The dead have no victories and the hangman is a friend.

The dead have no victories. The dead do not triumph: not in war, not in resistance, not in peace, not in memory.

First, our memories are lies. Memory is, itself, the first ground of deception. Think of all the times you were wrong about what you remember. You saw a red shirt in your mind, draped over the frame of a friend, cast in the light of a treasured recollection. You know it to be true. You remember it. And then, maybe only days later, you hold a photo in your hand. In it, she wears green.

Or - in the passing of breath and conversation, each person captured in the amber of her own memory retells a shared experience, differently. The details emerge, and they do not agree.

How memory flatters, or torments, or tempts us to believe what we cannot verify.

Second, our memories are truths. They are the truth not of fact, but of our faith in tomorrows. This isn't a fault. Only a fool would lay blame, here. We are formed by others, by pains and pleasures, by fears and desires, many years before memory bubbles up and percolates into the illusions of self. We are made long before we become makers. The self, caged as it is always in memory's prison, is first and last a tall tale. A story. We suffer this disorder. We revel in it. It defines even our boredom. The range of possibilities, the shapes of selfhood, cannot be cataloged. Self varies, with mood, with digestion, with shitting and farting and sleep; but character, that vicious slaver, conceals this variance in the habits of obedience and belief. We are never constant. But memory, and its capo, character, would have their prisoner believe otherwise. They trick awareness into breaking with its senses, inventing a self who lasts. The experience of self is the story of an escape which will never happen. It is the flight into an ever receding tomorrow. Like other lies - history, religion, law.

The living victors would have us believe otherwise, of course. They would have us believe in our selves to the point of obsession, cultivating a society wide disorder of the single personality. A plague, an affliction, and thing which has no age, and is always aging.

Epoch and place vary, and our million million selves come and go. Most of us know nothing of the soil beneath our feet, the lifetime of an ant or worm, or the history of a square foot of air. We know nothing, and that leaves us free to observe. That could be enough, but it's not. A people without the curse of character and obedience - how do you rule them? How do you raise a child into a boy into a man who will congratulate himself as he takes a voluntary step towards his own planned participation in the mass execution of war?  How do you thwart a child into being a girl into becoming a woman who knows by twenty that she has a place, and a thousand reasons to trust her fears, and a hundred times as many shapes she should never, ever be?

How do rule? You deny. You forbid. And then you punish. After punishment, not being punished is as good as a reward. It works on those who are clever or stupid enough to avoid the whip. It works, eventually, on the whipped themselves.

And in being ruled in the petty tyrannies of family, in the school house and the workplace, we are shaped into singular and collective acts of deception; into pack animals with a faith in the tomorrow told tales of our invented pasts.

The human is inconstancy and inconsistency. Our obedience is not. Obedience follows the infliction of harm upon memory, until memory lies and its invention, the self, believes it.

The cults of the sacrificed dead are not inconstant. They are firm faiths, clear in doctrine, deliberate in worship, unflinching in punishment, generous in the promise of reward. Consistency is their hallmark. It is their brand mark, as well.

The dead lose everything. They lose even the scars burned into memory. They become, instead, glyphs and cyphers for the living. And the living victors make use.

The living victors - you know them because victory habituates them to the giving of orders and the taking of spoils, because they rule you in small and large ways - enshrine the dead: as reminders, as testaments to their control of shared memory, as icons for adoration and obstructions to liberation.

It isn't nothing that across time and place, spanning the palimpsest sprawl of history's scribbles, those who rule depend upon death, and upon the memory of the dead. Death, as defeat. Death, as surrender. Dying, as the fearful passage into oblivion. Oblivion, as punishment, the black shrouded scourge who hounds the self into its final corner.

The body dies, and for the foreseeable future, all bodies perish. But death also kills the fiction, the self-affliction. And in that awareness, a liberation which is neither flight nor the maddened rush into the walls of our cages. This single personality, this cultivated disorder, this colonization of the accident of memory which believes, and obeys, and marches off to war, and tortures itself into clothing, and approved shapes, and behaviors - it can die at any time, and the body can go on living, aware, enjoying, suffering and shitting and fucking and getting through the day and into tomorrow.

