Moe Bama

Great men have interesting ways of solving problems when they're under stress. One time at Reagan's ranch in the hills near Santa Barbara Ronnie had gotten on his favorite horse and ridden into the chaparral above the house. He had a speech to make in Germany and it just wasn't coming to him. He chanced upon his foreman and some workers building a retaining wall to protect the ranch house from mudslides but they were making a mess of it; it was obvious it wouldn't hold under the slightest pressure. Reagan sat bolt upright and yelled, "Mister Gonzales, tear down that wall!"
With Barak Obama inspiration also comes in strange ways. His European Victory Tour had bombed and even his press sycophants were starting to report his bigger and bigger gaffes. Instead of the public wanting Mo' Bama his numbers went up when he vacationed in Hawaii, signaling that the public wanted Less-bama. What to do?
Pick a Vice President! That should be easy with the deep bench the Dems have. Kook-sin-itch is probably the closest in terms of the issues but he's not a super-credible candidate with the large number of people who dont want to commit national suicide just yet. There's always the lovable Hillary; but she's been pretending to gag every time she says Obama, with the gag on the middle syllable, so she's not really a good pick. There's Evan Bayh, but the thought of the Obama Bayh Bayh jokes was just too much. Also the guy is terminally boring. People used to faint at Obama speeches; they pass out in droves at Bayh events. He's been sited for violating the Sleeping Gas Protocol of the Geneva Convention. There's that sawed-off little runt in New Mexico; his mother's a Mexican, thats a plus. But that would just antagonize the Clints more and they dont want to totally stiff them. Plus he's obviously smarter than BHO and the Abbot and Costello thing would start to happen because of the size. No Way.
What to do? What to do? Barak went up to the den and put on one of his favorite DVDs to relax and just have a laugh. The phone was ringing off the hook with advisors and press people all eager to be the first to know. Who will it be?
He hits play. Its the Three Stooges, the one where they're plumbers. Obama laughs along until a scene comes on where Curly is proud of some job he's completely screwed up and turns to Moe and states' "This is so easy a moron could do it!"
Moe replies, "Well why dont you get one to help ya?" And then hits him on the head with a wrench.
Obama sat bolt upright! Why don't I get a moron to help me? The idea hit him on the head like a wrench. It stayed with him as he interviewed the potential rivals. Bayh read him a position paper, Clinton threatened him with oblivion, Richardson burbled on about some 'border' somewhere we were supposed to be 'enforcing' or something like that.
Only one candidate had properly prepared. He also went to the DVD player, the only move for a completely facile candidate in a nation whose brains have been reduced to Jello after decades of TV watching and now internet-surfing. But he got it all wrong. He wanted to watch some 'black-themed' movies so he could 'get down' with brother Obama in that way the white people use to ingratiate themselves with black people by trying to act hip that always wins them over in a flash once they realize how groovy and multi-cultural you are. He watched a collection of Stepin' Fetchit movies that he had found lying around his empty cavern of a campaign office after his 'presidential campaign' collapsed from sheer embarrassment. This guy paid illegal aliens ten bucks to vote for him and they put the money in their pockets and voted for Hillary Clinton who was offering them counterfeit Green Cards.
So armed to the teeeth, and I do mean teeeth, this dude is all about teeeth, with hip black culture he went to the interview. He considered wearing a dashiki but some adviser saved him just in the nick of time. If he had bumped into Al Sharpton in the hallway...
It was frosty at first. But then Obama asked him a question about policy, giving Our Hero a chance to put some of the Ebonics he'd picked up watching those videos into play.
"I dont know boss, I's as ignorant as you is..."
He had found him! A twenty-four-carat, Real McCoy Moron with teeeth! Yes Biden is a total zero; he's boring, he's stupid, he's enthusiastic about every bad idea anyone has had in the last thirty years, he screwed up the Clarence Thomas Borking, his presidential campaign was the absolute worst each of the eight or nine times he's run, he has a tendency to shoot his mouth off and say offensive and stupid things; he's PERFECT!
You just can't go wrong when you're a Democrat and Moe Howard is your guru.

