on Cheney's handwritten notes about gittin' Wilson and a Fitz filing. Wayne Madsen seems to admit that he got bamboozled on the matter of Karl Rove's impending/collapsing indictment last week. Tough break. I consider Madsen to be a most unusual source, with a lot of question marks. The stories about the Ohio vote fraud were weirder and more conspiratorial than any other I ever found, as have been the NSA stories. Wild enough to interest me, but I'm just not sure if I can support this guy or not. However, I'll still hold out a little faith that he'll finally get the bombshell he's looking for. (Side bonus: a good old summary of Ledeen's ties to the whole Niger-uranium forgery case. Not fresh though)

Tiny slice of conspiracy thinking: fake a middle solution: The "illuminati strategy", or so they say, is to control both sides of a debate, in order to create the desired political outcome. Thus "left" and "right" are convenient solutions. In some ways that is useful, but in reality, sorry guys, there are a lot of different interest groups in the world that aren't just the illuminati. But then again, it's a pretty good way to look at Hannity & Colmes. I didn't like Pair.com and their fucked-up thinking, but if you want more on the illuminati Third Way illusion, this is it. I meant to post this with Pop Conspiratoria and forgot it. Also here is OpusDeiAlert.com complaining that Opus Dei is really a bunch of evil Jewish guys and Ratzinger is an "Anti-Pope", whatever that means. I promise this is the end of this particularly silly (and somewhat offensive) shit, but Opus Dei is still spooky.

Pixeldusted sent along what he called Stat Porn - area-adjusted statistical maps from Worldmapper.

That guy named Bill from Brooklyn sent a story in the NY Times about a bizarre trick that physicists are doing with light.

There is talk of a certain wobbly quality in the American economy and Pravda has a bit on the looming petrodollar problem. Libertarian Republican Rep. Ron Paul on the declining dollar.

NSA Total Big BrotherGate: Read Billmon on the Leviathan and it's all-consuming total power complex. You won't regret it. William Arkin's WaPo Early warning Blog has some damn good stuff on the NSA spying programs. This Salon interview with an NSA insider is worth reading:

The fact that the federal government has my phone records scares the living daylights out of me. They won't learn much from them other than I like ordering pizza on Friday night and I don't call my mother as often as I should. But it should scare the living daylights out of everybody, even if you're willing to permit the government certain leeways to conduct the war on terrorism.

We should be terrified that Congress has not been doing its job and because all of the checks and balances put in place to prevent this have been deliberately obviated. In order to get this done, the NSA and White House went around all of the checks and balances. I'm convinced that 20 years from now we, as historians, will be looking back at this as one of the darkest eras in American history. And we're just beginning to sort of peel back the first layers of the onion.

Iraq disintegration notes: Power and Interest News Report is pretty dry, solid geopolitical analysis, and they are smart to look at how ''Iraq's Impending Fracture to Produce Political Earthquake in Turkey''. Inside Higher Ed has a feature on the Middle east wars in US Campuses, noting on the plus side:

Macalester College, for example, is receiving a grant to promote work on a dig in Israel and planning “peace summits” on the Middle East, to bring together various thinkers at the college’s Minnesota campus.

AfterDowningStreet.org has a pretty harsh collection of uncensored Iraq images of the dead, dying and wounded. Also their website runs Drupal, which we are (slowly) moving to, so it's helpful to look at for that alone. Middle East Newsline reports insurgents getting bolder in attacks - just going straight for US bases. Sunnis complain of US "atrocity" killing of civilians. Juan Cole says, yep, it's pretty much impossible to save Iraq. A former diplomat says many inside the government want to speak out on the war, but are afraid to. Analysts in the military say that the war has forced the US to be "reactive" to insurgents and abandon the all-important initiative. Palestinian refugees from Iraq accepted into Syria. Saddam tried to help out the Palestinians a bit with housing & aid, and now they're feeling the backlash as Iraq shears itself apart. A pretty fucked up story about 200,000 AK-47s from Bosnia vanishing due to some corrupt defense contractors or something. Oddly, from a UK tabloid, but whatever. Most of these links came from Juan Cole.

Antiwar.com has switched their blog engine to WordPress. Antiwar really does a good job, and Raimondo's latest bit on American Gangsterism is no exception, as well as "Is America becoming a police state?" and the Next World War.

Winning the Macalester Lottery and seeking Global One World Government approval: I shake Kofi's hand; plus antiwar protest notes

This is a belated note from the Springfest/Kofi/CheebaDANZA weekend. Springfest kicked ass, the weather held out, the organizers put on an excellent event. I couldn't say any more without risking a federal indictment. And the next day, my roommate offered me a ticket to go see Kofi Annan. I was pretty scrubby, which was exactly how it ought to be.

I still have some backdoor access around Macalester, so when I got rejected (ticket in hand) from the Kofi speech, after marveling at the bitching donors who believed their millions could get them into the Fieldhouse, I managed to sneak into the lunch, and get a seat way up near the front. This, in turn, has caused me to appear in Macalester Propaganda:

As the least well-dressed lunch guest, with the filthy jeans I grabbed running out the door at 8:20 that morning, all was right. The venerable and well-dressed Alex Flores (looking up at far right in the photo above) took three good photos.

As he went down these stairs, surrounded by shrewd members of the State Department security detail, I went to Kagin's side elevator, down to the ground floor. A Mac guard ushered me out of the building with some other folks, but I lingered near the entrance. In no time, Kofi popped around the corner, I asked if I could shake his hand, and I wished him luck.

Along with Springfest and a variety of shadow activities, I pretty much hit the Macalester triple bank shot that weekend... Finally mastered the damn place, about two years too late.

As for the University antiwar protest, well damn, it was really rainy. But still entertaining. I would say that I liked it when the protesters hit the military recruiters' office with metaphorical red paint. (photo from MN Daily story)

However, as recent news stories about police investigations of protests at the 2004 New York Republican convention reveal, the cops look at any potential illegal protest conduct as a probable cause to search you and wiretap you and whatever else. Therefore if a dangerous internet anarchist terrorist like me were to say "that was pretty sweet when they painted the recruiters' office," this would apparently justify total surveillance for the rest of my life.

In any case, I thought it was ironic that they arrested several protesters while the adjacent police horses pooped all over the sidewalk. Red paint and manure was everywhere. But we ought to call it "terrorist latex" and "freedom cakes".

Ducking probable cause and pneumonia - photo by Jenny @ the U

CHEEBA 420 fest at Macalester abruptly canceled by administration? Kofi is coming soon too; a P.R. disaster looms?

For 4/20, the Cheeba organization at Macalester College is throwing a CHEEBAdanza for Social Justice at 4:20 PM. However, the student organizers, who tried to coordinate over weeks with the school administration, late in the evening of the 19th, suddenly found themselves apparently without festival approval after a surprise meeting with administration personnel. However, as of this late hour in the A.M., the event is still listed on the online events calendar:

It seems that the administration is trying to pull the plug after a rather boisterous article in the Pioneer Press Wednesday (also picked up in KR's Duluth paper). There is a lot on the line at Mac today, as the disappointed and angry students who have worked for weeks to pull together an elaborate festival that was (is?) set to include several bands, a comedy routine, the African Music Ensemble, a 100-pound roasted pig, juggling, a bouncy castle, and fire throwers.

The Pioneer Press story which alarmed the administration, although evidently they have been getting pressure from all sorts of sources, including faxed copies of their fliers, from the U and other schools:

It's, like, a pot fest, dude
The CHEEBA Club's celebration of marijuana is 'part entertainment (free food and dodge ball), but it's also about social justice.'
BY MATT PEIKEN Pioneer Press Apr. 19

So, like, check this out.

These dudes at Macalester College are throwing this righteous party Thursday. They're calling it CHEEBAdanza — "the Twin Cities premier marijuana festival." Says so right on the green flier. This isn't one of those mediocre pot fests — it's A-grade all the way.

Excellent.

First of all, OK, you have the date, right? Thursday, April 20. That's 4/20. And you know the party starts at 4:20 p.m. That's the legendary tokin' hour, my friends.

So anyway, there's gonna be all kinds of free munchies and jam bands playing on the Old Main Lawn, probably well past 7, and they promise, somehow, to parade up Grand Avenue to Fairview Avenue to Summit Avenue and back to Grand.

"It's pretty short. We're pretty lazy about these kinda things," said Spencer Edelman, a Macalester senior from Boulder, Colo., and a festival co-founder. "Marching long ways isn't really our thing."

No worries.

Just even having the festival, man, it's like, how'd you pull this off? Turns out Edelman and his buddy Reid Lustig and some other Macalester dude — think his name is Stefan — two years ago formed an official campus CHEEBA Club (Creating a Harmless Environment to Enjoy Buds Appropriately).

Kofi Annan himself is coming to speak this weekend, and Springfest, on Friday, is only a half-day long – which is part of the reason that the festival was widely supported for Thursday.

I will have to go see what is going on with this scene tomorrow. Obviously, it would be a shame to let yet another Macalester event die a swift and brutal death. What will happen? Will an army of stoners be cast out? Will Macalester's spirit finally wither and die, or rise again like the phoenix? Will security clear the green space? Was the Constitution written on hemp?

Can this be spun into a public relations victory and some spiritual relief at the same time? Or is everything these days doomed to end in disaster?

Craigslist: 4/20: CHEEBADANZA---Marijuana Re-Legalize Festival

CHEEBADANZA, a free marijuana re-legalization festival open to the public will commence at Macalester College on April 20th at 4:00 pm

St. Paul, Minn. –Hundreds, if not thousands of community members are expected to congregate at the Macalester College campus on April 20th at 4:00 pm for the 2nd annual CHEEBADANZA, a free and inclusive concert celebration in support of the re-legalization of marijuana.

CHEEBA (Creating a Harmless Environment to Enjoy Buds Appropriately), is hosting this event in collaboration with Minnesota NORML and numerous other social justice organizations located in the Twin Cities.

“CHEEBA consistently creates memorable moments that we can share with all our buds in the context of social justice” organizer Cameron Garcia said.

Homegrown musical talent will entertain the crowds starting at 4:15. The bill currently includes headliner Possibly Bailey with support from The Suspects, Scholax and Boxhead, Kontrast and Outside the Bachs. During a brief intermission, there will be a quick, peaceful march along Grand Avenue in St. Paul at 4:40. Activists will return to Macalester’s campus for more music and plenty of free food until 7:00.

Other fun and games include horseshoes, a dodge ball tournament, four-square, lawn bowling and an inflatable bouncy castle. Tentative plans also incorporate a pig roast and bonfire.

By demonstrating that people who smoke marijuana and people who do not smoke marijuana can have fun together in peace and solidarity, CHEEBADANZA shows that legally restricting marijuana enjoyment is cruel and unnecessary. This entire event is free and open to all supporters of the cause in the metropolitan area.

CHEEBA (Creating a Harmless Environment to Enjoy Buds Appropriately), is a popular and influential student group funded by Macalester College since 2004.

email cheeba@macalester.edu

Nick Werth breaking out to the Southern Cone

Werth (at left) is rounding out his time at Macalester with a huge tour of South America, and fortunately he'll be blogging it for us — in Spanish. Southern Cone 2006 at Blogger is Nick's tool to let us know what is going.

Nick is leaving on February 12. He is hitting Buenos Aires, Argentina; Montevideo, Uruguay; Asuncion, Paraguay; and Porto Alegre in northern Brazil. Sounds frickin' awesome.

We'll keep tabs on his situation. Maybe he should have a Babelfish translation link or something. My Spanish is ok, but hardly perfect. English is still the langua franca. But I like how his site already has Spanish-language Google ads running.

(HongPong.com file photo)

Jesse Mortenson's Green bid for 64A Macalester legislative district featured in Star Tribune

I had heard that my former Macalester classmate Jesse Mortenson '05 was considering a run for the State House — and indeed, he is not the only recent Macalester grad to consider a run. Apparently, Jesse is the first Green Party candidate to shoot for a spot at the Capitol, which makes me wonder what the hell the rest of them are doing. (official Green Party press release on it)

Fortunately for Jesse, his campaign got some good press with a Doug Grow column in the Star Tribune today ('Pol's fundraiser won't be typical DFL bean feed'), mentioning a planned vegan fundraising dinner next month. The column rambles on about the difference between Republican and Democrat food fundraisers, mentions the Al Juhnke "hotdish law."

Anyway, I think it is great that Mortenson is going for this. Certainly in 64A, he has a better shot of winning Green than almost anywhere else in the state, save Dinkytown or the relative Green strongholds of Minneapolis.

He is only two years younger than the House's youngest, freshman Rep. Andy Welti (D) of the Rochester countryside area. And his core platform — anti-Wal-Mart & Big box retail organizing, single-payer health care, more renewable energy and demanding an end to the Iraqi occupation — all of these issues will certainly find their supporters around Macalester. (needless to say, I pretty much agree with his take on these issues)

The main potential problem is that some older, richer Macalester graduate in the neighborhood could likely snap up the DFL endorsement. If s/he is not such a hot candidate, Jesse would certainly have a sporting chance in November. City Hall Scoop reported that Ian Keith, an elementary school teacher, announced for the race in November. In that case, with no other contenders (?), Jesse is the more interesting candidate, hands-down.

In our time at Mac, Jesse and I found ourselves aligned in cliques that were sometimes mutually hostile — namely his occasional spats with some in The Mac Weekly, in particular during my time as an editor there during the controversial 'need-blind' days. Mortenson was criticized for talking too much at Macalester College Student Government LB meetings, for throwing monkey wrenches rather than working constructively, in other words all the usual accusations leveled against the activist set around Mac. I secretly never saw any of this as a problem, because the MCSG is often something of a farce, and I supported anything improving the quality of the theatre therein. In any case, he did a lot to raise awareness of broader problems that many preferred not to face.

So Jesse had a mixed public image among some at Macalester. In person, I always found him friendly, informed and connected, a kind of utilitarian progressive who took a keen interest in the activities and structures of governments and corporations. There are quite a few protesters-of-the-week at Macalester, who talk a lot of talk. Jesse is not of that class: as a grassroots progressive, he seriously walks the walk.

After the Brian Rosenberg wars, I can only imagine the fun of seeing Jesse squaring off against Phil Krinkie and Steve Sviggum. With a little luck and a lot of elbow grease... If he has been up at Midway building some kind of stealth coalition among small business owners and activists at the Midway Citizen Consumer Community Coalition and Metro Independent Business Alliance, he might be able to pull off an unlikely pro-business Green campaign that other progressives could try nationwide. Where did all the people on that stage come from?

Naturally, Sociology chair Terry Boychuk had nothing but glowing things to say about Jesse's candidacy in the Dec. 9 (or Dec. 2?) Mac Weekly story that announced his campaign.

After all, Macalester students only end up running the whole world, so what chance could Mortenson have in one of Minnesota's most liberal districts? My grandfather, Daniel S. Feidt, was elected to the Minnesota House in 1936 at age 28, on his second try. He got to the Senate two years later, where he stayed until 1961. Like Mortenson, he was of an independent streak and was wary of party machines, preferring the independent structure of the Legislature in those days.

I'll add a bit from his 1957 pamphlet, Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature, an ode to the dead nonpartisan system. I think that Mortenson would appreciate it:

It is understandable why party leaders desire to increase their power by gaining control of the Minnesota legislature, but the view of the independent voter is different, he does not want his legislator, alderman or school board member, to be subject to party responsibility.