And then, well, the living have no victories. And those who would rule will find they can only order their own twisted husks of memory around, or march off into battles with the ghosts of heroes who never were, never are, and never could be again.

That doesn't stave off dying, prevent illness, negate dread. Shrugging off the single personality disorder doesn't make the nerves immune to pain, or the heart to longing. It won't erase jealousy or any other venality which keeps us interesting. But, it's a first step among many towards a world that's not just easy for everyone, but maybe even half the time, one worth inhabiting.

And all we have to do, in our own individual moments, is walk up the gallows step, greet the hangman with a smile, slip into the noose...and leap. After that, nothing. And everything.

And the world to take back...

Reich's Fail

Robert Reich: "A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America."

Me: When haven't they?

Translation

"Israeli officials say they won't warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the discussions. The pronouncement, delivered in a series of private, top-level conversations, sets a tense tone ahead of meetings in the coming days at the White House and Capitol Hill.

Israeli officials said that if they eventually decide a strike is necessary, they would keep the Americans in the dark to decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel's potential attack. The U.S. has been working with the Israelis for months to persuade them that an attack would be only a temporary setback to Iran's nuclear program."

Source.

Translation:

"Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit.

Bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit bullshit."

The "US" is responsible for every decision made by Israeli leaders, in the same way that the head of an organized crime family is responsible for the orders given to his underbosses. Without the head of the racket, there is no underling whose actions can "distance" the boss from the deed itself.

If the leadership of the Israeli suicide cult state starts a war with Iran, wager every dollar you have on the solid bet that Washington has given its approval, its marching orders and its imprimatur to the wholly owned subsidiary that is Israel.

Program Note

If you are kind enough to read me from time to time, I'm all sorts of appreciative. That I'm not the most original, best educated, or thorough thinker should go without note, but I have the vanity of a self-deprecating nature, and would like to note it anyway. Which is kind of a segue towards a complaint with Blogger. I like blogrolls. Diverse, unwieldy lists of people who have more interesting things to write than I, and who do it with less bravado and fewer instances of cultivated ignorance. Unfortunately, Blogger no longer allows me to update or add to the roll to the right of this page. So, I've been adding new blogs to the "Read" column to the left, where I've traditionally placed blogs that Blogger refuses to recognize as self-updating. There are any number of writers, observers and thinkers there worth your while. Please give them a look.

Thanks,

Jack

Monsieur

IOZ hardly needs a link from me, but I'm compelled to nod it off anyway:

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2012/02/diving-into-dreck.html

Added in Edit:

Commenting upon IOZ's post linked above is Philboyd, who has a corollary formula which really resonates, and which I believe states with elegant brevity a position which is often difficult to understand, especially for those of us with the imperium and auctoritas of acculturated dudeliness:

Every piece of subtle macho posturing, every little joking intimidation would not work without the accepted social position of men as powerful studs who take what they want. Likewise, that accepted social position would not make sense without the awful prevalence of men raping women. Here, maybe, is a radfem twist: even if you don't posture, even if you try to repudiate the idea of a strong, rape-y man, your interactions with women still rest on a foundation of rape - just as a policeman who tries really hard not to use his nightstick still interacts with people on a foundation of violence.  In our society, that's what a policeman is.

Source.

I don't believe this is easy for most of us men to understand. I certainly have had difficulty appreciating what it means to live as woman within the confines of a society which authorizes abuse of women as a norm, sexualizes it as entertainment, and politicizes it as a natural order of things.

Trinities

So Jesus and his self-brother, the Spirit, don't give Catholics glossolalia and the shivvy-shakes. Neither do they do the crackers into flesh and cooking sherry into blood magic for Assembly of God pentecostals. God is not an ecumenicist.

Neither is the State. Or the Market.

All three are royal fictions. And each, despite the rhetoric of universalism and transcendence offered by their devotees, is employed to sunder.