The Belly Of the Beast

I was going to write this last night but I was too exhausted so I put it off. Since then Obama has picked Biden as his running mate and I guess every sincere blogger should be talking about that but that fish will keep until tomorrow.
This last week I was taking a 'teaching artist' training course that was put together by The Actor's Fund, an entertainment industry social service group, and funded by Sony Pictures. The purpose is to train working artists to teach art courses in Title One schools. The course took place in the same building that houses SAG and AFTRA down on Wilshire Blvd. right next to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum Row. The Writers Guild and the Director's Guild are right down the street. If the oft-reviled 'Hollywood Film Community' has a center of gravity its right there.
Getting there and back was a pleasant plus. Most people dread driving 25 miles each way across a large city at rush hour. But when is a city not a city? When its LA! A low chain of mountains, called the Santa Monica Mountains, runs through the city. I live in the northern foothills of those mountains; the side known contemptuously to those on the opposite slopes as 'The Valley'. Valleyites, suffering from a huge inferiority complex, refer to the city side of the mountains as 'over the hill'. Getting over the hill can be accomplished on the freeways, through the two passes between the Valley and the LA Basin or by taking one of the winding, narrow roads that climb up through the canyons on the sides of the mountains. I chose the mountain route. It didn't take less time and probably added some distance but the route took me up a canyon in Encino (past Michael Jackson's house. I used to work for him in the late eighties and once or twice dropped things off there on my way home) that runs through a neighborhood overgrown with trees which contains some modern mansions and then climbs steeply up to Mulholland Drive, named for the hydraulic engineer who designed the first aqueduct that brought water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles, making the city possible in its present form (the eco-lawyers have since shut it down, of course). Mulholland winds along the top of the ridge line, sometimes on one side sometimes the other, offering panoramic views of the city as you negotiate the winding curves. The mansions on the tops of the hills are truly magnificent. In LA altitude is a function of success; the higher up the slope you are the more prominent. The plants are insane. Native oaks crowd a thousand species of imported trees like Lebanon Cedars and ash; eucalyptus trees on the south-facing slope but not on the Valley side. Rioting Bouganvillia and Plumbago. Stunning patches of roses, roses cresting high walls.Luxurious tended gardens and large patches of wild native plants. A couple of times I saw coyotes dart across the street through gaps in the traffic.
Mulholland is a notorious haunt for people who love to drive. Porsches, Beamers, Honda S2000's all come up there in the hopes of taking a hairpin turn at 50 or 60 mph on the way to the office. The stretch between Bel Air Presbyterian (Ronald Reagan's old church) and the light at Beverly Glen is like Road-Race 2000. Dropping below forty will get you tailgated by a cursing executive in a Mercedes 560sl. But who goes that slow? With the top off and all the windows down and Jimi Hendrix or James Brown loud on the sound system even my puny old Del Sol is up to the challenge! What joy! Then a leisurely drop down into Beverly Hills down the lovely Benedict Canyon. The rest is a drive through Beverly Hills or up the Sunset Strip, always interesting, always fun. One time I played Zappa as I drove down the Strip in memory of the Old Days; Plastic People. The weather, cool for August, was the kind of weather that makes people never want to ever leave LA. In the early morning a couple of days the marine layer of clouds hadn't burned off as I started and the light grew progressively stronger as I approached my goal as the sun burned the clouds off.
And what a goal! If you like to gaze at extremely beautiful women who dont wear very much clothing in the summer Wilshire Blvd, Sunset and Doheny (and tromping in and out of the SAG offices) are about as good as you can get.
So I'm in this class with all these high-powered film industry production types, performers and dancers (only a few don't have bios on IMDB). We've all had a terrible year but as the screenwriter among us (X-Files, Beverly Hills 90210, etc.) was wearing his WGA 'STRIKE!' T-shirt and on our breaks we were hob-knobbing with a bunch of the SAG bigshots no one mentioned why we all had such a shitty year. In fact that was the group ethic. No one talked about politics, generally a social no-no in any studio or film crew, but here it was because it was assumed you were suitably left-wing; could any rational person be otherwise? The teacher had a long history in the Arts and then in the Non-Profit Arts Community. The visiting experts were all from the Education Establishment. All amazingly intelligent, educated, sophisticated people; people who couldn't understand how anyone could be against raising taxes. There's so much good work to be done. The other thing that the educators had in common was a visceral hatred of No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind was written by the Washington Education bureaucrats and the NEA, shepherded through the Senate by Ted Kennedy and then, in the name of bi-partisan comity, the new era of Good Feeling after the Clinton food-fight the hapless George Bush signed this bill which effectively put the Federal Government in charge of education. It has been an unmitigated disaster. My wife runs an elementary school library so I know teachers and on-site administrators and I have never met anyone involved in education that has anything but anger and contempt for this disaster of a law. And as they curse this horrible nightmare that has destroyed education they get to practice saying George W Bush's name, BUSH, with the ultimate hatred and contempt. Just to utter the word BUSH is all you need to do as it involves the whole panoply of invective which we all know by heart. I feel sorry for them that this wonderful Newspeak word that encompasses every evil and makes any further discussion unnecessary will be stolen from the Left come January. Its a word which makes any criticism of the cancerous education bureaucracy and their penchant for top-down control (the true culprits in the destruction of American education) completely unthinkable. Its all BUSH'S fault. He lied, you know. This should certainly be a warning to accommodation-minded Republicans to stay away from the disasterous left-wing social recipes lest the inevitable catastrophic results be squarely pinned on them as in the case of No Child Left Behind.
Even though California has the highest taxes in the nation, only NY, NJ and RI are higher, there was a constant lament about the lack of funding for education. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) people who came in to speak with us, constantly refered to the twelve-story district offices a few miles away as 'The Death Star' but never questioned whether this giant structure, stuffed with overpaid parasites, where the idiotic memos and the sweetheart contracts originated might be why education in the city is in such dire straights.
So that you dont mistake me, these are sincere, dedicated people trying wholeheartly to do their best. They are bright and motivated. I liked and was impressed by them. But anyone who can look at the state of California's crumbling economy and doesn't realize that raising taxes will make it worse, much worse, is blind. Just like the WGA and SAG striking, or threatening to strike for more money, has undermined the economic basis of the film industry here. There is complete tunnel-vision on the Left, their little patch of trees is all they see. Who cares about the forest, that's all theoretical; we're dealing with reality baby!
So, I had a wonderful time. I love hanging out with bright, intelligent, interesting people. The film conversations, for someone obsessed with film and who always found that even in animation studios most people cant discuss film with any passion, this was a rare treat! To be able to talk about Orson Welles' lighting and cinematography techniques!
The course was difficult but I think I did well and I'm looking forward to an internship and to exploring East LA's barrios and going down to South Central, terra incognita to us Valleyites, and seeing if I have what it takes to entertain and enlighten a group of bored nine-year-olds with my drawing and preaching skills. I'll still work free-lance in animation, of course (I have a show starting in a couple of weeks where I'll be working at home), but I'm looking forward to developing a pleasant, fulfilling part-time career so that as I retire I can phase out the Rat Race and work at something less high-pressure.
I've got to go mow the lawn and climb up the hillside and cut back the shrubs that are blocking the sprinklers. Have a nice Saturday!