He does not want a political climate to develop where there might be brought back to Minnesota's scene the paid political hack, the ward healer or the ward boss.

The independent wants Minnesota to remain as it is -- the cleanest political state in the nation and the independent wants his public official, be he legislator or alderman, to be responsible to the voters, not to some party boss.

…Minnesota has the opposite of the party boss system; it has its own system -- a non-boss system, in which every legislator is free to decide what is in the best interest for his constituents and what is in the best interest of the state on each issue. The Minnesota system, in my judgment, is infinitely more in the interest of the public.

So my warmest regards to Jesse Mortenson's independent effort in 64A. It will be a difficult year, but surely a rewarding one. I'll be following this one closely.

(Campaign photo shamelessly ganked from Jesse's official announcement entry on his campaign site, JesseMortenson.com)

Charges dropped!!!!

I sent this email out to lots of people. If you're reading it, well that means you care about my dear website so you are invited too! (I sure as hell don't have the email addresses of everyone I wanted to invite...)

**********

Long story short: the mess is over and I win. Rambling details below. We are having a Victory Party this Friday evening - at whatever evening time - at the new apartment @ 32 Spruce Place, Apartment 200, in downtown Minneapolis, and everyone's invited. I mean everyone. Forward this email around if you like - 'they' are invited too. Here's the GoogleMap to the Apt. - you just drive up Hennepin towards downtown, turn right at Spruce Place (a block before South 13th street) and then go a block to Harmon Place. The building's on the corner, and I'm going to put my red stoplight in the window as a beacon!

My contact info is: 651 338 7661, AIM: hongpong2000, http://www.hongpong.com (as always)

Last night I was walking to the Hennepin Ave. Davannis with my roommate Colin Kennedy, and a random dude asked us for a cigarette, as they do so often. He talked with us as we walked, about how good friends have to give hard advice (as a friend did about the case that night)... I told the dude my dilemma - that I had to go to court tomorrow and decide if I should plea bargain. He said he'd had his troubles with the law and had been caught with 17 ounces of cocaine (someone else's, of course!) and he'd had the option of a plea for 15 years or going up for 40. He said that going to jail was good for him, it forced him to change his life, and he spent 3 years reading law books. The state wouldn't fight hard to force a plea because it costs lots of money to impanel a jury, he said. He told me that I should stick it out and tell the truth, and whatever higher power I might believe in would see that the truth would set things right, and it would be plain for all to see. Best legal advice I'd gotten in a while!

It took almost seven full months, but we stuck it out in court and rotated through three judges in all. However, today I didn't expect anything would happen, except setting a court date with yet another judge. This time around, the new one, Judge Kathleen Gearin, talked with Gary Wood, my lawyer, and the city prosecutor Jeffrey Martin, for quite awhile in the Chambers.

When Gary came back it was some good news. He wasn't sure how the judge was feeling about it but they'd offered a Disorderly Conduct with a $50 fine. I compared that with the thought of hundreds more dollars on legal fees that I can't afford and I decided to go for the plea. We went back in to wait to finish this thing.

I'm recollecting this from memory here... So when we went up to the judge in court, she asked if I wanted to take the plea and I said something like 'Yes, because I can't afford to go any further.' She looked over the police statements and said that there was something about the issue of spoilage of evidence and a memory card. She asked the prosecutor if this memory card ever showed up at the property room and he said it never had. However, he never offered a particular defense or explanation of this. 

She asked me to explain in my own words what happened, and what if anything was contained on the memory card. I said that we, as a senior class, had been on a riverboat cruise that day, and I'd taken around a hundred pictures of everyone gathered together for one last time ... and she said, alright get to the point... so I said that we'd been in a cottage, the police came in, I took a picture of that and took more pictures outside. I said that I know it is legal to take photographs from a public space as long as you obey lawful orders from police, etc. I told her that I took a picture of someone (Andrew Kracziewicz) being arrested, and then the police hit the camera out of my hand and I got arrested. I said that at the jail, the police had showed me the camera and asked if it was mine, and I said that it was, then I got it back when I was released, without the memory card.

She asked if the photos indicated something illegal by the police, and I said something like that they were being forceful and overreacting. Well, she said, they had to be forceful, and that it seemed from the police reports that some people had been out of control. I didn't try to defend the actions of everyone there and stuck to the matter of the pictures. I said that the existence of the pictures proved that I hadn't been shoving Officer Moore -- I'd been taking pictures. The prosecutor didn't try to defend or challenge this, aside from claiming that the police report was the state's full statement on the matter.

The judge said (I wish I had the exact quote) that, with a reference to a precedent of McGill vs. someone, that failing to produce the evidence was prejudicial to the defendant - and that she was bothered by the fact that these pictures never showed up. Citing some statute, she said that the charge of obstruction of legal process of force was dismissed. She seemed quite ticked about how they never brought the pictures. I had never expected such sharp words about it, so it was really great to hear after all this.

I didn't pontificate about any grand concepts of freedom of the press or claim that Macalester students are all saints because that kind of thing would not really resolve the situation. It was easier to deal with all this with no friends or family at the courtroom watching me - it simplified the whole thing mentally, and well, I hadn't actually expected anything at all to happen today, so I never suggested that anyone go with me.

In the end, at the very least I proved to the police that they can't just destroy photos and expect to totally get away with it. Gary thought that they'd fought so hard in this case because of some of the top city attorneys decided to pressure us - they had earlier demanded written apologies with the other plea bargains, but they forgot to do this in writing, so it's not going to happen.

After the case I bragged to my dear old roommate Alison Norman, who is going crosseyed squinting at law books at William Mitchell 60 hours a week, that I'd won one case and now she better catch up!

When all of this was over I remembered what one friend always used to say to me... "Now Dan, drive carefully. I know what your country does and I don't want to go to Guantanamo!" The terrible truth of what happened in this incident was that Audun, an international student, was assaulted by the jail personnel, and his lack of a US passport probably contributed to that. The police also maced Zeynep in front of her cottage. The experience ruptured their sense of what this country's about -- and with the news these days that Cheney is darting around the Capitol begging Republicans to let them keep torturing vanished foreigners, along with news of a secret network of CIA detention camps in Eastern Europe (why would anyone think badly of secret camps around there, anyway?) -- it seems that this contempt for the rights of non-citizens trickles right down from those policies at the top. Inside jail it's not too difficult to see that you're only a few cells on the spreadsheet away from Guantanamo. It turned out that my ever-cynical friend was quite correct.

There's some possibility of a lawsuit down the line, in the hopes that we could discourage the police and sheriffs from abusing people like this, but I won't make any predictions or plans, and I sure as hell don't want to worry about it that much, after having experienced this weird and time-consuming trip through the System. The odometer's finally rolled over on this mess, and I'm happy about it. Tomorrow I'll wake up free of Conditional Release, having won a piece by standing my ground, but oddly winning after I'd given up.

Cheers to all of you and thanks for your steadfast support, far flung you may be. I want to come and visit people sometime in the dead of winter... +1 for the good guys!

--Dan

Updates a-coming; a bust in court on Halloween

Hey all, I sent out this email to some people about the ongoing Senior Week legal case. I had to go down to court on Monday but nothing happened. Suffice it to say, this is a big pain in the arse:

From: Dan Feidt <dan.feidt@gmail.com>
Date: October 31, 2005 2:46:38 PM CST
To: everyone
Subject: Bounced to another judge

So I get down there and asked where Judge Ostby is hearing cases today. The woman at the desk said that Judge Ostby isn't hearing any cases today. What?! Apparently she has rotated from misdemeanors to felonies and she ditched this case like the rotten fish it is. So we got reassigned to November 8 with Judge Gearin.

Also, the city attorney is angry that the previous plea bargains for the other guys failed to include an apology, so they may try to 'undo' the plea bargains in order to try to secure an apology.

While they said that we had been sent notices that the court date had changed, neither I nor Gary Wood got one so it was totally a surprise. What an excellent bureaucracy. A little Kafkaesque.

Today I am working on Politics in MN stuff as well as Computer Zone things. There's obviously a lot to say about TraitorGate - I mean the Plame scandal. I promise there will be more. In the meantime go see Firedoglake.

Some kind of DeLay situation; dipping Uzbekistan; Machiavelli in the 21st century; Hey Arianna, we're #1 for "Bolton fake intelligence"

Yeah, I can't bring myself to write any more about the whole arrest incident. So I won't.

Start with Machiavelli for the Twenty-First Century from New Left Review. I liked this.

It is true that Bush sounds like LBJ in 1967 with staying the course. Tom DeLay got indicted, what fun. They are screaming partisanship but the Democratic Texas prosecutor has hit a lot of Democrats in the past.

In Ohio they are trying to un-gerrymander the legislative districts. Good luck folks.

Robert George, a self described "Catholic, West Indian black Republican" asks himself "Why Am I (Still) A Republican?" Indeed. There is a good deal of gloating on the left-blogosphere these days, as conservatives seem to split in all directions and run for cover. Stygius and Laura Rozen note that such luminaries as Andy Sullivan, Dan Drezner and Robert "the ghoul" Novak are running for cover.

I might have the sniffles. I wonder if it is H5N1 KILLER FLU. Which is spreading rapidly.

Arianna is saying what I said a while ago, that John Bolton is quite likely connected to the Valerie Plame CIA case. (antiwar.com was on it a while ago as Raimondo quickly puts on the comments). For more old bits, consider "They Knew" the intel was spoofed in In These Times, Aug 2004. Oh by the way, HongPong.com has the top Google ranking for "bolton fake intelligence," for the excellent post: "More stories of the fake intelligence and John 'the Moustache' Bolton". Hey, not bad!

The US is really leaving Uzbekistan. I really enjoyed this lengthy New Left Review profile about the history and situation of Chechnya. It very astutely points out that no legitimate Chechen leader has ever agreed with the Russians to be part of Russia or the USSR. Also the article adds that the FSB and Putin were widely suspected of orchestrating the 1999 apartment bombings subsequently blamed on Chechen rebels - terror99.ru is a sweet Russian site elaborating on some "conspiracy theories" about why a beam of shining light like Putin would ever dare do such a thing as bomb some buildings to freak out the Russian public.

Check out Arms Control Wonk. It's just cool. They have good info about North Korea among other things.

Oddly, Arlen Specter accused the Pentagon of blocking an investigation in the pre-9/11 "Able Danger" Pentagon intelligence project that people are now saying somehow identified Mohammed Atta, and other weird stuff. NY Times on it as well as CNN. I will spare you the billions of weird theories that could spring from this. Sorry - use your imagination.

The NY Times Company is cutting out 500 jobs.

An American diplomat characterized the depth of Shiite fundamentalist organizations taking solid control of southern Iraq as "our dirty little secret." If you are looking for a more realistic summary of Islamic militant movements and "the far enemy" check out this review of The Far Enemy on the Agonist. Some are arguing that Iran is not a global threat. Try "Give Iranian Nukes a Chance" by Slavoj Zizek (Aug. 2005), a lot of stuff about how the state projects its threat perceptions onto foreigners, justifying ongoing 'security measures' that are in fact the real threats to Democracy & Freedom. I think the truth lies in between, but it certainly is true that MAD logic may get the Iranians peace in the end - or a large glass parking lot. I hope for peace, and I am not a paranoid racist who thinks that Iranian civilization is totally suicidal and irrational.

Slavoj Zizek also wrote this bit about how the WMDs were MacGuffins in the narrative. Old but funny.

The Afghan heroin kingpins / warlords did quite well in the elections. Juan Cole noted that the British agents captured in Basra were apparently active in trying to intercept arms coming into Iraq from Iran. Basra is wack these days (FT adds to this, and Raimondo remarks that we're on the war road to Damascus and Tehran via Basra). Cole adds:

Among the more powerful Iranian arms merchants is Manucher Ghorbanifar, this one with friends in high places in Washington, who is trying to pull the United States into a war against Iran. War is good for arms merchants.

There is also some info about how much be-Baathification has really happened.

Check out this new film, Occupation Dreamland, about how some US troops handle their situation in Fallujah. There are sweet trailers. It looks amazing. Also check out this story about Turkey and its social conflicts.

Some commentary about Katrina's economic effects. The "Fog of Katrina" is being used to obscure unrelated economic information, they say. MorganStanley economist talking about how and when the global economy will get rebalanced. Richard Cohen at the WaPo says choose, dammit, Guns or Butter.

As always, between Israel and Palestine there is plenty of violence and even more spin. The Israelis got mighty angry when Hamas fired a bunch of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, which Hamas justified by claiming that Israel blew up a vehicle at a militant rally, killing lots of people. It seems reasonable to me that the vehicle blew up on its own, but it is certainly possible that Israel did it. So Israel attacked Gaza and arrested a bunch of people in the West Bank. The 'militants' supposedly captured in the West Bank were to some extent part of the militant organizations' "political wings" and some of the more moderate elements, including those that favor reconciliation and intend to run in the upcoming Palestinian elections. I found the following on some kind of rightwing Israeli site, unitedjerusalem.org, where the text was loaded into some kind of interactive bias-judging webpage. Weird. But here is the "political" vs "militant wing" bit, which seems to be on Haaretz's print page here but not here or here. Thanks google.

In the largest arrest sweep since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the IDF apprehended 207 leaders of Hamas´ political wing, along with a number of Islamic Jihad activists in the West Bank early yesterday. Most of those arrested are not on the list of wanted men from the two organizations´ military wings, but rather their accomplices or activists in the political and civilian wings.

Palestinian sources said that among those arrested were several local leaders considered key figures in the upcoming third round of municipal elections to take place Thursday in 105 local authorities in the West Bank and in the fourth round of elections scheduled to take place in December, which include the major cities.

Among key activists arrested yesterday were several expected to run on Hamas´ ticket for the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25. Prominent among the detainees is Sheikh Hassan Yusuf, along with his two sons. Yusuf, who was released from prison six months ago, and Muhammad Ghazal, a senior Hamas leader in the Nablus area, is considered a leader of the moderate camp espousing Hamas´ involvement in the political process.

But such a move was probably deemed necessary by Sharon for his own sordid domestic political reasons: On the other side, Sharon narrowly won his battle with Netanyahu over the Likud premiership and primaries, managing to retain the later Likud primary date and blunting Netanyahu's ever-intrigiuing conspiracy to take over the state. In a humorous twist, Sharon couldn't give his speech to the Likud Central Committee because his microphone went dead. This sparked a huge controversy between both sides, with the Netties claiming that Sharon did it himself to posture as a victim. Akiva Eldar always has interesting things to say about "Sharon's Cheerleading Squad", that is, the Israeli Left that now finds themselves in a strange political alliance.

I would like to believe that it was Sharon's idea, but Netanyahu actually approved it, to suit their weird personalities.... Anyway, also Likud members accused each other of ballot manipulation and voting fraud (as has happened in the past).

Israel would like a seat on the UN Security Council. The director of the Shin Bet security service says he expects more attacks from the West Bank now, which seems true as far as it goes tactically, but then again I think we can expect the settlers to Amp their Land Grab up now as well. The settlers are on a mission to persuade Likud Central Committee members of how freakin great they are.