Anarchist

A person believes: I will do this, I will not do that. I have my limits, I have my needs, but I am also the things I must do, or won't do; I will accomplish and I will avoid.

We believe these assertions, a faith common to our humanity. We are certain, and sure, that what makes the mirror of self in our memory unique is nothing short of a devotion to this faith in the obedience of the future to our flesh-wracked now. We devote ourselves to a future we insist will obey.

A person promises a meaning to life, and recalls that promise to fickle memory: this is how I will live my life. This is the story they will tell of me. This is the path, and I am who I am by sticking to it. You are who you are because I see you near to it.

We tell ourselves how will we live our lives. We tell each other. How much of our culture is the telling and retelling? More than we expect.

These tales are mostly lies. Our beliefs are, when examined, a catalog of self-deceptions.

I am an anarchist because I have evidence of the truth of these lies.

Smear the Queer

When I was young, boys played a game. It was called "Smear the Queer," or alternately, "Kill The Man With the Ball." The objet de jeu was simple, compared to baseball or lacrosse: do violence to the "Queer" with the ball. If you are wondering if the Queer was just an odd fellow, within game play, ponder no further. The Queer was certainly the Fag. And he had a handicap, which was the ball. The Queer had to have two hands on the ball, unless he was throwing it away. The point of the game, from the vantage point of the ball clasping Queer, was to get rid of the ball and become not-Queer. Because the only person who could be struck, tackled, knocked down or done violence to was the Queer with the ball.

The Queer was not allowed to just get rid of the ball. There were rules, sort of like with dodgeball. The Queer had to throw the ball to a team mate. Who then became the Queer who tried to get rid of the ball while all the members of the opposing team either attempted to tackle, trip, punch and smear him, or block passes to the new Queer's team mates. Team mates who were not the current Queer could not be hit, struck or touched. Violence was reserved for the Queer. And only the Queer.

Smear the Queer was a rugged game. We all had to take a knee, once, when a Queer was driven to the ground so hard one of his lungs was collapsed. Sometimes players took the Smear part literally. By "sometimes," I mean "regularly." We should perhaps remember that the game was also called "Kill the Man with the Ball." During the course of play, I had a dislocated shoulder, and there were a few broken wrists, noses, fingers and what not.

Smear the Queer was a Boy's Game. Girls never played it. They weren't allowed. Well, publicly that is. We had a few tough chicks who played. They were often the most aggressive players. Something about compensation to male-consistent behaviors in a male dominated environment, and conditioning, I image.

Smear the Queer could be played impromptu, but in my youthful experience, it was nonetheless organized. The game had rules. If the rules weren't followed, it wasn't a game. And most often, it was not only organized, it was sanctioned. I learned to play Smear the Queer in the Cub Scouts. With the Cubmasters as referees. It was more popular than Capture the Flag. It was even more popular than Capture the Flag (with Prisons*). It was surely preferable to Flag Football, which game provides no opportunities for the smearing of Queers, and has the distinct disadvantage of being free of tackling, tripping, nose breaking, lung collapsing and other boyish delights.

We also played a version (sans collapsed lungs or leaping tackles) on school grounds. The nuns, as referees. Girls excluded, of course. They had their own side of the playground. Literally. There was a line painted in the middle. We boys had football, StQ, dodgeball, tag and smash the faggots through the chain link fence, on our side. We also had marbles, jacks, baseball card trading and kickball. The girls had hopscotch. Once, the girls, led by the firebrands M---- S. and one of the many Michelles, organized a soccer game. The nuns were not pleased with this collapse of decorum. For a week, the girls has to spend recesses walking around the perimeter of their side of the playground. Doing the rosary. We boys were not discouraged from watching them. Object lessons need objects of condemnation, and all.

I'm told that if there were no giant leviathan, or world full of competing giant leviathans, society, such as it exists, would devolve overnight into one massive free for all of Smear the Queer.

I imagine that the exemplars, shapers of boys into men, pillars of the community, gum-hating nuns and bastions of rectitude - who organized and sanctioned Smear the Queer, as well as boy and girl divided playgrounds - would agree.