Bye Bye Afghanistan!

Every time something really, truly disastrous happens you can be sure that just as things are looking absolutely black Condi Rice will appear pretending that its just some diplomatic frisson thats going to require everyone to roll up their sleeves and do some diligent negotiating. In just the past year she has presented a Palestinian peace proposal which utterly ignored the homicidal nature of the Palestinian 'bargaining position'; she has flapped her gums very softly at the Burmese government's refusal of aid to its destitute citizens and noiselessly watched tens of thousands of them die. Now she is applauding the 'Democrats' who have taken over Pakistan. Our troops in Afghanistan are supplied through Pakistan. There is no sign of recognition that the people who are taking over are very hostile to America and the West and are much more sympathetic to China, who gave or sold Pakistan nuclear weapons when this crew was in power before Musharraf. In 1963, when the incompetent Kennedys connived to have Diem bumped off in South Vietnam LBJ was said to have remarked,"Sheet, he's the only boy we got!" Well Musharaff was the 'only boy we got' in Pakistan. This is more momentous than the fall of the Shah of Iran. We might be lucky to get our people out of Afghanistan without a fight; a fight against fanatics with nuclear weapons. Did that get your attention?
And what about the people we 'rescued' in Afghanistan, left to the tender mercies of a returned Taliban and Al Qaida? Yet another bloodbath no doubt. So we're going to have an anarchic Pakistan-Afghanistan run by Sunni Islamic fanatics possessing nuclear weapons and aligned with China next door to a Shi'ite Islamic Republic long past it's prime run by a fanatical and murderous death-cult clique of Mullahs trembling in fear of revolution but possessed very shortly of nuclear weapons of its own. A situation that Condi might describe as rich with diplomatic potential; just like two two-year-olds playing with loaded automatic pistols with the safeties off is rich with hilarity waiting to happen. Thats where 'cultural sensitivity' has led us; primitive savages with a track record of murdering their own people with gay abandon are now armed with nuclear weapons and looked on as legitimate governments whose psychotic demands have to be accommodated. What choice do we have as long as we're dependent on them for energy? I wonder if the Russians and the Chinese are having any second thoughts about handing nukes over to these unstable towelheads. Actually the Islamic proportion of the population of Russia will reach fifty percent within the next fifteen years or so, creating another Islamic nation with nukes. If I could buy real estate on the Moon right now I'd be on the next flight out. In the next few years the US's budget crisis, which is just beginning, will cause us to abandon the Eastern hemisphere; it will be like the lights going out in a tough waterfront bar.