I just found informationwar.org, a UK peace project. Nice name. Did you know that Winston Churchill once praised dropping poison gas on the Kurds? Funny story.

A question of police photography

It seems that my case will come down to the matter of whether or not I was taking pictures. Well, anyone can tell you that police officers make an excellent photographic element. So here are my some of my best photographs of police officers from the Republican National Convention. (click to enlarge)

The (lower) photo of the NYPD officer on the motorcycle is one of my all-time favorite photographs. On his forearm, his tattoo reads "All gave some / Some gave all / 9-11-01". It is so much more authentic than all the cheap rhetoric...

Well folks, tomorrow the City of St. Paul is going to try to assert that there was Probable Cause that I committed a crime on May 11, but never photographed any police officers. Let this little post indicate that I have had a great deal of success photographing police officers. Police officers are more likely to behave themselves when they are being recorded. It cannot be denied.

Time to Double Down; Instant Messenger viruses are trying to get me

I feel... as if I am looking at the world from the bottom of a well...

And the only way to beat it is to bat it down...

I would like to note for the rest of the Internet that Nick Werth's AOL Instant Messenger client is infected with some kind of nasty program (although he blames John van Wagenen as the source of infection) that sends out links to dynu.com and johnslaten.com , which in turn downloads weird virus files. Fortunately I have a Mac and use Adium as my client. So no problem here!

You need to ditch AOL Instant Messenger and use an alternative IM client program, which will not get infected, and takes less CPU and memory besides. For Macs I recommend Adium. For Windows PCs and Linux, Gaim is the gold standard. Go for it, you won't look back.

Ok, other than AIM viruses, well folks, the hearing for Macalester's May 11 incident is on 9 AM, this Tuesday morning at the County Courthouse/City Hall at 15 West Kellogg Boulevard with Judge Ostby. I can't remember at the moment which room it's at but you should be able to ask for directions to Judge Ostby's courtroom, if anyone is so interested in getting over early to see what happens.

There will be a number of witnesses testifying, including Laurie Hamre and various students. I may also testify.

As you might imagine, it is a tense situation for me, which brings forth all kinds of questions about Truth vs. Expediency, and all the rest.

Wish me luck. It's time to Double Down. :-/

Macalester teaches Billy Joe Armstrong to differ from the hollow lies; Zarqawi == Emmanuel Goldstein

I missed the Green Day concert in St. Paul on Friday. It sounded like a hell of a good time, made particularly special by Billy Joe Armstrong's connections to the area: his wife is from New Brighton, and I have heard on reasonably good authority that he purchased a house on Summit Avenue. Star Tribune reported Saturday:

St. Paul was where he wrote some of the songs for the politically charged "American Idiot," the Grammy-winning album that is the best-selling nonrap CD of the past year, with more than 4 million copies sold. In the summer of 2003, he had walked around the track at Macalester College in St. Paul, writing the songs in his head.

This also tracks with what I've heard, that Armstrong was spotted a few times around the track - a more interesting celebrity sighting than that time Josh Hartnett came into the SuperAmerica and Grand and Cleveland when Alison was working. It would also explain why much of the album has a perfect rhythm for running. This song always made a lot of sense to me - it must have been because I was living down the street when he wrote it! :-)

So what's my real point today? The image of Senior Demon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is an essential element of the Bush Administration's strategy to manage perceptions of their disastrous war - diverting blame and creating an attractive 'negative image'. Zarqawi is one of the principle Hollow Lies of the war.

Say, Hey!

Hear the sound of the falling rain / Coming down like an Armageddon flame / The shame / The ones who died without a name

Hear the dogs howling out of key / To a hymn called "Faith and Misery" / And bleed / The company lost the war today

I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies / This is the dawning of the rest of our lives / On Holiday

Hear the drum pounding out of time / Another protester has crossed the line / To find / The money's on the other side

Can I get another Amen? / There's a flag wrapped around the score of men / A gag / A plastic bag on a monument

I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies / This is the dawning of the rest of our lives / On holiday

Meanwhile, in the Information Age of Hysteria, we have perhaps the underlying principle of our government in a nutshell, as Ron Suskind put it before the election:

The [White House] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Enter the Demon of our Times.

Let me offer a theory: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may actually exist, but his "existence" in the media is an essential element of the Bush Administration's Public Relations strategy to manage perception of the war. He is a personification of malevolent intent: if he wasn't around, we are told to believe, things would sort themselves out, so our motive has to be to crush him instead of confronting the Pentagon's essentially racist, disastrous policies. The Star Tribune carried a Washington Post/AP story on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's latest pledge to kill all the Shiites. Consider the following:

More bombings push Baghdad deaths near 200: Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post

BAGHDAD -- Insurgents believed to be allied with Al-Qaida in Iraq kept up bombings in the capital on Thursday, launching strikes that brought the two-day death toll close to 200.

The chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said the surge in bombings represented the kind of occasional spikes in attacks that the military has been expecting "around certain critical events that highlight the progress of democracy."

In this case, an Oct. 15 referendum on Iraq's new constitution is only a month away.

"Remember, democracy equals failure for the insurgency," Lynch said. "So there has to be heightened awareness now as we work our way toward the referendum."

Police targeted

In the violence Thursday, suicide bombers killed at least 31 people in two attacks about a minute apart that targeted Iraqi police and Interior Ministry commandos, officials said. Insurgents also managed to land a single mortar round inside the Green Zone, the base for U.S. officials and Iraq's government. There were no casualties and only minimal damage, U.S. officials said.

A day earlier, at least 14 car bombs across Baghdad killed 167 people, the majority of them Shiite Muslim civilians -- the highest one-day toll of the war inflicted by insurgent attacks in the capital. Seven of the victims died overnight of their wounds.

An audiotape released on a website linked to Al-Qaida in Iraq after Wednesday's attacks said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group had opened "all-out war" on Iraq's Shiite majority.

Attacks linked to Al-Qaida also hit the city of Ramadi, capital of the western province of Anbar, a stronghold of foreign-led fighters. Witnesses said Al-Qaida-allied fighters rocketed and shelled two U.S. military installations at Ramadi and traded fire with U.S. patrols in the city. The U.S. military reported one Marine killed and said a would-be car bomber also died. Iraqi emergency medical workers said Marine snipers killed six Al-Qaida fighters.

The two-day barrage of attacks attributed to Al-Qaida in Iraq, and the increasing control of towns in the west along the Euphrates River being asserted by foreign-led insurgents, intensified the U.S. military's focus on Al-Zarqawi.

U.S. commanders often have publicly denigrated his role in the insurgency to little more than that of a media-fostered figurehead. On Thursday, however, Lynch discussed Al-Zarqawi in some of the sharpest terms yet, calling him the Americans' main target and saying the United States was winning the fight against him.

"We believe we are experiencing great success against the most crucial element of the insurgency, which is the terrorists and the foreign fighters. The face of that is Zarqawi and Al-Qaida in Iraq," Lynch said.

"We've got great intelligence which tells us where he's moving to and where he's trying to establish safe havens. As soon as we see him trying to establish a safe haven, we will conduct operations," such as the one underway against northwestern insurgent strongholds in Tal Afar, Lynch said. "We're using all assets under our control in conjunction with the Iraqi security forces to find him and kill him."

Now let us refer to a little bit from Orwell's 1984... As WikiPedia summarizes the teachings of Emmanuel Goldstein:

...the state of war creates a mentality that suits the Party well. A Party member should be "a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war." Though "the entire war is spurious...and waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones", even Inner Party members who potentially could know better passionately believe that the war is real and will "end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world". .... There can never be any large-scale invasion of enemy territory, so that citizens of one superstate would come face to face with citizens of another and discover that conditions there are very much the same as in their own superstate: Even the prevailing ideologies are almost identical. To maintain the image of the enemy as a monster whose ideology is a barbarous outrage on common sense, all sides realize that "the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs"!

Since the war is a sham and each superstate is unconquerable, the ongoing "conflict" has no sobering effect on the oligarchies ruling the three superstates: .... "The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they chose." [Paging Mr Suskind...]

Thus, the war is actually "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact". As far as the lack of any genuine outside threat is concerned, the superstates might just as well agree to live in permanent peace; then they would still be "freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger" (the kind of danger that might force the rulers to behave somewhat responsibly). This, according to the author, "is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace."

While I quietly alluded to this earlier, other people have been making this point for a while, but damn it, even the newspaper admits this "media figurehead" phenomenon is partly true. There's probably a real Zarqawi figure out there, but basically, these days I generally believe he is a media construction designed to provide a narrative that Joe Six Pack can understand. The exciting Zarqawi Chase (with, say, captured laptops and narrow escapes) is the kind of story that the NASCAR dad needs to stave off cognitive dissonance. The insurgency is not a failure of policy, it's not Rummy's and Myers' fuck-ups, it's this damn Zarqawi always trying to throw monkey wrenches in the system AKA "building democracy". Some might say it's a Leo Straussian Noble Lie to provide succor for the Bronze Masses. Let me throw in a Billmon post on this matter from a year ago:

The problem here is not with the Fallujans, the problem here is not with the coalition. The problem here is with foreign fighters, international terrorists, people like Zarqawi, who we believe to be in Fallujah or nearby.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor: Press Briefing April 13, 2004

The security situation in Fallujah, Iraq, remains stable, and coalition forces there are engaged in a "robust hunt" for al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed to be in or near the city, coalition officials said today.

American Forces Information Service: 'Robust' Manhunt for Zarqawi Under Way April 13, 2004

Former regime elements can be former Ba'athists, they can be Iraqi extremists, they can be outside jihadists, they can be Zarqawi network folks as well.

Gen. Dick Myers: Press Briefing April 7, 2004

The terrorists, assassins are threatened by the Iraqi's people's progress toward self-government, because they know that they will have no future in a free Iraq. They know, as al Qaeda associate Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi put it in his letter recently, that we intercepted: "Democracy is coming"...

Donald Rumsfeld: Press Briefing April 7, 2004

A statement circulating in Iraq and signed by anti-U.S. groups last month claimed al-Zarqawi was killed earlier by American bombs in northern Iraq. A senior U.S. official denied the report of al-Zarqawi's death.

Associated Press: Al Qaeda tape takes credit for Iraq attacks April 6, 2004



The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.

George Orwell: 1984

And let us not forget Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's entry into the universe of the News Cycle came with the notorious Nick Berg decapitation video. This video had a number of strange anomalies in it, and I have suspected for quite a while that it was fake. My favorite alternate explanation was that the video was actually shot by US personnel inside Abu Ghraib prison (aside from the "Lawn Chair from Hell" connection) to distract attention from the exploding torture scandal.

Too conspiratorial? Such a video could never be fake? Then why does the great Zarqawi appear to have Two Legs, not One? Try the WikiPedia Nick Berg conspiracy theories page for even more! This WikiPedia paragraph essentially sums up my point:

There are rumors that Zarqawi is dead because no sightings of him have been confirmed since 2001. In one report, the conservative British newspaper Daily Telegraph described as myth the claim that Zarqawi was the head of the "terrorist network" in Iraq. According to a U.S. military intelligence source, the Zarqawi myth resulted from faulty intelligence obtained by the payment of substantial sums of money to unreliable and dishonest sources. The faulty intelligence was accepted, however, because it suited US government political goals, according to an unnamed intelligence officer.[14] The Zarqawi myth has also been purported to be the product of U.S. war propaganda designed to promote the image of a demonic enemy figure to help justify continued U.S. military operations in Iraq[15], perhaps with the tacit support of terrorist elements wishing to use him as a propaganda tool (a sort of Al-Qaeda Ronald McDonald).

I'm just going to wrap this up with a chunk from iconoclastic researcher Michel Chossudovsky, who wrote "Who is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi?" at the Centre for Research on Globalisation:

The US intelligence apparatus has created its own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program "to go after" these terrorist organizations. Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be "genuine". The objective is to present the terror groups as "enemies of America."
The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America's war agenda. The "war on terrorism" requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on terrorism is presented as a "Just War", which is to be fought on moral grounds "to redress a wrong suffered." The Just War theory defines "good" and "evil." It concretely portrays and personifies the terrorist leaders as "evil individuals". .....

To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat. The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an "advertising" campaign, "it gives a face to terror." The "war on terrorism" rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports.

.....Al Zarqawi is often described as an "Osama associate", the bogyman, allegedly responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in several countries. In other reports, often emanating from the same sources, it is stated that he has no links to Al Qaeda and operates quite independently. He is often presented as an individual who is challenging the leadership of bin Laden. His name crops up on numerous occasions in press reports and official statements. Since early 2004, he is in the news almost on a daily basis.

Osama belongs to the powerful bin Laden family, which historically had business ties to the Bushes and prominent members of the Texas oil establishment. Bin Laden was recruited by the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan war and fought as a Mujahideen. In other words, there is a longstanding documented history of bin Laden-CIA and bin Laden-Bush family links, which are an obvious source of embarrassment to the US government.

In contrast to bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi has no family history. He comes from an impoverished Palestinian family in Jordan. His parents are dead. He emerges out of the blue. He is described by CNN as "a lone wolf" who is said to act quite independently of the Al Qaeda network. Yet surprisingly, this lone wolf is present in several countries, in Iraq, which is now his base, but also in Western Europe. He is also suspected of preparing a terrorist attack on American soil.
.....In Iraq, he is said to be determined to "ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites". But is that not precisely what US intelligence is aiming at ( "divide and rule") as confirmed by several analysts of the US led war? Pitting one group against the other with a view to weakening the resistance movement. (See Michel Collon [1], See also [2] )
......What is the role of this new mastermind in the Pentagon's disinformation campaign, in which CNN seems to be playing a central role? In previous propaganda ploys, the CIA hired PR firms to organize core disinformation campaigns, including the Rendon Group. The latter worked closely with its British partner Hill and Knowlton, which was responsible for the 1990 Kuwaiti incubator media scam, where Kuwaiti babies were allegedly removed from incubators in a totally fabricated news story, which was then used to get Congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf War.
What is the pattern?
Almost immediately in the wake of a terrorist event or warning, CNN announces (in substance): we think this mysterious individual Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is behind it, invariably without supporting evidence and prior to the conduct of an investigation by the relevant police and intelligence authorities.
In some cases, upon the immediate occurrence of the terrorist event, there is an initial report which mentions Al-Zarqawi as the possible mastermind. The report will often say (in substance): yes we think he did it, but it is not yet confirmed and there is some doubt on the identity of those behind the attack. One or two days later, CNN may come up with a definitive statement, quoting official police, military and/or intelligence sources.
Often the CNN report is based on information published on an Islamic website or a mysterious Video or Audio tape. The authenticity of the website and/or the tapes is not the object of discussion or detailed investigation.
Bear in mind that the news reports never mention that Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA and that Al Zarqawi had been recruited to fight in the Soviet-Afghan war (This is in fact confirmed by Sec. Colin Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003) (see details below). Both Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi are creations of the US intelligence apparatus. The recruitment of foreign fighters was under the auspices of the CIA.
.......
Colin Powell's Address to the UN Security Council
In the months leading up to the war on Iraq, Al Zarqawi's name reemerges, this time almost on daily basis, with reports focusing on his sinister relationship to Saddam Hussein. A major turning point in the propaganda campaign occurs on February 5, 2003. Al-Zarqawi was in the spotlight following Colin Powell's flopped WMD report to the UN Security Council. Powell's speech presented "documentation" on the ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, while focusing on the central role of Al-Zarqawi: (emphasis added):
Our concern is not just about these illicit weapons; it's the way that these illicit weapons can be connected to terrorists and terrorist organizations...
But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.
Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, fought in the Afghan War more than a decade ago. Returning to Afghanistan in 2000, he oversaw a terrorist training camp. One of his specialties and one of the specialties of this camp is poisons.
When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and this camp is located in Northeastern Iraq. You see a picture of this camp. Graphic, above. [there were no WMDS at this camp according to ABC report, see below]
The network is teaching its operative how to produce ricin and other poisons.... Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq, but Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000, this agent offered Al Qaeda safe haven in the region. After we swept Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, some of its members accepted this safe haven. They remain there today.
......
The Nicholas Berg Video
Barely a couple of weeks later (11 May 2004), Al Zarqawi is reported as being the mastermind behind the execution of Nicholas Berg on May 11, 2004. Again perfect timing! The report coincided with calls by US Senators for Defense Sec Donald Rumsfeld to resign over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It occurs a few days after President Bush's "apology" for the Abu Ghraib prison "abuses" on May 6. The Nicholas Berg video served to create "a useful wave of indignation" which served to distract and soften up public opinion, following the release of the pictures of torture of Iraqi prisoners. (See the intelligence assumptions underlying Operation Northwoods, a secret Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to kill civilians in the Cuban community in Florida, and blame it on Fidel Castro. (More: [3]))
..........
Extending the War on Terrorism
Are "we winning or losing" the war on terrorism. These statements are used to justify enhanced military operations against this illusive individual, who is confronting US military might, all over the World. Al Zarqawi is used profusely in Bush's press conferences and speeches in an obvious public relations ploy.
You know, I hate to predict violence, but I just understand the nature of the killers. This guy, Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associate -- who was in Baghdad, by the way, prior to the removal of Saddam Hussein -- is still at large in Iraq. And as you might remember, part of his operational plan was to sow violence and discord amongst the various groups in Iraq by cold-blooded killing. And we need to help find Zarqawi so that the people of Iraq can have a more bright -- bright future. (Press Conference, 1 June 2004, emphasis added)