That no anarchist ever taught us to play Smear the Queer is entirely besides the point. And the one boy who was (in hindsight, and who is now Out) obviously gay was, I imagine out of self-protection, one of the game's most brutal participants. But, it's not like we learned the game from adult homosexuals. Or from the long-hairs who occasionally passed into the area to pick apples and berries alongside the Mexican, Cape Verdean and Brazilian migrant workers. The potheads couldn't be bothered, and the deadheads wouldn't have tried, and nary a Red could be found to teach us to hunt down the Other and smash him into the ground. Perhaps they were too busy being Others themselves.

Huh.

We learned that game from the same sort of people who are now telling us that, without them, the game itself would spread all of the planet as if by moral infection, and would no longer worry mere Queers. It will even trouble hitherto comfortable white people.

I should note, in conclusion, that the present campaign against Bashar Assad looks like international Kill the Man with the Ball. In Libya, it was definitely more a version of Smear the Queer.

Of course, when exemplary, organized, decent people play it with guns and moral sanction, it's called government. When anarchists try to imagine a world where kids aren't taught to play the game at all, well, obviously the correct response to that What If is that everyone will learn it as if by magic, and also everyone will be a Smear-worthy Queer...


* - CtF(wP) inevitably led to the abuse of the prisoners. This came as a surprise to our elders. It was eventually banned. Prisoners were no longer allowed to be taken. Captured players were instead assigned to a neutral zone, where they could be liberated by a team mate, according to varying rules. Smear the Queer was never banned, at least not when I was a minor.

How to ask superior questions...

Here:

Is there some serious projection being done by anarchists? Are folks considering their own habits, desires, values, etc.; and the roles that government does and does not play in their own lives; and concluding from this that we’d all be better off without government—but failing to adequately consider the full diversity of people being governed? Are violent criminals and street thugs, for example, out of sight and out of mind?

A couple qualifications are immediately necessary. I readily grant that there is a ton of unreasonable fear of violent crime, and that such fear can be easily exploited by people in power. I also readily grant, more parenthetically, that anarchism can draw on very important considerations of what government does to directly serve corporate interests, to wage war, etc.—and I have no intention of contesting or minimizing such things.

I’m just thinking about how violent crime is, in fact, a reality. And some violent criminals can only be stopped by force. And I’m glad that I don’t have to try to marshal that force myself.

I’m very grateful for the armed security guard at my school. And given the hell that the inner city can be, I’m very grateful for the armed police, and perhaps even the armed prison guards, who help to at least keep it contained in the inner city. (Not that letting it rage there is a good thing, obviously…)

I have seen up close and personal, and for a sustained period of time, a ghetto subculture that places a premium on toughness, violence, and taking what you want; and seldom seems to be given any pause by considerations like empathy, pity, or remorse. I’ve seen a steady stream of theft, robbery, and intimidation. I’ve heard and seen students’ readiness to fight at the slightest provocation, and to mercilessly beat a fallen opponent if given the chance. I’ve heard excited and admiring talk about countless shootings.

Near the beginning of this school year, two college students were walking in a park in my city when two young men robbed them, made them kneel down, and shot them both in the head. The next day three of my students were talking about this—bragging and comparing notes about how they would have done the same.

Can anarchism deal with such realities?

Or might anarchism be under some charitable illusion that cold-blooded violence doesn’t really exist? That the injustices and oppressions and privations of the current social order are wholly responsible for inner city violence, perhaps?

Such systemic issues play an enormous role, no doubt. There is an unbroken chain of oppression and discrimination stretching back to kidnapping and chattel slavery. And those born into urban poverty today have the deck stacked against them—all the more if they are also born into brown skin.

But even seeing these realities clearly, and even assigning most or all fault or blame to those in power rather than those in poverty—present realities still are what they are. And part of the present reality is cold-blooded violence. There are hardened killers in the world, and especially on the streets of the ghetto. These folks didn’t create the war zones they were raised in, and in that sense they are clearly not to blame. But they have nonetheless become what they have become.