Murderer On The Roof

Behind them, according to people fleeing those villages, came a militia army of Chechen and Ossetian volunteers who had joined up with the regular Russian army. The volunteers embarked on an orgy of looting, burning, murdering and rape, witnesses claimed, adding that the irregulars had carried off young girls and men.

"They killed my neighbour's 15-year-old son. Everyone was fleeing in panic," Larisa Lazarashvili, 45, said. "The Russian tanks arrived at our village at 11.20am. We ran away. We left everything - our cattle, our house, and our possessions."

Achiko Khitarishvili, 39, from Berbuki, added: "They were killing, burning and stealing. My village isn't in a conflict zone. It's pure Georgia."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/14/georgia.russia

Not one German in this village escaped. not one woman escaped and not one girl- the seventy-year-old ones no more than those of twelve. If they had hidden in the barn, flames drove them out. The local farm leader's wife died under the rapings. But other women died too, after they had been taken by twenty men or more. The men died- all but four who escaped by mere chance. They died because they were fascists or had firearms or wanted to shield their women and children, or because with all the violence and drunkenness it just happened. Their dead bodies lay around in the ravaged houses, in the yards, on the street. The local farm leader dangled from the frame of his own barn door, hanged feet up, because he had been a fascist. By his side hung a boy of fourteen-- no one knew why.

'The Defeat In the East' by Juergen Thorwald

From the time of the Russian Civil War up until the present day the soul of a once great nation has been brutalized and burned out by evil men serving an evil purpose. The descriptions above could have applied equally to the Ukraine in 1933 or Afghanistan in 1987 or Chechnya in 1997. People in Russia turned in their neighbors to the secret police to get their apartments or sleep with their wives and were rewarded with medals for their Socialist vigilance. The Russians have been committing brutal atrocities without heart or mercy for nearly a century now. A society which once was at the forefront of the arts and sciences is now a burned-out, amoral hulk with a declining birthrate and an accelerating death-rate brought on by its severe and chronic alcoholism. Medical care is primitive and doctors have to be bribed to even look at their patients who are systematically robbed as they lay unconscious in their beds. The same rural exploitation that existed in the Collective Farm era exists today in the almost-depopulated hinterlands which produce a tenth of the food that they did in Tsarist times long before the Green Revolution increased yields on private farms everywhere else in the world. The only thing that that formerly mighty society produces of any value is crude petroleum and natural gas and exports are falling because the theft, oh excuse me, nationalization of the oilfields by Putin has brought them under the control of the same band of corrupt, incompetent thugs who wiped out Russia's entire class of intellectuals in the 1930s.
Now that sawed-off criminal Putin has decided to end the independence of Georgia and has sent in the squads of drunken animals which are his country's only real cultural export. Proud Russians like Mikhail Gorbachev, the guy who happily sponsored similar depredations in Afghanistan, are loudly averring that Russia was attacked by this tiny former province. Putin is restoring their national pride! Putin is restoring the national shame of a nation that killed the best members of its own people and then spread the murderous disease of communism to Eastern Europe and burned out the souls of each of those countries for half a century until the whole enterprise went bankrupt from sheer mismanagement.
The craven cowardice of the West is now on full display. The true emptiness of NATO has been unmasked by this sanguine misadventure. The NATO troops who cover cravenly in the secure areas of Afghanistan while the American and Afghan troops take the war to the Taliban are not likely to scare a brutal degenerate like Putin.
Hey, I know! Lets have a big rock concert and hold hands and sing songs about peace and raise some money so we can give the destitute survivors of the Russian onslaught in Georgia a bowl of mush once a week, providing the Russians will let us, of course.
If we don't get some kind of sense of urgency and start drilling for oil and building nuclear power plants NOW this is what the future is going to be like. Vile, heartless neo-communist regimes will complete the conquest of the world envisioned by Lenin and a new Dark Age will descend upon mankind, one where the thugs will be unrestrained in their power to torture and murder. It will be a world with a crashing population because the medical system will have been gutted by incompetence and greed and epidemics will run freely through the masses of cowering serfs.
We can get a handle on this. We are stronger than them because morality is strength. It is the only strength. That is why democracies defeat thugs almost every time. But our own democracy is in danger. If Barak Obama and the Democratic Party win this election any hope that we can survive the coming storm as a free nation is over. I know that many people despise and hate that inferior McLame, I do myself; but even if he has betrayed us again and again; even if you can't stand him on a whole panoply of core issues; even if he won't turn the direction this country is going in around, stopping Barak Obama and the Pelosi-ites is too important to waste our time casting protest votes for Bob Barr or some other comedy candidate or staying home nursing our grudges. We have to win this. This is the Big One! ANY Republican, no matter how retarded or liberal, is better than ANY Democrat, no matter how 'moderate' or sensible they seem to be. Our survival is in jeopardy, we have to act to save ourselves.