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, but the Chase keeps it Interesting. Hedges:

We become the embodiment of light and goodness. We become the defenders of civilization, of all that is decent. We are more noble than others. We are braver than others. We are kinder and more compassionate than others -- that the enemy at our gate is perfidious, dark, somewhat inhuman. We turn them into two-dimensional figures. I think that's part of the process of linguistically dehumanizing them. And in wartime, we always turn the other into an object, and often, quite literally, in the form of a corpse.

Everyone loves a mugshot

I sent out the following email to a ton of people. Basically a status report on the situation:

******

For your identification pleasure...



Hey all, I trust everyone's had a nice summer. It was kind of a weird one for me. The legal case has still not been resolved and the police have still not released my photographs (yes, that's illegal). As you probably heard, I got arrested by the St. Paul/Mpls/Airport police in a peculiar incident of unwarranted Law Enforcement Aggression against Macalester's graduating Senior class on May 11. I can't really talk about the details (there is a story at www.themacweekly.com right now with the basics) but at least I was arrested photographing the situation, producing some kind of evidence rather than just a written report of what transpired.



One of our classmates (an international student) was savagely assaulted by Ramsey County jail personnel within the county jail - and another pepper sprayed in the back of the squad car. We also saw Ramsey County jailers spontaneously assault a helpless black man in the processing room. It was an experience I will never forget - the State does terrible things behind concrete walls and steel doors. We saw that especially if you are not a white citizen, you have *very* good reason to fear the Authorities.



It is very weird to have Conditional Release. Instead of Posting Bail, I still have to call this woman at Project Remand every week. In theory, I could be tossed in jail for jaywalking or speeding. We are having a Florence Hearing on September 27, which is a type of hearing with witnesses. If the judge finds that there was not Probable Cause to believe that we committed crimes, she can toss the case. Otherwise we have to try to wheedle out a plea bargain - some have been offered already.



Other than that, well, I am still productively employed with Computer Zone Consulting and Politics in Minnesota. At the end of August I moved back to Hudson with the parents for a while, giving me a well leveraged position in cheap cigarettes, fireworks and Sunday Booze. The likely plan is that I will move to an apartment in Minneapolis with Dan Schned by October 1, but that is not quite certain (Schned himself just got a job yesterday at the liquor store by the Hennepin freeway exit).



If anyone has family down South, I hope they are doing all right. This was some crazy shit we've seen over the last few weeks. I am thinking that maybe I should go down sometime - there would surely be a thousand stories to tell the world. My website is actually dependent right now on a corporate Data Center perched high in a New Orleans skyscraper. The company called DirectNIC (http://www.directnic.com ) is staffed by these strung-out people holed up in the skyscraper, running a diesel generator. If their computers go down, then the link between http://www.hongpong.com and its current IP address might stop working. Very strange. DirectNIC's website has a lot of stunning photos of the situation, even a live webcam perched above the depopulated city.



So my present contact info is

Dan Feidt

802 6th Street

Hudson, WI 54016



Cell: 651-338-7661

Family house: 715-386-5565 or TOLL FREE (yes!) 888-346-5565 .

email: dan.feidt@gmail.com

web: http://www.hongpong.com

AIM: hongpong2000



Much love to everyone - stay in touch. I hope everyone has a fine fall season at college or Real Life. I am often very flaky about staying in touch with people. It's nothing personal - I'd really like to hear from everyone! Take care!



Dan

A sudden burst of employment leaves Feidts well placed

A most unusual day. I went to the St. Paul City Hall/Ramsey County Courthouse, a building with incredible, Gotham-like style in the lobby. But our adventure with the Robed branch of government was on the 14th floor.

As most people reading this probably know, I was arrested along with a number of other Macalester students on the evening of my 22nd birthday, May 11, 2005, outside one of the cottages at Mac, in a weird and improbable incident with police from St. Paul, Minneapolis and the freakin airport. I was charged with Obstructing a Legal Process with Force, and my police report is an exciting work of fiction, although for entertainment the report of Mike Dannenburg's 'threatening' clipboard-wielding is a laugh Riot (in the 3rd degree).

I believe these reports are a matter of the public record, and down the line I'll probably post them here on the site.

I can't really get into main details of the incident & our current situation. So now we have three lawyers, and are trying to get the case dismissed. Today we arranged to have another hearing called a Florence hearing, with witnesses (some seniors, for us, and possibly cops, for the city), sometime in early September. Also the judge ordered the prosecution to produce the digital pictures I was taking as I was arrested a week before the hearing. I am eagerly looking forward to getting them back.

That was pretty much all that happened downtown today. After things wrapped up, Andrew from Computer Zone Consulting called me up, and it sounds like I have finally got some more web developing projects to do.

I went out to see the family in Hudson this afternoon, because my dad got the job he was after at Blue Cross Blue Shield of MN today. My sister Sasha just started at the Hudson Target store. My brother Johnny 'Cakes' is a counselor at YMCA Camp Warren right now, and my mom looks after a space at Abigail Page Antiques in downtown Hudson.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time that the entire Feidt family has been employed at once. Suddenly that horrible Abyss we call the Bush Economy seems a little further off.

So when I get back from this evening with the family I discover that Sarah Janecek of the ol' Politics in Minnesota gig has left me an exciting message that I've got some work to do. In one day I shift from itinerant Selby dweller to dual employment, and my dad is set with a salary again (and a bit of a raise). It has been a most excellent day, and I must sign off to get some rest, because it seems like things may gear up Real Well tomorrow.

New HongPong version coming together

Hey, check it out, it's happening:

http://wp.hongpong.com

The WP stands for WordPress. it will move out to the regular www Real Soon Now. It has a lot of sweet tag features & other bells & whistles. Much better than MovableType, and I will have a more open way for everyone to get logins....

Also, site traffic is up sharply for July, and I am trying out a new program to measure hits. Should be sweet... I am averaging about 1000 hits a day, of which about 40% seem to be from the AskJeeves bot, and another 20% are pure spam attempts. So maybe around 300 real people a day? This new stat program should help me figure it out.

Also for some reason, muddled Macedonian characters have become my top Google search this month. Don't know why.

More later.

P.S. Tuesday morning is the long awaited appearance at the County Courthouse regarding the infamous Macalester Seniors vs St. Paul/Minneapolis/Airport Police May 11 incident. I could be a totally free man just hours from now!! Or not.

And I still haven't gotten my pictures from the police/DA/powers that be.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, well I can't blather about it on the Internet. If it's all over tomorrow, then I'll talk)

System halt approaches

It is nearly time to relocate into 1630 Selby. Kennedy is gone for the week, visiting family, and Alison has already moved out, so it is eerily quiet at both ends. My stuff is more than half-packed up. I bid an ambivalent farewell to dowdy plaid shirts that stuck with me far longer than they should have, and threw away old notes and bits of paper, signifying elements of the trail over the last four years.

The server may go down for a while here, and may take some time to come back. Hopefully quickly.

Many objects found in the room, a mapbook of Paris, cards and CDs, photos from the war protests and London. The Hongpong.com Gentoo Linux server, a Pentium 4 Dell Dimension that has performed admirably since I got it from Dan Schned's brother Alex last summer, has faced the challenge of websurfers from the CIA and thousands of virus attacks with great stamina and more importantly, almost unshakeable stability. The server will go down after 42 days in operation. Not bad, but not as good as its all-time record of 111 days.

The electrical problems in my room (bet you didn't know the Uninterruptible Power Supply was grounded by a wire I installed) never blew up the computers, and the dust from all the shit in here didn't quite kill me.

The room was sort of an overgrown projection of my personality, hodgepodge with sprinklings of conspiracy, David's crazy art, wires and components, Rhymesayers stickers, burnt matches, post-its and printouts, critical theory readings and Poli Sci books scooped from the free table, a bookcase topped by Marx, half the Illuminatus trilogy, scribblings and bizarre charts taped to the walls. Many a long night hunched over the computer, following hyperlinks into arcane trivia until three or four in the morning. I tried real hard to "Get it" even though all too often I felt totally disconnected, hostile to the America outside.

Those days are over now... there were fun times, strange times. Someone once claimed that the center of the universe passed through the corner where the TV used to be. For some reason, I tended to believe it.

A day in Court

It has been a strange week. I want to thank everyone who sent in statements about the events on 11 May, which hopefully will help us make the truth known so that these charges are dropped.

Audun's hearing is later today with Judge Mott, although I'm not sure what time. It is at the St. Paul Courthouse at 15 West Kellogg Blvd.

The whole Mac community has been very supportive of us and we appreciate it. Now if only this terrible incident would just go away...

Uhm, in other news I am moving to 1630 Selby Ave. until the end of August. My roommate will be the one and only Colin Kennedy. Sounds like it will be fun!

AIPAC, Uzbekistan and other ordinary people

Stayed up late watching WarGames. WOPR always manages to figure out the Nuclear Codes, and somehow that Matthew Broderick convinces it to transcend its boundaries and comprehend the futility of nuclear war. If only things went so well in Washington today... The Experts are Really Confused about what's going on.

Our Macalester news story in the Pioneer Press. Not 100% accurate. Can't say more.

The WaPo finally tackles the British Intelligence "fixed around the policy" story which hey, Hongpong (and a zillion other sites) brought you sooner than the Mass Media. George Galloway hates on our favorite Norm Coleman.

The elections in Iraq maybe made it worse. For your shot of fatalism consider this argument: let the Shiite death squads run amok. Why not? It makes about as much sense as anything else... Keep readin Juan Cole. Sunnis hint at peace terms.

The Bolton thing really bit them in the ass. No endorsement. Voinovich's passionate statement against Bolton. Crazy brave. Brownstein on how it is playing out inside the GOP. Steve Clemons is a key guy against all this, he wrote a piece and runs the TheWashingtonNote.com, worth watching:

Whereas much of the support for Bolton has had the veneer of being about United Nations reform, what Bolton proponents really want is a ferocious show-down with Iran and North Korea through the United Nations -- not because the U.N. is a good venue for such a battle but because the weaknesses of the U.N. and the problem of getting Security Council unity behind resolutions may allow Bolton to kick apart the institution.

Another news bit.

Newsweek apologizes for the Koran toilet paper thing that set off fatal riots.

Worth looking at this major Agonist post about Franklin and the AIPAC case.

Where is the corporate cash going to paper over global warming?

Something crazy is happening around the Ferghana Valley (PDF) in Central Asia. One thought on it. Good background reading.

The Bush-Bolton Plan to Bomb Bushehr [Iran] by Jude Wanniski

A service I haven't seen before, the NY Times Link Generator for your blogging needs.

I am suddenly getting German spam to news links I can't read. Why did they send me this?

No comment

Well things have taken an unexpected turn. Can't really say anything about the situation, I'll see everyone at graduation tomorrow.

Nice films

"There is no disputing that [timeattackers] are cheating at games to make their videos. This is a fact, and trying to argue against this point is futile and only demonstrates stubbornness and self delusion." -sdkess

Just got back from a screening of student films on campus. All in all quite entertaining, though they should throw that fucking DVD player in the garbage--it snagged on several films. Bassam Jarbawi's "Frequency," a montage of West Bank life with excellent music, and Jesse Mortenson's "Timeattack" were my favorites. By the way here are Jesse's links to the Timeattack websites:
http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/
http://home.comcast.net/~arcthelad/

On Tuesday I am on my way to Florida somewhere around here to get a little sun and spend a few days with the family. This is the first time I've gone somewhere warm with them during the winter in three years, so I just gotta do it. Then, during Macalester's spring break, I will be out in Colorado with some folks for about 6 days. Warm sun and fresh mountain air. A balanced vacation!

I enjoyed this advice from SlackerManager.com about various tactics to get people to go away and stop bothering you.

I have a bunch of various interesting links sitting around and as usual no time to form it together. If I'm going to tie up my loose ends tomorrow and get ready to go, probably won't have time. Or maybe I will...

Radio show, 30 minutes

Hey all,
I have a radio show in twenty minutes. I have a big story in the Mac Weekly today about How to Interview the Minnesota Legislature.

Listen to the radio show online. Special guest today: DJAngryNihilistRoommate and The Bobs! Studio request line 651 696 6312. Hell ya

To the sound of ballots dropping

The WMCN benefit at the 400 Bar tonight was excellent, although I only got there in time to see Short Order. Mitch sported sunglasses... I'm real tired now, but I watched the overnight cable broadcasts regarding Iraq, which sounded better than I might have expected. Massive violence over the past 4 hours, almost a dozen suicide bombs, yet the people are apparently turning out in many places. I don't know what it will sound like by the time I wake up in the morning. Of course, the real fireworks might come when they try to move the ballots. Who knows...

For all this lying and violence, well at least they got to have some polls. Some came from Bulgaria to Turkey to vote, according to CNN.

The highlight of the broadcasts was at about 1:59 central time. Two Iraqi dudes were telling FOX News about coming from Utah to vote in California, and they started to describe how another Iraqi at the polling station was wearing black because their relative got killed working in the Iraqi National Guard, and then the anchor suddenly cut them off. Time for the 2 AM commercial break!!!