And they’re not prepared to tend your community garden. They are prepared to shoot you and take your stereo.

http://fromwinetowater.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/anarchism-and-teaching/

The School Man

I read a School Man today. Lecturing with his gnomic-stupid voice. Abashed, faux bashful. Contemptuous, as only School Men can manage. A misplaced contempt, the cross-eyed staring down of self-conceived inferiors, inventing lowly adversaries to justify its essential cowardice, to salve itself in the recognition that its slippery comforts, its personal history of compromises and surrender are really an ascent towards truth, and wisdom, and sensibility. A naked act of shamed concealment, this - captured in relief, cold water dripping down a too-scrubbed brow that hovers over a face composed of sly glances and self-loathing.

Fiddling with the numbers, pretending to a grand narrative of history, as if his version of the whole story could account for the termites eating through the wood, or the making-do of broken mothers. All pretense, this School Man, even his contempt. A flaccid little soul, convinced that its wet slobber is a passionate kiss. Persuaded to believe in itself as a pyre, when it never manages to spark.

Missing the entire point. Missing the point of pointed things, all things being equal.

Covered in the dust of academia. Not noticing that his beloved history has moved on to other lovers. That time itself has drawn up its skirts and kicked the dust of its shoes at him. So he sneers instead. He conjures the loathing of the satisfied and the self-assuaged in defeat. A transubstantiation of its bundled small selves into the outward projected great Self inhabiting the nexus of history. Failed magic, and all the more embarrassing for the continued insistence on the publicity of its self-denied deficiency.

That other age, the one the School Man imagines as his gift to the lesser lights, the fantastic era he has peopled with Great Men and prophetic voices?

It's gone.

And it never was. We are venal creatures. Rooting around in the rotten roots of our perfidy, we discover the partial truths which liberate, and succeeding in a fleeting emancipation, chain us once again.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But the School Men can't admit it. So they fabulate. Nicomachean ethics, angels on a pin head, the weight of a soul, being-otherness, alchemical metanoias, the laws of economy, forever fighting rebels and fixed anarchies in their own minds, casting out the bad demons of the wrong uncertainty. Rational to a fault, blind to their monomanias and an obsession with order that reveals not reason, but a faith in the assertion as magic. They are always God Men, these School Men. Fucking priests, the lot of 'em.

And where there's a priest, there's a proctor, and a tithe and inevitably catechisms and sacerdotal vestments and the flagellant's whip. The School man mortifies. He makes dead the ineluctabilty of living.

He hates, and calls his hatred love, or knowledge, or faith.

There's nothing wrong with hate. Hate is a human good. But the school man gets his wet slobber and his dusty fingers all over even the beauty of hatred, and he makes it academic. He's the reducer, and his reduction is always a kind of violation. The shame-faced uncle with his roving hands and the explanations that follow. You know the kind: a careful word, well thought and pre-conceived, to distance his own inviolate self from the violations he commits with fingers and tongue.

He hates futurity. That's why he's always trying to plan it. He hates the now, which is why he must attempt to husband it, to beat it into the submission of a grand order, of a history what behaves.

But it doesn't behave, for all that history really does work, and explain and describe.

So here we are in the now. The School Men are the enemy to the side of our next tomorrow. An immediate one, because they announce themselves as friends. They have no amity to give. The proctor cannot love his ward, and the School Man has, does and will continue to insist on being a warden to time and human frailty.

Frailty colors our immediacy. The democratic age - a gentle fiction - has reached its terminus. We are done with human rights and the pretense of consensus. That's not daybreak's light dawning over the painted stones of the privately held terrariums deeded over from forgotten former Commons. It's twilight. That silvered horizon is the setting sun. Night comes. And the brutality is already cleaner, and more honest.

The Brutal Age begins again, because it has never ended.

The School Men won't brave that night. They've chosen their lot. They already have the company mark. It's self-preservation. No shame in it, but it belies the falsehood of their economies of symbolic motion. It negates their claims.