Ancient History

Sometimes, when the cares of the world weigh down on us as a nation, it's nice to take a little breather from the alarming present and ease our troubled minds by wandering back into the past. You know, get out the old history books and just do a little escapist reading. Now, I'm not talking about the important facts of US History as our schools teach it; we all know that stuff about Indian Genocide, the KKK, the McCarthy Years, how we're all responsible for slavery and JFK being shot, the stolen election of 2000, the growth of that vile monopoly capitalism that's killing the planet-- our malignant nation's "Tragic Past" as one presidential candidate calls it. No, I want to get away from all that and lose myself in a far distant past, one with nothing to do with our frightening present. Oh sure, people used to think that many of our traditions and most of our laws originated in the Roman Empire until we discovered that the US Constitution is really based on a mixture of Iroquois Law and the Ujamaa traditions of the African Slaves which were ripped off by the fiendish 'Founding Fathers' and credited to the Romans by the White Chauvinist Pigs who conspired to create a capitalist hell on Earth right here in our tragic nation.
Around the same time as those Founding Fathers there lived in England a historian named Edward Gibbon. He was considered, until the publication of Barak Obama's first book, the finest prose writer in the English language. Sometimes, just to take my mind off my troubles, I'll leaf through 'Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire' and muse over some random quotes.
Let's do it together, shall we?
Those were troubled times, the old Fifth Century. Here's how Gibbon describes the scene (all Gibbon quotes will be in Italics):

...every species of corruption polluted the course of public and private life; and that the feeble restraints of order and decency were insufficient to resist the progress of that degenerate spirit which sacrifices, without a blush, the consideration of duty and interest to the base indulgence of sloth and appetite.

Just imagine living in a place like that! There's more:

...and the mad prodigality which prevails in the confusion of a shipwreck or a siege may serve to explain the progress of luxury amidst the misfortunes and terrors of a sinking nation.

Phew, what a bunch of morons! But the regular people were pretty down to earth it seems:

A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the insubstantial visions of liberty and greatness.

One warmonger actually tried to get the Romans to abandon paying off their enemies and to encourage the people to defend themselves against the rising menace:

He exhorts the Emperor to revive the courage of his subjects by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute in place of the barbarian mercenaries an army of men interested in the defense of their laws and of their property; to force, in such a moment of public danger, the mechanic from his shop and the philosopher from his school; to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure; and to arm, for the protection of agriculture, the hands of the laborious husbandman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll bet this loser wants me to miss my favorite TV shows, too! At least we have that dunce W to blame our problems on. I guess the ancients did too:

...and the people imputed to the mischievous policy of the minister the public misfortunes, which were the natural consequence of their own degeneracy.

Well, we can see how out-to-lunch this Gibbon dude really is. But it gets worse. You see they didn't understand 'soft diplomacy' or cultural sensitivity in Gibbon's day so his chauvinistic mind allowed him to make the following statement:

The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the Council Of Ravenna he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.