What product so immediately needed to be offered to us? A collection of cowboy classics. John Wayne. Buy it now and git double the episodes, only nanntenn nannty fiiive plus shippin' and handlin'.

Norm Rosenberg taught us about the John Wayne movie Red River. Wayne rides into the west, gits some land, shoots the representative of the land's owner, and connects the cattle generated to the American economy, represented by a railway. He didn't have time to hear the end of any damn stories, either.

Ironically, there was only one polling station open in the western United States, and we'll see how many stations in western Iraq make it through the day.

Ongoing news coverage:
Al Jazeera - although they got officially kicked out
Agonist.org - online news collectors. top notch folks.
The early report from Dexter Filkins of the Times.
Something will turn up on Metafilter.

My regards to anyone who tries to brave the situation, and my sympathy for those that already know its a slanted game. Hang on folks, this is the part where 2 + 2 just gotta equal 5.

PoliticsMN: The list of state legislators so far

Well, I have been going at this for a couple weeks now, and school officially starts today. The big concentration of interviews is mostly over with, but they've piled up to profile quickly. This entry is intended to as a way to console myself that I've already gotten a large chunk done, because by God it doesn't yet feel that way.

So here's the list of Minnesota legislators I've interviewed, and profiles I've written:
Interviewed but haven't written profiles:
Senators:

• Satveer Chaudhary (DFL-50)
• Chris Gerlach (R-37)
• Pat Pariseau (R-36)
• David Hann (R-42)

Representatives:

• Phyllis Kahn (DFL-59B) (that was an especially interesting one, yes)
• Paul Thissen (DFL-63A)
• Mary Ellen Otremba (DFL-11B)
• Connie Ruth (R-26A)
• Karen Clark (DFL-61A)
• Loren Solberg (DFL-3B)
• Mark Olson (R-16B)
• Mindy Greiling (DFL-54A)
• Bud Heidgerken (R-13A)
• Jim Davnie (DFL-62A)
• Dan Severson (R-14A)

Profiles completed:
Senators:

• Yvonne Prettner Solon (DFL-7)
• Betsy Wergin (R-16)
• Linda Scheid (DFL-46)
• Gary Kubly (DFL-20)

Representatives:

• Dean Urdahl (R-16B)
• Greg Blaine (R-12B)
• Gene Pelowski (DFL-31A)
• Ann Lenczewksi (DFL-40B) (pronounced Len-CHESS-key)
• Joe Atkins (DFL-39B)
• Michael Paymar (DFL-64B)
• Laura Brod (R-25A)
• Paul Marquart (DFL-9B)
• Bruce Anderson (R-19A)
• Morrie Lanning (R-9A) (22-year mayor of Moorhead)
• Joe Hoppe (R-34B)
• Randy Demmer (R-29A)
• Michael Beard (R-35A) (Christian publisher who got us drinks until 2 A.M.)
• Duke Powell (R-40A)
• Chris DeLaForest (R-49A)
• Aaron Peterson (DFL-20A)
• Dean Simpson (R-10B)
• Doug Magnus (R-22A)
• Denny McNamara (R-57B)
• Lyle Koenen (DFL-20B)

Ugh, unfortunately I'm not quite on top of writing these damn things. But I'm getting there...

Starting Monday morning at 10, it's time for Senators Mee Moua (DFL-67) and Ellen Anderson (DFL-66), Reps. Michael Nelson (R-46A), Ruth Johnson (DFL-23) and Fran Bradley (R-29B).

I started a Wiki page for PoliticsInMinnesota info.

Hurray for final semester at Macalester! Yahoooo! I'm going to bed. My wrists are tired as hell from typing... Hah, it seems like I might have found the fix for the server's date sliding problem, finally. Or not. Time will tell.

All in one year

It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.

It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.

So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.

So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.

This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.

January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.

My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.

But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.

Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...

Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).

The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.

After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....

So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.

After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.

I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.

School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.

I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.

And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.

I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?

To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.

The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...

So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.

The only version of my desertion that I could ever subscribe to

Election day is tomorrow. (Ok, it's actually today and I changed the time of the post a couple hours back for dramatic effect. Yay.)

On what will hopefully be the last day of this strange government’s political domination of our country, I thought that I should share something about the last four years. Where to begin… where to begin…

I wonder how much of this time has been wasted and whether the energy we spent in resisting served no purpose.

Then I think back to the times that we came together to declare with one voice that the war was wrong, the policies were wrong and the leaders were mad. Even in those dark hours, those symbolic gestures in the street assured me that there was some kind of link between people that even Bush couldn’t crush.

All the way back to the fall of high school’s senior year (2001), on that distant planet we once lived on, I felt that the good times couldn’t last. I thought the economy was cruising on a bubble. I thought that things would make less sense before they made more.

That bizarre election four years minus one day ago launched the country into the sea of uncertainty. Little did we know that the political strategy of this president was to burn away the basis of facts themselves, and substitute spin for reality.

After looking at Macalester College in the Clinton days, I found coming here in the calm, almost flippant season before 9/11. Somewhere I still have that summer’s Time magazine all about shark attacks.

We had ten glorious, blazing days at Macalester, partying on Turck Three, Turck Two, up and down Doty and Dupre. The social universe had no barriers. It was just as well that I didn’t yet have the computer my parents had ordered for school.

One Tuesday morning, I hadn’t yet done my work for Griffin’s film analysis class that afternoon. My crappy old clock radio clicked on, disjointed ramblings about some crash on MPR. Hit the snooze button. The second time I listened for a while, buildings on fire. Went to the bathroom and a floormate told me something crazy was going on.

We went into my room and fiddled around with Adam’s shitty old TV. Then the fuzzy image came up: the towers burning in a haze of static. Campus ground to a halt, everyone stopped to watch, agape.

In the days that followed, I looked again and again at the American flag outside the chapel. Anything was possible now. In a way that was a sort of freedom, the idea that from such a chasm something better might be fashioned. But I also feared that they would take this disaster and run away with it.

At least we would have the chance to start afresh in college, at least this epoch would let us cleanly break from the old days.

Unexpectedly, something weird happened to our class, and I think our class alone. The famed Macalester bubble hardened into a Macalester shell through the rest of that semester. We reoriented towards our friends and our studies. Generally, we rarely got far off campus. I think that somewhere among those crucial weeks, when the country wept and the flags flew out of stores, we missed some indoctrination session that everyone else got. We didn’t get saturated by the media—we barely saw cable. We were not formed into believers.

I still remember someone telling me that they could hardly believe that these flags were all over the place. It felt alien—more American than America.

Then came those slogans. “United We Stand” was the best because it was consonant with “United States.” Later the war brought “Support Our Troops.” One night in Mickey’s Diner with some of my Indian friends, I realized that among this group, the slogans became meaningless. If you were among foreigners, the ‘We’ and ‘Our’ become false, and suddenly you escaped from the mental box.

What, then, to say about the war? What to say about where God has gotten placed these last few years? There’s really nowhere to begin but with my persistent atheist beliefs. For me, the most threatening, doom-laden quality of this government has been the way its supporters have attached an eschatological, apocalyptic meaning to September 11. They believe (or purport to believe) that September 11 was not a ‘mundane’ event. Instead, the disaster is elevated to a spiritual or eschatological plane, as it becomes an element of God’s plan for the world. The crashes are not just plane crashes, they are a projection of supernaturally pure moral evil into reality, and a revelatory moment for the believers.

Such heretical thinking has a great political advantage. Over fall break, I saw a few minutes of a Congressional campaign debate from gerrymandered Texas that when the Republican related the dangerous idea. He said that God had allowed this disaster to happen, but God’s grace was revealed in the American reaction to it. The disaster opened a path of redemption, and Bush, as God’s agent, had moved down this path. The War on Terror became spiritually licensed.

No, I say to these people, No a million times. God was not involved. God does not exist, and everyone who says that there was Grace in what followed is fabricating a ghastly deity of convenient vengeance. The Republicans have exploited this unholy narrative and its profoundly evil nature should alarm any student of politics or history. Aggressive nationalists have run this kind of line throughout human civilization, because people fear the uncertainty of not placing faith in the story.

A professor of journalism, David Domke, visited my rhetoric of campaigns and elections class this fall to talk about Bush’s religiously colored language, as part of a tour for his fascinating new book, “God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror” and the Echoing Press.”
He describes how the Bush administration fabricated the “good vs. evil” and “security vs. peril” binaries, and applied them to make it seem as if Bush was carrying out God’s will.

Cynical atheistic political theorists like Leo Strauss have said that a political leadership’s appeal to God serves the purpose of lending cohesion to the society, and claiming to speak on behalf of the Invisible One effectively silences the doubters. Some leaders, like Bush, claim to act as prophetic agents or portals of insight into God. These are the dangerous ones; once followers buy into this, there is no stopping them.

Over the course of this government, I’ll say that the most profoundly frightening and disturbing moment of the whole adventure came during my attendance at a rally supporting the war in its first days, on March 22, 2003, where I took pictures.

There, our governor, Tim Pawlenty, uttered something I knew to be racist and totally false. I heard the grief of 9/11 cynically redirected to support the war, an abuse of power that literally made me shake. Pawlenty was speaking on the steps of the state Capitol building. He said that we were going to strike back at those who struck us on 9/11. I instantly knew this to be a lie, a horrible lie. The crowd cheered, and I shuddered.

Early in 2002, I started looking around at the points of conflict between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Without too much trouble, I found the Intifada. Here was a concrete case of Muslims getting crushed by outsiders with military aid from the United States. If we were to patch this War on Terror up, it would have to involve peace in the West Bank and Gaza. There was no other way.

My lifelong fascination with maps took a turn for the surreal when I first looked at the complex diagrams of settlements and Israeli roads on the West Bank. What the hell was this program? Why are these things expanding? Did someone say that God authorized this? Was there some kind of moral fiction being generated to sustain the process? And what does democracy become in a country that generates racially exclusive colonial suburbs?

In the fall of my sophomore year, October 2002, two men from this place came to Macalester. (I wrote an editorial about it a couple weeks before they came) I co-wrote the news story about their visit here, but of course someone failed to put that issue of the Weekly (Vol. 5, Issue 4) online.

I talked briefly with Ami Ayalon, Sari Nusseibeh and George Mitchell. Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s FBI-like security forces, the Shin Bet, and Nusseibeh, the then-president of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, came to the U.S. to talk about their sensible peace plan, which entailed removing virtually all the settlements, sharing Jerusalem and bringing the Palestinian refugees into the territories, not Israel. They hoped to promote the plan by getting ordinary folks on both sides to sign their statement.

For me, this encounter forever destroyed the idea that to be ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘a friend of Israel’ means supporting the self-destructive policies of the Likud. Ami Ayalon is as much of a hard-nosed Israeli security expert as you will ever find. He could have probably killed me with his ballpoint pen in a dozen different ways. Yet this tough man was acutely afraid of the settlers and the threat they posed to Israel’s stability. His years at the Shin Bet actually were among the safest and most hopeful that the people of that poor, beleaguered country ever had. It was Ayalon’s Shin Bet that cooperated with the Oslo Accord’s new Palestinian security services to prevent the Islamic fundamentalists from bombing and shooting Israelis. There were virtually no suicide bombings under Ayalon’s watch, because he determined how to coordinate Israel with willing Palestinian security forces. I learned it could be done again, because it had been done before. If only the constant process of the settlers’ territorial aggression—which increased dramatically during Ayalon’s tenure—had been checked, things might not have spun out of control.

At this same time, we began to hear rhetoric of plans to invade Iraq. I dismissed these rumors for a while, believing that the U.S. would have to intervene with Israel before breaking out into Iraq. I saw a couple patterns emerge as the deed went down. The first was the source of stories about weapons of mass destruction and lurid tales of terror training within Iraq. These stories tended to depend on the statements of defectors, who in fact turned out to be liars pimped out by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hear of the really threatening yarns from more objective sources.

The other key pattern was a sense that the government itself was divided about the war, because, as we found out later, there was a dramatic factional battle, roughly between the neoconservatives in Cheney’s office and the top of the Pentagon, versus the State Department, CIA, and some of the uniformed military staff.

Reading one of my weirder “news” sources, I found references to a 1996 policy document called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” This doc, widely available on the Internet, prompted me to rethink what exactly these neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith were gunning for. I have rambled extensively about the significance of the Clean Break, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my days. Near the beginning of the war in Iraq, I posted my analysis of it on Everything2.com. As the war started during spring break, I remember reading one of the key passages to my family:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

So before I get into the wretched nature of the war, I should explain a politically hazardous, yet profoundly important idea about our present situation. At this moment, we are deeply wrapped within something I call the ‘Israeli-American Hegemony,’ (a.k.a. ‘the Republican-Likud merger’) a crucial, misunderstood component of the ‘War on Terror’ campaign. In some ways this hegemony is a continuation of the old ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ we’ve heard so much about, but it is in fact a new, evolving political form that both the Bush and Sharon administrations have done their utmost to market to their countries.

This hegemony signifies that the national identities of Israel and the United States should merge together, on the basis of perceived political, moral, military and religious congruities between the countries. There is a specific moral calculus fabricated into the hegemony: namely, that Israel and the United States exist on a moral plane apart from the rest of the world, and their decisions are effectively guided by God’s higher moral purpose.

The Clean Break document states that Israel needs to match America’s language. In an institutional fashion, this is what hegemony and integration really means: the Pentagon starts to think and function like the IDF and the American messianic Christians move closer to the messianic Jewish groups in the West Bank.

The Clean Break document said that

Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values…
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.

To synchronize the language between our governments is precisely the objective.

Yet the success of this hegemon is based on insane, shaky foundations. For one thing, it defies a fundamental premise of international politics: different states have different interests. I’m sorry, but I do not have the same policy interests as a handful of messianic settlers on a West Bank hilltop, and my government should reflect that. The whole enterprise of the Israeli occupation itself is horrible: only our own Christian fundamentalists who see the construction of settlements as a means to fulfill the return of Jesus and bring about the apocalypse favor this undertaking.

This hegemony idea also is rather racist: it suggests that the Israelis themselves are incapable of charting their own destiny. Instead, they are expected to play out the end-of-the-world script that Christian fundamentalists believe they ought to play.

I’ve found that this hegemon has been quite easy to spot lately. We can pick apart political discourse just from the last few weeks of the campaign. We saw it when Sharon and Bush agreed that “Israeli population centers” in the West Bank could be annexed, as if Bush could somehow speak on behalf of the Palestinians.

Thomas Friedman says that Iraqis refer to American troops as “Jews,” while Arab TV networks show split-screens of Israeli aggression in the territories and American lunacy in Iraq. This, Friedman says, is harmful because it merges these identities into a larger complex, but not because it’s an objective fact of the current situation. As he says, now it is hard to know where American policy ends and Sharon’s begins.

Osama Bin Laden’s latest video references the crimes he claims were committed by this same ‘alliance,’ a charge probably not literally true (I doubt he cared that much in 1982) but with much more resonance after the U.S. has tried to kill vast numbers of Iraqis over this year.

I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.

But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.

The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.

And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.

In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.

And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.