All they have left now is their shame. And they've earned it. They merit the widening chasm between their modes of existence and their message of history. They deserve the rewards of an enumerated hypocrisy, and the dubious acclaim of the annotated history of their betrayals.

They'll prattle on. That's their mettle, or its antithesis. And they'll probably get louder, and more strident, the closer it comes to the flux-tormented break between the false prophecy of justice and the reality of an enduring and pagan barbarity. See the evidence: their church has no keystone. It has no firm foundation. Do they smash the icons? Do they come out into the street and revel with the upside-downers of the unkinging Misrule? No, they hie closer to the throne, aiming instead to crown a new master, one with proconsular imperium, certain that if only their will is made manifest, and believed, if the prophets are heeded, if the secret keys are turned, if history behaves, this time their golem too will do the noble bidding.

While outside, where life counts, where safety is known for a lie, and security for a miserable deception, the School Men's objects of contempt piece their lives together in spite of insecurity, weaving through the ruins and remains of a dozen dozens of golem projects gone before. Where theory and the plan of the School Man's history dissolves at first contact with the heat death of a immediacy, crumbling into cold ash amid the ruins of a succession of Alesias.

The School Man draws closed his blinds, pulls the shade, opens his desk, retrieves his ink and pen. He scribbles on the fabric of the shade, scratching out elaborate, euclidian landscapes and peopling them with stick figure denizens.

Finished with his doodling, he announces with a flourish, "See! See, ye of little faith! Look out my window. It all fits, the shapes make sense! How bright the future! How rational!"

Absorbed by his creation, praying cruciform to the god in his head, he does not notice, he cannot see, or smell, or hear, the passing of another army on the way to its next Alesia, obedient to another's ranked and ordered reasons.

Outside, casting a shadow like a bird of prey, the next chief dreams of profit, glory and decimation, and his School Men get ready their histories, and the latest set of reasons why the rest of us have to suffer...

In Case of Sobriety

The official from the State Department told The Daily Telegraph that while the White House wants to exhaust all its diplomatic options, the debate in Washington has shifted away from diplomacy and towards more robust action since Russia and China blocked a United Nations resolution condemning Syria.

The Pentagon’s Central Command has begun a preliminary internal review of US military capabilities in the region, which one senior official called a “scoping exercise” that would provide options for the president if and when they were requested.

The White House said it was talking to allies about holding a “Friends of Syria” meeting in the near future and was considering delivering humanitarian aid to affected areas in the country.

Source.

Y'know, in case the Israeli bat shit crazy fucks sober up and realize that attacking Iran is asking for too many domestic deaths.

Iran is committed to the territorial defense and integrity of Syria.

So, over/under on which anti-BushWar liberal will be the first to give a first-bombs defense of ObamaWar in Iran?

Whiskey Courage

Shorter Barack Obama: "It's like wicked risky, dudes, to bomb Iran, wink, wink..."

Shorter Netanyahu: "C'mon, dullards, that schwartze...burp...in Wash...Wash...ing...Wash...ton...in't fuckin' gon' risk the Jew money. Let's roll!"

Sure, it could all be brinksmanship. And on the tevye hand, it could be that Netanyahu and the Likud have their asses planted on the sweating dynamite of a sabra population which can still recall with fondness the myth of the golden flower a'bloom in the desert. The kibbutzim may have lost out to the corporate raiders and a wave of privatization, but their children and grandchildren haven't yet forgotten the promise of a socialist homeland.

So, war. Against dirty bird Persians, this time...

Courts Martialed

After nearly two years in isolation and captivity, Bradly Manning has been ordered to face a court martial. The million or so words soon to be written about Manning and his order to court martial have about as much relevance to the conclusion of the affair as your next exhalation does to the luminosity of Betelgeuse. You already know the outcome. Goat, scaped. Every last bit of commentary, including this stupid blog blurgh, is already wasted. If Manning doesn't get the needle, he'll probably never see the outside of Leavenworth again.

Remember that the next time you're compelled to martial your own court of judgment in favor of a misplaced faith in "good law."