Geeesh! Picky, picky, picky! Why can't we just Give Peace A Chance? but no, Gibbon continues with the insults:

They disdained either to negotiate a treaty or to assemble an army; and with a rash confidence, derived only from their ignorance of the extreme danger, irretrievably wasted the decisive moments of peace and war.

But, in the end, the Romans sat down at the table for a respectful round of negotiations that only can be achieved by good-hearted people getting together to resolve their problems in a civilized manner:

...the Romans were resolved to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric refused them a fair and honorable capitulation, he might sound his trumpets and prepare to give battle to an innumerable people, exercised in arms and animated by despair. "The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed," was the concise reply of the barbarian; and this rustic metaphor was accompanied by a loud and insulting laugh, expressive of his contempt for the menaces of an unwarlike populace, enervated by luxury...

But, what the heck. Dale Carnegie once said that 'No' is the first step toward 'Yes'. They just should have explained everything to him more clearly. I think that 'rustic metaphor' shows that they weren't dealing with a guy with any higher education or knowledge of the Rules Of Diplomacy. But Gibbon lets us off the hook a little:

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to deprecate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

So don't sweat it, baby! Its just these Evil Times. And if a tiny ally is overrun by a swarm of bloodthirsty barbarians just relax. These are local problems as Gibbon so correctly notes:

The Britons, reduced to this extremity, no longer relied on the tardy and doubtful aid of a declining monarchy.

So chill out, relax. Catch the Olympics on TV or go down to the health club and get a massage. You deserve it! All this worrying that the people who, by their superior merit, have managed to obtain positions of leadership are blindly leading us to destruction is just idle paranoia. After all, Rome's still there, isn't it?

The New Munich

The Russians have invaded Georgia! Aunt Pittypat has refugeed to Macon and Rhett and Scarlett are loading Miss Melly into the buckboard as a wave of clanking T-34s lead lines of screaming infantry forward across the landscape. The scream of Stalin Organs and the earthquake-rumble of massed artillery echoes through the peach orchards. Have they gotten to Atlanta or Savannah yet? Well, no, they've gotten as far as Abkhazia and South Ossetia...wait a second, I can't find those places in my 'Georgia' triple A travel guide. What? Oh, that Georgia! Who cares about that Georgia? What's it got to do with me?
The answer is PLENTY! Why are the retread KGB agents running Russia under the leadership of Vladimir Putin engaged in a piece of bloody and vicious aggression against it's tiny neighbor?
It's not like they want a few million more angry Muslims to plant bombs in apartment buildings and movie theaters. Georgia isn't exactly a juicy plum holding out the prospect of rich loot and economic advantage so what's the deal?
The oil price has dropped. For dictators like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Chavez that's really bad news. They can't compete with the advanced economies when it comes to producing heavy machinery or computer systems, they can't compete with and are even dependent on food grown by the three agri-business giants (The US, Canada, and Australia), they can't compete with Asia and especially China when it comes to consumer goods production and exporting; their moribund economies rise and fall in the price of one commodity, OIL! In the last couple of weeks the price of that commodity has fallen precipitously from $148 a barrel to around $116, with speculators still selling short and analysts talking about $60-80 being the support level.
Do you expect thugs like Putin to sit around and just let that happen while the economies of their countries sag like one of Obama's underinflated tires? Not in this universe. All of a sudden Russian airplanes are bombing civilians and Russian tanks are pouring across the border in an area which is crossed by a pipeline that carries 1% of the total world production of oil. Russian planes bombed the pipeline but 'missed'. In the age of JDAMs its impossible to imagine a relatively modern air force attacking an undefended target that they had plenty of time to assess and missing it completely. This isn't the Zimbabwean Air Force here. The Russians have had plenty of practice bombing apartment buildings in Chechnya to get any problems with their aiming technology worked out.
It's obvious what's going on. This is a blatant attempt to raise oil prices. It will work, too; just like the provocative actions by the Iranians in the Gulf raised the spot market price every time it started to slide. The Iranians are a bit inhibited because they don't want to provoke the cowardly democracies into pressing for a strike against their nuclear facilities so its the Russkies' turn. And when it gets right down to it, what do they have to lose? Nobody's going to do anything. Europe gets most of it's natural gas from Russia. Russia provides millions of barrels of oil to the world market every day. Their production has sagged since they expropriated the privately owned and foreign companies but they are still a major player.
The Demo-Obama solution, of course, is diplomacy. They think that talking to this bloodthirsty dictator, who has a veto in the UN, is going to make him betray the economic and political interests of his country. 'Persuasion is the tactic of the weak, but the weak are rarely persuasive,' said Gibbon in the ultimate refutation of the Power diplomacy of the degenerate socialists.
What would constitute strength in this case. Beyond a bit of sword-rattling it might be instructive to these dictators to know that the United States had just gone into high gear looking for oil and building nuclear power plants. A superpower that was exploiting it's vast energy sources would be a threat to the high prices these creeps have become hooked on and would have leverage in any negotiations that took place. With Putin and the boys threatening Georgia and the Ukraine the result of not stopping them now will create a monster that will certainly threaten the weak, degenerate, unarmed bunnies in the aging states of Europe. Our inability to act will compromise all sources of oil from the Eastern hemisphere; another pressing reason to start drilling NOW!
I've been hanging out at these supposedly right-wing blog sites where the policies of the Democrats are regularly castigated as unAmerican and serving to weaken our country. In many ways the people who are saying those things are right. But it's now becoming increasingly clear that every day, every hour, every minute we delay trying to become as petroleum-independent as we can threatens our national existence. The anti-drilling policies of the Democratic party have now become a threat to that continued existence. These tiny incidents are just a harbinger of the final showdown, the day the oil stops flowing. If we haven't done anything to stop this trainwreck from happening in the next few years we are going to be overwhelmed by a disaster unprecedented in our history.