Right-wing Israeli hawks crow about how the U.S. is finally absorbing the lesson it learned in Lebanon from the Marine barracks bombing. Our future wars, they say, will more resemble Israel’s campaigns in the West Bank and Lebanon. Hence, we need the Israeli operational methods to succeed (ignoring the fact that the Israeli ventures have been bloody, pointless failures). Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:

…there is no doubt that the American military's view of Israel's strategic posture today bears little resemblance to its perception of Israel's strategic posture 21 years ago. Particularly since September 11, and as the situation in Iraq continues to evolve and mutate, the US military has increasingly come to see Israel's war fighting experience both against the Palestinians and in Lebanon from 1982-2000 as a composite of how America's wars will look in the future. Everything from Israel's need to have armed guards at the entrances to shopping malls and cafes to our tactics for land-air-sea combat operations and intelligence-gathering techniques informs the US military as its commanders prepare for battles of the present and the future.

Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.

Hawks also constantly assert that Hezbollah is an enemy of the United States, and its television station, Al Manar, even more so.

I argued in a paper this spring that as the U.S. military depends more and more on private corporations for doctrine, training and logistics, privatized military firms are an ideal transmission belt to strengthen this hegemon, as ‘Israeli security experts’ come in to provide the goods on how to manage these Arabs. In the other direction, the U.S. provides military hardware like Apache helicopters to Israel. If you think that national identity has nothing to do with helicopters, tell me if the images of Apaches blazing missiles that the Arabs constantly see .

Consider that al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia killed an American working on Apache helicopters there. Al-Qaeda is zeroed in on attacking highly visible elements of the hegemon like the Apache.

Perhaps, too, the same informational tools that the Israelis use to target individual ‘terrorists’ are being implemented throughout the U.S. military. In particular, CACI International has been lauded by Israel as providing informational tools to fight the war on terror, and CACI interrogators in Iraq construct matrices that tell the military which Iraqis to go after. What if these very tools are part of the political problem that has obliterated all goodwill between the U.S. and the Iraqis? What if the tools have gotten out of control, instructing the military to lock up the wrong Iraqis in places like Abu Ghraib indefinitely? For that matter, what about the rumors of Israeli interrogators within Abu Ghraib?

Seymour Hersh has reported that one book in particular, “The Arab Mind,” has been instrumental in shaping how the neocons developed their strategies in Iraq. “The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour'. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation'."

Now, Iraq. More than a thousand U.S. soldiers dead, many thousands more wounded and crippled. The war has reached out and killed folks in harmless backwater places like Ellsworth, Wisconsin. And now we hear estimates that one hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed by the war and civil disorder.

There has always been something strange and unreal about the invasion and the way our occupation policies have been carried out. There’s been a certain feel or metaphor to their approach that I would describe as the ‘Babylon complex.’

The Babylon complex was a result of the asphyxiated, closed decisionmaking process in the Pentagon, combined with the foolish, racist assumptions of horrible people like Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The image of a Free Iraq that they painted in our heads was one of great power, good for us and a friend of Israel. The operation would finance itself through Iraq’s vast oil revenues, an globally unmatched mountain of wealth under the sand.

The vision of this wealth overwhelmed the planners of the war, really. They bet everything on subduing the Iraqis and implementing their economic-political shock therapy plan. The Bush administration believed that any serious acknowledgement of their horrible planning would harm their political leverage in the U.S., so they did not fire the incompetent people in the belief that somehow Good Faith could carry them through the situation.

The continuity of the operation trumped its stability. Providing the spin or appearance of stability precluded actually working for stability. As the great CPA spokesman Dan Senor (who entered Washington as an aide for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC) put it when talking about the al-Qaqaa munitions disaster:

“The facility was already nonsecure well before we had come to the country to begin stability operations.”

(Image composited from the 'Metropolis')

How suitable, then, that in the very site of historical Babylon itself was the stage for this flight of fancy. It reminds me of the 1925 Fritz Lang classic, “Metropolis,” and the story of Babel contained therein.

Maria: Today I will tell you the story of the Tower of Babel.
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies—
and on it we will inscribe: ‘Great is the world and its Creator. And great is Man.’
Those who had conceived the idea of this tower could not build it themselves, so they hired thousands of others to build it for them.
But these toilers knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned the tower.
While those who had conceived the tower did not concern themselves with the workers who built it.
The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many.
[Title:] BABEL
[A crowd rushes the tower, and destroys it.]
Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator.
It is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them.
Worker: But where is our mediator, Maria?
Maria: Be patient, he will surely come.
Worker: We will wait, but not for long.

So now the hands are fighting the planners, surprise surprise. They are only fighting for the greatest material prize of world history, and they’re just settling in to fight to the death.

The spooky feeling stepped up when I heard that the U.S. military was finding mountains of arms all over the country, but lacked the manpower to capture and secure them. All these arms—of all the things you need to capture and secure in an occupied country, for the sake of ordinary folks and your own soldiers, you have to secure the arms. And they didn’t. Al Qaqaa is only the latest example.

The disastrous planning has quickly undermined our moral stature in Iraq, as small tactical victories are actually strategic failures. We play word games about terrorism then airstrike the hell out of Sunni city after Sunni city. As the conservative William Lind put it:

The point here is not merely that in using terrorism ourselves, we are doing something bad. The point is that, by using the word "terrorism" as a synonym for anything our enemies do, while defining anything we do as legitimate acts of war, we undermine ourselves at the moral level — which, again, is the decisive level in Fourth Generation war.

The incredibly astute Professor Juan Cole described how the Bush administration operates by representing, rather than reflecting reality.

The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by "representation" in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.

Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.

Ok, Dan, you think, that’s great but can you prove it? Can you prove anything? And when does this ridiculously long post end?

I’ll be done soon. It’s been four horrible years, for God’s sake! Fortunately, I have collected some useful evidence. Dr. Rashid Khalidi visited Macalester in the fall of 2003, and I managed to snag him for an interview for the Mac Weekly. This interview, for me, answered many of the key questions. Did Iraq have to go so wrong? Did the neocons fabricate intelligence data to justify the war? Is there a connection between Douglas Feith and the settlers? It’s all there…

DF: You said in your talk regarding Iraq that “there are much worse days to come.” What leads you to this?

RK: Several things. The first is that the Administration purposely had too few soldiers for the post-war, leading directly to a chaotic situation which resulted in the destruction of the organs of state. The occupation thereafter took a number of decisions which alienated the entirety of the armed forces, and the Baathist technocrats, without whom it would be almost impossible to run a modern state in Iraq….

DF: What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?

RK: Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.

There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi….

DF: A Frontline interview with Richard Perle was published with the documentary “Truth, War and Consequences.” He talked about the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war. Perle said the office was staffed by David Wurmser, another author of the Clean Break document. Perle says that the office “began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?

RK: I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found.

It was not just the Office of Special Plans, or whatever. There are a lot of institutions in Washington that were devoted to putting this view forward. Among them, other parts of the bureaucracy, and the vice president’s national security staff….

We now know this stuff, with a few exceptions, to be completely and utterly false, just manufactured disinformation designed to direct the United States in a certain direction. Whether the neo-cons knew this or not is another question, but I believe Chalabi’s people knew it. I would be surprised if some of them didn’t know it.

And now, the presidential campaign. Early on, I was all over the place, distrustful of the candidates. I felt that the ‘Washington candidates’ like Kerry were compromised by the war. I wanted someone to wake this slumbering country, and somehow Howard Dean succeeded brilliantly in getting attention and articulating opposition to the war. I went to Iowa to check out the process there. I wrote a story about going to the unofficial kickoff of the Iowa caucus race, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Outside the hall, Howard Dean shook my hand, but didn’t look me in the eye. Most of the candidates spoke there, and I found Dean’s readiness to holler “You have the power,” amping up his huge section of the crowd, to be somewhat distasteful if not outright demagoguery.

In Iowa, all the candidates met a friendly audience, because they all spoke to the better side of America, and they each went for one of Bush’s exposed quarters. Such a spectacle as this veered into heights of drama so that for those moments, these folks under hardship and war could let each other know they still had friends in Washington, and they were part of a project bigger than themselves.

My admiration for the Dean campaign became a confidence in a stable new coalition, but Dean’s theatrics fit poorly at key moments. My perceptions of Edwards and Kerry as trustworthy and experienced leaders was boosted by Peter’s and Andrew’s thoughtful support. The basic trust of our southern neighbors gave me hope in these bleak days that America isn’t totally in disarray. Their support of each other led me to believe that the majority of the country—which never voted for Bush, or anyone—might still be reached in the wilderness.

I shied away from thinking about the Democratic race after that, but of course the process heated up and Dean faded after the summer. John Kerry, the frontrunner, found himself hamstrung by his Iraq position, so how could he find a way out of the bind and discredit the Bush administration?

Finally, when Kerry came to Macalester and I helped cover it for the Weekly, I had the opportunity to ask him a question as he was shaking hands on the way out. I asked, “Senator Kerry, do you believe that the intelligence distortions on Iraq should be treated as a criminal matter akin to the Iran-Contra affair? Do you believe that the investigation should be a criminal matter?”

Kerry said to me, “I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done.”

A classically hedged answer from Kerry, which wasn’t a surprise. However, I would say it was the wrong answer. His campaign could have challenged the “flip-flopper on the war” idea by telling the American people how the administration fabricated the WMD and terror intelligence on Iraq, and tricked well-meaning legislators like Edwards and himself into supporting the war with it. But Kerry’s people never concretely made it a part of the campaign, although late in the game Kerry finally said that Bush had “played games with intelligence.” People love a spy thriller: Kerry should have laid out how Chalabi and the gang faked it. Bush and the whole administration would have been better discredited. A real pity, a pity. But you can’t say I didn’t try.

Ok, well this has become more a ramble on the usual political topics than a digestion of what the subjective experience of living under this government has been like. Looking back on it, I have some regrets. I have a serious problem with trusting people and even being willing to spend time with them. Most days it was just chickenshit reluctance, but sometimes my political obsessions and paranoia got the better of me, even before I found out that all these military and government guys were looking at my website.

With regards to running this website, it has been an interesting experience. It has brought the CIA and Department of Homeland Security straight into my bedroom, but its also showed me how profoundly interconnected the Internet makes us. How else, besides lunch at Macalester, can you run into so many random people from so many different countries?

I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been worth it. I know I didn’t do the most I could to challenge the war; I spent a lot of time in a muted, black and fearful moods. Not like the soft weight of clinical depression, this was a kind of burning flame I could see when I closed my eyes. I knew that the bastards were smashing the heritage of all human civilization when they invaded Iraq without protecting our first Artifacts.

As someone who refuses to believe in God, I have only the continuous stream of history to supply a foundation of meaning in our lives. That’s why I’ve found it so difficult to come to terms with the idea that these guys just didn’t give a damn. I am still terrified of the political forces they’ve unleashed.

One last thing that I haven't yet written about online: what it meant for me to visit the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I will say that it simply makes it easier to think about once the icons become fixed in your concrete reality, instead of the fluid, alternately fixated and amnesiac media sea that we float in. Once the place is tied down in your own experience, it is much easier to understand. Power became easier to understand from we saw later: a young guy reading the Bill of Rights in a park got arrested right in front of us.

(This is the third-to-last picture I took in New York, during the protests outside Bush's speech. Click for larger version)

I remember standing on the stoop outside Wallace a few days before spring break in 2003. They had just clipped the fences between Kuwait and Iraq. This was a time of sociological anomie, I said to Alison and Dan Schned. There are no social norms here. In a way, it was a kind of freedom, and we treated it as such. We are still stuck in that anomie, even when Kerry wins tomorrow, as I’ve guaranteed myself he will.

Fortunately, I still have some glimmering bits of optimism left. When the sun rises on November Third, it will be a whole new world. I feel that I’ve gotten through the worst times now, and maybe, just maybe, the four-year malaise will finally be crushed by the evidence that my people have not yet abandoned hope.

Lunch Beyond Good and Evil: Around a Table with Michael Ledeen

The International Roundtable at Macalester is one of the biggest annual events on campus. This year, (Sir) Ahmed Samatar of the International Studies department managed to corral three leading intellectuals into speaking: super-leftie Tariq Ali, historian of the British empire Niall Ferguson and mega-neoconservative Michael Ledeen. (Right now the Mac Weekly site is not showing my story that was published on Friday. I emailed the webmaster about it, so that should be cleared up.)

As a senior, I was invited to the Roundtable lunch. Things just went from there. The following was my editorial on what happened:

With the election scorching our brains, the future has seldom looked less certain. A small network of ideologues, analysts and bureaucratic adventurers known as neoconservatives have shaped our strange generation in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. As Washington reporter Josh Marshall put it, the war in Iraq will forever be known as the war that neocons agitated for, framed, planned (poorly), and finally carried out, by persuading a trusting American public with fake intelligence, over the resistance of the vast majority of the world. Thomas Friedman stated that this war could never have happened without a couple dozen in the capital leaning on the levers of power.

At this precipitous, binary moment in our nation’s history, either we are about to reach the High Noon of an eight-year Bush presidency, or we are tripping through its final days. If Bush is finished, the psychopathology of individuals like Michael Ledeen will be digested for decades. If the smirk-in-chief is just settling in, we’d better figure out these people’s motives, and quickly.

After Tariq Ali’s Friday morning session, where Ledeen perused a book for long stretches, the speakers, and some seniors and professors retreated to the Weyerhauser Boardroom. I asked Dhruva Jaishankar to save me a seat at some table. I built a croissant sandwich, and I suddenly discovered that Dhruva had landed at Ledeen’s table. He saved me the chair on Ledeen’s left. I thought, “What the hell? Let’s do it,” and sat down with the grim scholar of war.

How do I converse with a genuinely diabolical person, especially one about to speak before the whole campus? I thought, chewing my sandwich, can I just bitch at the man holding the American Enterprise Institute’s ‘Freedom Chair?’

Parsing my words, I asked him if the Middle East was a fundamentally inscrutable “wasteland of mirrors,” a phrase I erroneously thought he’d used. No, the Middle East was pretty easy to figure out, he said.

Ledeen has staked everything on the belief that the fundamentalist Iranian leadership will nuke Israel or the U.S. once they have the bomb. Thus, for him, their downfall is among the highest of priorities. He has fought within what he deemed Washington’s “chaos” of policymaking to go after Iran. But the neocons tend to get carried away with rhetoric for its own sake: witness how State Department Undersecretary John Bolton has threatened the sensitive North Koreans right before negotiations just for the hell of it. So I asked him, if the regime in Iran is highly unpopular, how can he be sure that they aren’t exaggerating their intentions, hoping to goad the United States into overreacting and threatening them, so that they can turn around and tell the Iranian opposition that they must unite to fight the external threat?

Ledeen, a Machiavellian to the core, said that this was much too convoluted for him. He said that he was a historian of the twentieth century who’d read a great deal of fascist rhetoric, and those people were very serious about killing the Jews. Likewise, he said that former President Rafsanjani stated he would nuke Jerusalem despite the losses from a counterattack, because it would benefit Islam to take out a huge proportion of the Jews while only a small proportion of Muslims would get killed in return.

I asked why the Iranians would bomb Jerusalem if it would kill so many Muslims. He said that the Iranians murderously hate Arabs and kill them all the time. In fact, he said, the Iranians are killing “hundreds” of Arabs in Iraq today, sending in money and munitions.

His scheme to free Iran was to supply the opposition with the tools to destabilize the regime, “but not a single bullet.” I have a hard time believing he could resist arming the Iranian opposition. In fact, many say that the Pentagon, administered by Ledeen’s allies, has courted a weird, cultish anti-regime Iranian guerilla group based in eastern Iraq called the Mujahideen al-Khalq. If Bush wins, it’s quite unlikely that the neo-cons will be able to resist using forces like these to harass Tehran, but we have no idea what sort of reaction this would provoke from the highly mobilized, nationalist Iranians.

Trying to avoid provoking more mobilization, I asked Ledeen what sorts of places he got his information. “Never watch television,” he told the students at the table. He’d also given up on The New York Times. He surprised us when he said that he really likes reading online blogs, in particular Iranian and Iraqi blogs. Iranian blogging has snowballed into a serious trend, providing a sizeable young population with the means to skirt government censorship. Ledeen said that once you’d been reading a source for a while, you can get a feeling for their perspective and veracity, something I agree with.

He kept muttering little statements, preparing himself for the dramatic speech to follow. In particular, at both the lunch and his speech, he referenced sliding over the “border between manic depression and genius,” while he later admitted that writing about Iran was his therapy.

More than anything else, this explains the neoconservative agenda in a way that has eluded me during this bizarre presidency. Ledeen’s power in Washington has shaped not just their unresolved debate over Iran. More importantly, his militant myopia has fed the government’s racist, irrational and self-destructive tendencies. Yet Ledeen admits he has an anarchic streak inherited from his Russian anarchist Uncle Izzy. He also admits to a Trotskyist belief in perpetual global revolution. He said that America’s government was a “chaos,” but a better, more productive chaos than others. America is a revolutionary power, he argues, that crushes ideas before it makes a new order. Strip out Trotsky’s stuff about proletarians, swap bourgeoise for ‘terror master,’ and you’ve got a recipe for everlasting wars.

After I got away from that table, my little moral universe was bent. I hadn’t confronted the man like I would have a year ago; I hadn’t hacked the bristly defenses raised so harshly in the talk that followed. I didn’t get to the bottom of their motives. Did I, of all people, make a good impression on a man who wants to crush everything I stand for? Was that the wrong thing to do?

"Fourth World War" comes to the Campus Center

I'm don't have the details about this, but it sounds like an amazing movie: "The Fourth World War" is a documentary out of the various movements against wars all over the world, or rather, the 'thousand civil wars' the trailer speaks of. Suheir Hammad is narrating, and she was really impressive when she spoke at Macalester last year.

The movie is touring the U.S., and playing at the Campus Center Sunday night at 7:30. It will be screened in Minneapolis later tomorrow night, at the Soap Factory at 10 PM (2nd St. SE and 5th Ave.).

Additionally, this is an example of how our Macalester internet setups aren't working. There is nothing about a MOVIE in the CAMPUS CENTER on Macalester's event calendar website. What is the point of having a site like that? If we started doing more dynamic things online at Mac, then such events could be better publicized, as I argued in a Mac Weekly editorial a couple weeks ago.

'The Corporation' also screened on campus recently, and I'm sad I missed that, although I saw it at Lagoon a while ago.

In the season

I had a piece in the Mac Weekly on Friday about the technological gap at school and getting some new stuff going on the Internet. People seem to like the idea. I'll post the link when the story becomes available.

The town hall debate went real well for Kerry, and I think he's building a good foundation here. This weekend Alison and I volunteered for Paul Gardner, who's running against Phil Krinkie in the north suburbs. I think it's going really well up there. We put out flyers across Lino Lakes today. The weather was really excellent.

There is a lot of hectic news about the need-blind admissions, and it's all gotten intense on campus. I don't want to even talk about it, save to say that this issue of the Weekly also spells out some of the stuff that has been going on. William Sentell '02, one of the alumni speaking out on the policy conflict, has a site needblind.com, also at http://ilovemacalester.blogs.com/.

Right now I don't want to take a swing at this. I hope you all understand. Trying to enjoy the weekend. Too much work on Sunday!

No hay palabras — ¡Qué lastima!

What can I say? It has been busy as hell lately. I have been shoehorning Spanish workbook pages and Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation' into my morning shifts at the computer lab in the library. Then there is all the Mac Weekly stuff, and those people would flay me alive to tick away on this site on Tues. or Weds. when there's so many glitches to be fixed in the paper. Even though I did last week.

I will move right along to the big event on campus. Ralph Nader came last Thursday, and gave a press conference in the Campus Center. Peter Gartrell asked him some questions, actually, although I'm not sure what Nader said. Shouldn't Peter get a recording device?? So anyhow, Nader then spoke at the Chapel for an admission of $5 for students, $10 for the general public. A bunch of Mac students protested outside and carried Kerry signs. My moral fiber felt weak after giving that man money.

Nader admitted during the talk that he had Republican lawyers, but kept harping on the Dems, demanding they step aside and let him slither onto state ballots.

So a couple hours later I had to meet my dad to get this textbook which had been left back in Wisconsin. We met at the Artist's Quarter in downtown St. Paul, where my dad's friend from the olden days, Lucia Newell, was singing jazz with her group. They have just released a CD and it's a damn fine one.

So there was another old friend of my dad's there, a cynical, middle-aged Republican, whom I told about seeing Nader. Nader's a great human being, he intoned. "He's appealing to your noblest instincts, Daniel," he said. And then came the kicker.

He told me he'd given Nader's campaign a good deal of money.

That, essentially, tells you everything you need to know about the Nader situation.

Senioritis??

Oh God, my senior year at Macalester starts in about 9 hours. What am I going to do??!!

No, actually everything is unfolding smoothly so far and I'm really excited about my classes. I got my books today and picked up a bunch of dusty old volumes that the Poli Sci department was giving away. I must develop an amazing bookshelf of dusty volumes!!

On Tuesday, Robert Putnam, the well-known author of "Bowling Alone" and an observer of political trends in the American public gave the convocation speech at Kagin. Essentially his point (and he asked us to summarize this way) was that after any disaster, such as 9/11, there is a positive spike in how people perceive the social connectivity of their society. That is, disasters bring people together. However, these spikes fade as events fade, and in most age groups the post-9/11 spike has faded.

Yet for some reason in our age band—late teens to mid-20s or so—the spike remains high. He drew a parallel to our grandparents' generation that experienced Pearl Harbor and went on to become extremely engaged in social life here, and their children, the boomers, really let things slide, and our generation was on course to slide even further.

And so now it is our generation's responsibility to generate new forms of social capital, translating to communities and new organizations, because for some reason we are still on that spike.

That was one hell of a convocation speech. After the event, I skipped the great picnic get-together and went to Taste of Thailand instead because I'm tired of Cafe Mac before having eaten there once!

Bulgarian Mac alum trying to raise money for school

There's Mac grad in Bulgaria, Issidor Iliev, who is looking to score some cash to deal with going to the Stern School of Management. He's got the website going:

I was recently accepted to Stern School of Management, New York University and the primary reason for this web site is to help raise funds for my education there. As an international student, I have limited access to funds in the U.S. and unfortunately Stern does not have arrangements with U.S. banks to fund the full cost of education at the school. Now, after years of hard work, I have the amazing chance of being able to study in this top management school, and it would be unfortunate not to attend just because of my birth place. How will you benefit in all this? How will the world benefit?

I trust there are people who believe in giving others a chance and in helping others overcome hindrances and better themselves. As a matter of fact, I am such a person – whenever I have had the means, I have helped non-profit organizations, either through volunteering or financially. The Wilder Foundation for Children, Magen David Adom, Macalester College, groups fighting bigotry, are among the organizations I have assisted. I would like to assure you as a potential donor, that contributing funds for an MBA will be one of your most constructive donations, a donation that will keep on giving. Receiving an MBA will increase my personal and professional opportunities, which in turn will help me achieve my philanthropic ideas. And any charitable and volunteer work I will perform during my life will indirectly be influenced by you – with a small contribution now, you will advance a lifetime of giving. How can you help? You can go to the donate/loan section and donate any amount of funds you find appropriate. Along with getting listed in the supporters section of the site anyone who donates more than $15 will receive an Issidor.com T-shirt. You can also loan me an amount.

So give the man a break, assist Bulgaria and all that!

It is genuinely funny how many Bulgarians we have around here this summer. And the other day I saw a professor wearing a Bulgaria T-shirt. Too bad I don't know any Bulgarian expressions.

Remind us

There's been a hella lotta news over the past couple days. However, Saturday is Springfest, and I fully intend to immerse myself in the music, because I haven't been keeping tabs on pop culture as well as I should be. I don't want to think about all the damn news for a little while. So let this summary suffice for Saturday; there's plenty of interesting things to look at, radical and more conservative.

Remind us why the war happened. This animation has some rather jarring imagery but nonetheless it's worth looking at. A tacky style or propaganda of the 21st century?

UN Iraq man Lakhdar Brahimi condemns Israel's policies, generating conflict with the Israelis and surely making the Pentagon a happy bunch of fellas, reports BBC.

The United Nations envoy to Iraq has sparked a row after describing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as "the big poison in the region". Lakhdar Brahimi told French radio there was a link between Israeli actions and the recent upsurge of violence in Iraq. He said that the handover of power in Iraq was being complicated by Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman has reportedly described the comments as "unacceptable".
....
Mr Brahimi said his job was made more difficult by Israel's "violent and repressive security policy" and its "determination to occupy more and more Palestinian territory". He added that people's perception in the region was of the "injustice" of Israeli policy compounded by the "thoughtless support" of the US.

The UN secretary general's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told Israeli radio it was not acceptable for senior UN officials to make such comments about a member nation.

CS Monitor reporter on the deterioration in Iraq and how it has made journalists increasingly unable to wander about the country:

In essence, I feel we've become boiled frogs. Toss the frog into boiling water, and he jumps right out again, or at least tries. But put him in lukewarm water and slowly turns up the heat and he barely notices until he's cooked. Rather than overestimate the problems (a common journalistic temptation), I've begun to wonder if we're not understating them, notwithstanding the letters from readers who accuse our paper, and many others, of being Chicken Littles.

To be sure, in a wartime environment like Iraq's there is rarely a constant arc of progress, or descent into chaos. Violence ebbs and flows, incidents flare and then almost inexplicably, vanish. This froggy is leaving on a reporting trip outside Baghdad today - the first trip out of the city in more than a week. It feels safer again.

Phil Carter of Intel Dump has an insightful article on Slate about how the Iraq invasion has basically paralyzed the ability of the US military to respond to things elsewhere, crunching logistics and all that. He's a more conservative guy but he knows his stuff really well.

I wanted to throw in some things from CounterPunch: this April 10 piece by Robert Fisk describing how the Bush administration attacks its critics on Iraq, this jolly rambling report on 'Pseudoconservatives' by an anonymous defense analyst. Rahul Mahajan is a very intrepid journalist that I've mentioned recently, having written this piece on a visit to Fallujah and also writing the very interesting Empire Notes from Baghdad. Also Tariq Ali weighs in with his New Leftist sort of thing on "The Iraqi Resistance: a new phase." What seems to be his key point:

Its no use for Westerners to shed hypocritical tears for Iraq or to complain that the Iraqi resistance does not meet the high stands of Western liberalism. Which resistance ever does?

When an Occupation is ugly, the resistance cannot be beautiful, except in a Hollywood movie or an Italian comedy.

Then there is Fisk again on the Bush-Sharon plan, "Bush Legitimizes Terrorism." The piece is a tad overwrought, but I can only imagine how bitter someone like him would be having seen the middle east burn itself to bits for decades, never even thinking that it would come to this today. On the front page today is a humorous "Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation" by Paul de Rooij.

Here are the now-famous photos of deceased American soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base (on a fast mirror). These pictures are the rather explicit negation of a finely tuned, decade long Cheney policy to remove critical images of the reality of American warfare from the array of visual images that the public can actually see. In other words, their strategy was to prevent you from seeing these pictures. Now you can and should look at them to understand more fully the situation.

Mr Marshall is following a couple interesting developments. Firstly he says that plans to invade the southern Iraqi oilfields were ordered at the same time in the same document as the plans to invade Afghanistan in late 2001. Hot damn, cause and effect! He is also following the upcoming changes in the Iraqi government, and the apparent distancing of Ahmed Chalabi from the reins of power, both within Iraq and the ludicrous perks accorded to him by the U.S., such as his enormous personal stash of incriminating Baathist documents that by all rights should belong to the Iraqi people, not a lying, intel spoofing embezzler.

The topic is the new Iraqi government now being planned and organized jointly by the US and the UN and the fact that the decision has been made to toss overboard most if not all of the folks we put on the Interim Governing Council. At the top of the list of those to get the heave-ho is Ahmed Chalabi.

According to the article, the administration is seriously considering cutting off the amazingly ill-conceived $340,000 a month subsidy we still give Chalabi. Meanwhile, his role as head of the de-Baathification committee has just been publicly criticized by Paul Bremer.

David Corn has some reactions on the administration shifting Afghanistan money getting to possibly illegal Iraq war preparations.

The Hawkington Times says that "US sees Syria 'facilitating' insurgents." Oh well.

One conservative columnist in the Chicago Tribune flames Bush to a crisp over the war. I strongly think this is worth checking out, as it is not the new leftist claptrap of Counterpunch! :) Since no one wants to register for the Tribune, why not read it on the Agonist message boards?

They repeatedly tell us, in only slightly different ways, that this leadership group--or, better said, "court"--is one of "irregulars." At every opportunity, they went around our official government, around our institutions, and likely enough around the law. Across their history from the 1970s until today, this Bush neo-conservative group, backed by elements of the radical right and American supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, created alternate power centers to bypass traditional American ones. In short, they are true radicals. Think "Robespierre."

Bob Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack," for instance, how Douglas Feith, one of the most radical of the Bush-Rumsfeld courtiers, lobbied for the special intelligence planning board within the Pentagon to bypass traditional intelligence that warned against going to war in Iraq. This fact is widely known, but Woodward importantly explains: "It was a different way of doing things, first because the planners would be the implementers"--they would become the "expeditionary force" within Iraq after the war. Definitely not kosher!

There is a huge feature on the public radio series Marketplace about the Spoils of War, the reconstruction cash money millionaires and all that. You can listen online, and it will certainly go in the Mercenary File as well. Speaking of mercenaries here is a feature on them from earlier in the month.

Che is Unreal

Since I got back from Europe, I have felt oddly unsettled. This weekend I felt exhausted and twitchy, much to the chagrin of those around me. Sorry about that. I am not sure if it is the radical, public disintegration of the President's credibility, the waves of terror attacks sweeping more sectors of the world, writing a report on Richard Perle's wretched book, or the fact that many of my friends are acting weird. Maybe it's the willful collapse of Twin Cities public transit and the disarray caused in the light rail project. Maybe it was finally seeing a NadeRedux voter.

On Friday there was a great hip-hop show at the campus center. It opened with some spoken word from Suheir Hammad, then came Immortal Technique and Jean Grae. I haven't gotten hardly any music lately, so I made a choice and picked up Revolutionary Vol. I and Bootleg of the Bootleg, which I haven't listened to yet. Grae signed my CD to "the really tall guy." I appreciate it!