Snakes On The Plane!

We've become used to metaphors where Marxist leaders are linked to pathfinding professions. Stalin was the Great Navigator, Mao the Great Helmsman, Castro The Maximum Leader and now we have Obama The Pilot Of Change! But it seems that the sputtering political bi-plane that Obama is in control of has hit a bit of turbulence. McLame has hit him hard, drawing a picture of an out-of-touch elitist who embraces a no-growth whacko agenda in league with a pack of Anti-American ideologues and his responses have played into that image. So the Candidate Of Hope is struggling with the controls as the Republicans scream for drilling and nuclear power and are starting to turn the agenda of the election around to their advantage. This would be a tough situation for any Pilot and as our Intrepid Hero grasps the stick tightly beads of sweat start to drip down his face, stinging his eyes.
But that's not his only problem, by far! He's got Snakes On The Plane! Snakes named Clinton, the most venomous kind. The female thinks she should be flying the plane and is stirring up her lesser snake buddies to go in the front seat and start to entwine themselves around the legs of the embattled pilot as he struggles to keep control of the plane. Hillary operatives, will-less zombies who never make a peep without a word from headquarters, are now loudly and publically demanding a floor vote at the convention. Those thirty point shellackings that Snake Woman gave our Intrepid Pilot after he supposedly clinched the nomination are being remembered as it becomes obvious that the same people that voted for the loathsome Hillary out of dismay over the leftism and anti-white racism of the Obama team have not warmed to him in the meantime and are almost certain to go with Paris Hilton's 'Wrinkly Old White Dude'-- McLame.
Meanwhile, on an African babe-sampling tour, the lovely and reptilian BJ gave an impromptu interview to some ABC info-babe that was dripping with barely-concealed venom towards Obama and The Big O's tactic of branding BJ and The Little Woman as closet racists. He very pointedly equivocated when asked if Obama was qualified to be President. One time in the 1960 campaign when reporters asked Dwight Eisenhower why Nixon should be president he responded, "Give me a week to think about it."
What Clinton did was worse than that gaffe because it was an intentional slight aimed directly at Obama, intending to do him damage. The most amazing thing about the whole encounter was the seething anger that was just under the surface of BJ's terse delivery. He couldn't bring himself to say anything positive about Obama. He gave a generic endorsement of Democrats in general but nothing specific about their standard-bearer.
So with his poll numbers tanking, the Clintons and their minions stirring trouble at the convention and McLame landing video punches that are having an effect the high-flying Obama campaign is struggling to stay on an even keel and move forward. But to where? What's his goal? Where is the theme of his campaign? The old Hope and Change baloney has burned itself completely out; it was a hit on the 'old' candidate Hillary-Snake anyway. So what does he have to offer, tire gauges? Higher taxes? That's inspiring.
Meanwhile the flight over at McLame Airlines was lost in the clouds but finally the sputtering, confused, liberal old duffer has straightened the plane out and started on a steady course touting an end to drilling restrictions and an end of the de facto ban on building nuclear power plants, an issue with traction that has been pumping up his poll numbers and those of the Republican Senatorial and Congressional candidates when all of a sudden the cry was heard, "Snakes On The Plane!" Five alleged 'Republican' Senators, lead by that drooling moronic idiot Lindsey Grahamnesty are working with five Democrats to develop a 'bi-partisan energy plan' that gives the anti-drilling Democrats a de facto drilling ban to replace the de jure one and then gives $85 billion taxpayer dollars to fund more 'alternative energy' boondoggles. When are these jerks going to stop stabbing the Republican Party in the back in the name of bi-partisanship? Just more Snakes On The Plane!
So now it's become like a disaster movie. Two planes are in the air, both filled with out-of-control packs of reptilian troublemakers, both in the hands of pilots who are less than qualified to be in the pilot's seat. The atmosphere is alive with invisible downdrafts and wind shear that adds an element of unpredictability to the flight. An Israeli attack on Iran's nukes could change the dynamics of the election in one day, for instance. A fractious and riotous Dem convention or one where the Obamanoids were stupid enough to give Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or any of the other of the myriad of black psychotic politicians prime-time facetime (and they are that stupid. They think that those guys make sense!) could bring the plane crashing into the mountain. The slimy, sabatoging Clintons will not benefit from the resulting crash, even though they would bring it on in the hopes of running against a Republican Newbie in 2012 as the feeble McLame retires. They are finished as a political force in this country. But that won't stop them from trying to grab as much power and get as much revenge on all the people they see as having betrayed them as they can. They are making themselves completely hated in the Democratic Party, even a total wipeout of the Obamanoids will not put them in a better light or make them emerge as an alternative power-center in the party.
The only hope that the Snake-Infested Dems have is the phenominal stupidity of Reptile Republicans like Graham and Co. who are working with fiendish diligence to destroy what is left of the Republican Party. It's exciting! As the planes wander aimlessly in the fog, altering course with no rhyme or reason we ground-bound spectators can only hold our breath and hope for the best.