My only criticism would be on Grae and I.T.'s stage costumes. By some coincidence they both sported Che shirts, while I.T. also wore a military fatigue type hat and pants. I saw Technique at a peace concert benefit with Atmosphere and the Coup last year, just prior to this horrible war. He was also sporting the Che shirt then, if I recall.

Some drunk jackass hollered "cliche" several times. I wasn't sure if I should have decked the guy or argued with him. Our society today whittles down, flattens, the experiences of colonial people and the disenfranchised. From within, looking out at the Che's and Allende's, they cannot look like anything but cartoon characters. If a Latino dares to hold up Che, it can't possibly hold real meaning. Only Sean Hannity's casual dismissal of the whole reality makes sense to them anymore.

The character Fez on That 70s Show is a perfect representation of how the media, FOX in this case, bulldozes the entirety of subjective experience into one friendly, fuzzy, ignorant outsider. Really, I don't see how they could have written an actual South American from the 1970s without bringing forth all the ugly ghosts. Instead, only an unreal Latinoid can fill the role.

If Che is a "cliche," what is "real?" Where does this cultural authority of "the real" begin? Does it have its own cable network?

Last week before spring break and the glass is half full!!!

I am eagerly looking forward to spring break this year. For the first time, I'll fly over the big pond to Europe and hang out with Nick Petersen in London for a week. That's this Friday.

During that time I'll leave the site turned on, and I'll probably find some time to post back to here, but it can't be frequent.

This week, I have several mid-term exams and a giant group paper to contend with, so I can't spend a great deal of time writing here.

On the plus side, I realized that the Apache server which comes with OS X has a built-in Perl module (mod_perl), but deactivated. The Perl module runs the site's Perl code much more quickly than a server without the module. To turn it on I just had to enable it in the configuration files and restart the server. *Bingo*, just like that my site's dynamic stuff runs about 3x-4x faster. It was really necessary, and I only put it off because I was too busy and I thought I would have to go through the mess of recompiling Apache. So far I am using Apple's default Apache server with no problems.

This week I am experimenting with a slick program called ecto which allows me to write entries without using a web browser.

As far as the news is concerned, those new Bush ads are just so marvellous I don't really need to add anything. But imagine if Lincoln or FDR had tried to exploit similar images. This site is run by a legal professor with a spectacular sense of humor. (via the DKos)

The NY Times is running a huge Kerry op-ed blitz today. Maureen Dowd is clearly sugar-coating a nice image of a candidate with rich interests. A DLC totem suggests that "reform" should be Kerry's word of the campaign. A Clinton-Gore poll guru says that Kerry can take Bush on all kinds of issues.

For now, however, only 40 percent of voters think the country is headed in the right direction. According to nearly all public polls, Mr. Kerry is the preferred choice for president, and that prospect may well keep Mr. Kerry from focusing on the larger choice before America. That would be a shame, because voters would respond to such a challenge.

The choice is between an America inspired by John F. Kennedy and one shaped by Ronald Reagan. When the alternatives are framed this way, Americans choose the Kennedy vision by a striking 53 percent to 41 percent. It brings increased support for Democrats among voters from across the political spectrum — in small towns and rural areas, in older blue-collar communities, among low-wage and unmarried women as well as young voters and women with a college degree.

Rather than simply criticizing specific policies of the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry should emphasize the worldview it represents. Mr. Bush favors tax cuts for business and the wealthy as the best way to bring about prosperity. He heralds individualism as the key to a healthy community. In his tenure America has retreated at home before our shared problems, but advanced alone abroad. If Mr. Kerry challenges this worldview, Mr. Bush will be forced to defend it.

For more election news, Electablog is pretty darn good.

There is some weird stuff going on in Afghanistan, as the long-awaited Spring Offensive between the allies and the Taliboid forces (al-Qaeda types, probably ISI people, who knows?) springs into action. Bin Laden may have narrowly avoided a Pakistani raid. US snipers killed a bunch of "suspected Taliban."

I never thought the Republicans were 31337 hax0rs, but apparently they can steal filez and r00t a judicial computer system better than anyone thought. Their head judicial aide apparently helped steal around 4,670 secret Democratic documents. As the trolls on Fox News have been commanded to point out, many memos indicated the D's were working with outside groups to keep conservatives off judicial panels for specific cases, a hoorrrible, oh so hoorrible, infringement of judicial power. Or something like that.

I don't quite understand what D's were legitimately doing, except considering impact the judges will have on cases!!! Bad Democrats! Thinking about the effect of judges!! Bad!

Kerry beats Bush by a few points, 49-43, in Florida!!! Time to purge the voter rolls again!

Many Palestinians killed, including 4 children, in massive Gaza raids supposedly designed to draw militants out. What the hell is the point? Apparently Sharon's credibility with the abused Israeli public is at a new low, so this, like many Sharon initiatives, probably has a wag-the-dog logic to it. There is also word that the Israelis may have been asked by the Bush administration to avoid withdrawing from Gaza before the elections because of the potential instability. Uhm, Israeli occupation ==Bush political power? What? This is worth following.

Finally, at long, long last, the pervasive sense of the everlasting nightmare has softened. Yet now we have VP speculations. Bill Richardson or John Edwards seem good right now. Alison caught the McLaughlin Group this morning and McLaughlin predicted that the search for VP would go for ethnic, not regional, balance. We could do worse than Richardson, a popular southwestern Hispanic governor with tons of executive and international experience. Or on SNL, the skilled Darrell Hammond as Clinton put forth his own VP candidacy. He asked how awesome it would be to have him around again with even less responsibility. He said could put the Vice back in Vice President, although Cheney's done pretty well by that measure.

Ok, so now I will say it. My optimism about the outcome of the election and the future of the country has finally shot above 50%.

The glass is indeed half full.

Richard Perle fired?!

The word is that Richard Perle got tossed on his butt from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, supposedly for calling for the firing of the Pentagon's in-house spy agency's chief. The agency, the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, is somewhat more towards the "rational" side of intelligence gathering. That is, they were not the ones principally responsible for silly WMD intelligence. Yet Perle blames them for messing it up.

Too much for Rummy, finally at long last.

Pat Buchanan predicted on the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning that he would not be the last kicked out before the election. Ahh Pat.

Aside from that I should explain why I often miss posting Wednesdays on the site. The problem is that I have creative writing from 7 to 10, and of course last week I had to cover the Kerry rally and write the story, which took hours.

Midterms are right in my face here. It's going to be a hella lot of work. I covered the caucus story this week. it was altogether messy but interesting, as Kucinich overwhelmingly won our precinct, and we found out Edwards was dropping out while filling out ballots.

I am going to visit NickP in London in a week!! This is so damn cool, I've never been across the big ocean. Really. (Cheng has just gone the other way to Tokyo. He may make contact one of these days)

Thats about all I have the energy left about right now. Night.

Minnesotay Cauckay

We are about to take off for Empirical Research Methods class this morning. Later today we are going to take entrance polls at the Minnesota Democratic caucuses in St. Paul. Should be good.

Very tall and loud young man spotted on C-SPAN

Andy sent me an instant message at about 12:45 this morning saying that I appeared on the policy wonk's lifepartner C-SPAN during the Vote 2004 segment on Kerry's visit to Macalester.

Fortunately C-SPAN has put up a RealPlayer video stream of Kerry's event. It is quite blurry at 128K, but the sound is much more clear than I got with my voice recorder. Kerry and I can be heard really well, actually. I appear at about 1 hour 8 minutes into the clip.

I sneak a question to Kerry at rally!

While reporting for the Mac Weekly, I located myself in the audience near the "stage entrance" of the campaign rally. Senator Kerry moved down the line, shaking hands and signing things. With a huge crush of people and cameras all around, I asked Kerry if the investigation into intelligence distortions on Iraq should be a criminal matter. We reported his answer in the Mac Weekly story. (not yet online).

Kerry responded: "I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done."

The campaign story was a very tough one for us to write, and the session well into the early morning left me tired for days afterward. It is damn hard to write the Weekly and look sane the next day, as the editors know all too well.

The newspaper is in sweet sweet color on the cover. I'm really happy I snagged a candidate's quote, but I wish that more of what other people said at the rally could have been put in. Unfortunately, the paper a huge crush for space this week.

On the beat: Kerry visit

I am now covering the Kerry event on Macalester's campus Wednesday, which, alongside the Edwards rally on Sunday has surprisingly thrown me right into the middle of the national campaign for the first time since my November pilgrimage to Iowa (though the stories of Kellen, Andy and Adam at the Iowa Caucus made it far more colorful--and insightful).

With Dean's sudden deflation, my wandering political spirit stumbled onward yet again. I'm genuinely happy that the Democrats haven't torn themselves to pieces, and evidently Edwards doesn't plan to attack Kerry, or so he told us on Saturday. That in itself is a big step for the Dems.

The gang around here is flocking to Edwards, but I've hemmed and hawed about where I stand altogether. I think his image works great, I think he's making an impressive run that a lot of people said would never even get this far. That's a lot to his credit. There were plenty of Dean backers sporting their colors at the rally, so naturally, I am supposed to gravitiate there. But is Edwards' glossy inexperience ultimately a liability? (Additionally there's an incestuous sort of lawyer love going around among this crew, whether or not they admit it :-)

In the end Kerry seems to be steamrolling all the way down, and what's coming Wednesday will reflect that. Yet the Iowa and Wisconsin campaigns revealed Edwards poll spikes at the very end. Would Minnesota finally be the site where Edwards beats the man on top?

In sum, I am still ambivalent, and heck, since we are conducting entrance polls to the caucuses for Empirical Research Methods, I probably wouldn't even have time to caucus even if I wanted to. At this point, I may be more interested in watching the pretty pieces assemble into one glorious mural than really come down on it either way.

Shocks and aftershocks

I am making some progress on this new website idea but it has been slow going with finals. Fortunately that ends Wednesday. Unfortunately I have a TERM PAPER about THE WAR that has been rather disrupted. And it's also due Wednesday.

Here is a screenshot chunk of what I've put together for HongPong.com so far. This information will be strung together and turned into nice chunks of HTML information. I just found out how to import the WHOLE old HongPong.com right into it, but it will be tricky. These notes haven't been filled in for the most part, but pieces are getting added as I come across them. Think of it as sort of a topical filing cabinet with links and groups. Or something... It hasn't totally come together, that's for sure. And hurray, the Neo-cons will all be bright red!

As for the big news yesterday, that about does it for Jihadist Saddam. At the very least, we've got a great super-villain going now. Finally, a bitter and uncertain chapter in this story has closed, and the Baath Party is really finished, as a concentric ring system which made every bit of Iraqi society work backwards, a network of fear and domination which made the nation a house propped up to implode.
For me, the key question is still what happened to those Iraqi buildings, the libraries and the huge government ministries which ran the largest bureaucracy in the middle east. It feels like the loss of all these records was a disaster which not only obliterated so much history, but also rendered almost impossible the process of reconciling the society. (We've focused on bureaucracy, as a system, in contemporary political theory class, which sparks my interest in the day-to-day administration of occupied Iraq).
Unilateral reporter Robert Fisk, April 15, Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad:

So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives – a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq – were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment were set ablaze.

Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad. And the Americans did nothing.... I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history.

But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning – there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows – I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name – in Arabic and English – I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene – and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.

It's a moment in time we sort of chalked off from our understanding of the situation, and this extends down to the daily pattern of life in the country now.

But what is the next move for Saddam? Even in a cell the man still has a power, in no small part the ability, and the will, to tell all about how the Reagan administration helped him with all those well-demonized episodes of genocide and mayhem. There is that. But there is also Osama bin Laden about, and he's no bit player right now. As they cheered everywhere from FOX News to the foxholes to the streets of Iraq, I posted this comment about everyone's favorite evildoer. Yes, Saddam's capture helps things come together, perhaps. But who else benefits?

HongPong.com takes a vacation

When I updated to Mac OS X 10.3, it took apart the programs which generated my old website. I could just put them back together, but I decided that it is time to give HongPong.com a break for a while. It turned out not to be too useful, so I am looking at new ideas. One possibility is a new, different site, a sort of collaborative blog kind of thing with an e-mail list-server and public bulletin board. Such things are all the rage these days already, but I think it would be more informative than my sporadic ramblings.

Also I am already putting together a sort of node-type database with some software that I just got. It has a ton of potential for online information, but I'm not sure what will come of it.

One of the more famous blogs, DailyKos, switched from regular blog software to Scoop, the program which ran my site. In this way I was sort of a pioneer for adapting Scoop to bloggery, though of course little came of it.

Besides the technical stuff, things are pretty good at school. It is very different living off campus now. On the one hand, moving out of the tiny Dupre Hall single, only about 7 feet wide, into a nice duplex-apartment with The Norman feels marvelous. But this has to be balanced with all the extra cold between classes and home. Perhaps its a symptom of getting older but this year we focus on classes a lot more. Eh.. Tis worth it...

Also there are several people who I've failed to catch up with on e-mail. Rest assured it is not because I hate you, I've just been too busy to keep up with things.

This semester the most useful thing I've done (for the Mac Weekly) is interview Rashid Khalidi, a professor at Columbia and director of their Middle East Institute. Yet the interview itself is just the thing which rags on me, because he laid out all too clearly how bad things are becoming. These excerpts below are interesting, but be sure to read the whole thing:

• You said in your talk regarding Iraq that "there are much worse days to come." What leads you to this?
  
  ...[Alienation has been] exacerbated by the civil war that [Ahmed] Chalabi is trying to foment between the Shia, to whom he's posing as the champion of, and the Sunnis. The United States is on the point actually, I'm afraid, of incurring hostilities of more than just a lot of disgruntled Sunnis, and former Baathists, former soldiers, and so on, a few jihadis and others who are coming in, but maybe also the largest single group in Iraq, which is the Shiites.
• What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?
  
  Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.
  
  There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi. Chalabi, of course, being part of this group, having studied at the University of Chicago as well, although he was doing his mathematics Ph. D. when they were doing politics degrees.
  
  The other thing I would say is that there is another element in some of them, of a belief in force, which doesn't come just from Strauss and Wohlstetter, who was actually Wolfowitz's dissertation supervisor. It comes from Strauss via Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the head of the Revisionist strand of Zionism, which was an extreme nationalism which very much believed in force. I think that that view is very widely spread among the neo-cons.... They are people for whom reality is probably less important than their ideology, and their moral certitudes.
• Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?
  
  I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found...
• Is there a connection to be drawn between Defense Undersecretary Douglas Feith and the Israeli settler movement?
  
  Feith is a partner of Zell, and Zell is a leading settler. He lives in a settlement; he is an advocate of expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. He and Feith are ardent committed extremist Likud supporters, that is to say they support a policy of Israel's expansion, they support a policy of crushing the Palestinians, they support the expansion of settlements....

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That lays out where we are at today in this grand unpredictable flame of ours. It's just as well, in the sense that we are all learning plenty about human nature, answering otherwise hypothetical questions. To an atheist, religious warfare makes a hell of a problem to understand. Atheists in the foxhole? Even one of the godless can recognize when things have truly gone to Hell.

They just shot down a Chinook outsite Fallujah, fully loaded with soldiers about to cycle home for a break. Unbelievable how the principal lie of the war unfolds into all this tragedy.

There is an Atmosphere lyric I go by these days (from "The Wind").

October 19, 2003

August 20, 2003

April 27, 2003