A Major Gaffe

The Obamanator has stepped in it again. More amazing is that nobody in the media or the Democratic Party can see it. He's sure no Bill Clinton. Making the argument that having fully inflated tires is the same as drilling for oil is completely idiotic. We import 10 million barrels of foreign oil a day, if we cut that to 9.5 million we still have the same problem. We have to pursue every option. Anyone with any sense can see that. Nuclear, drilling, ethanol and the other alternative sources. Our economy can't expand if our energy supply is shrinking. Our economy can't expand if our currency loses it's value. The mask is now slipping as it becomes more and more clear how committed the Democrats are to contracting the economy.
"I'm saving the Planet!" Announced our horrible nightmare of a Speaker Of The House when a reporter dared to ask her about her stubborn refusal to schedule a vote on a bill to lift the drilling ban. Now we have the stark mental image of Barak waving a tire pressure gauge in our faces. The message is as clear as if it was his stiffened middle finger! Get out of your car and onto the bus you Plebeians, WE'RE saving the planet!
Now with the Republicans openly protesting Pelosi's arrogance and Obama getting ridicule heaped on him by talk radio even a party that appeared defunct even a month ago is showing signs of life. This election isn't going to be about Ted Stevens or John Murtha or Iraq or Medical Care or any of those issues; its going to be about energy, and in a larger sense it will be about whether we are going to take actions, in the name of Global Warming, that will severely hamper our economy. The Dems are on the wrongest of wrong sides of that issue. It worked for them when it was just something people saw on some corporate commercial about our Beautiful Green Future but now that it's come down to spiraling prices and real hardship the very group whose votes the Dems have counted on as theirs, the working class, are becoming alarmed and worried about the nation's and their own futures. All of a sudden the policy of forbidding drilling and putting a de facto moratorium on nuclear plants is seen in a different light. It also should be noted that the environmental groups give heavily to Democratic candidates and generally give nothing to the Republicans. A Democratic defeat at the hands of anti-enviro Republicans would be a disaster for those groups. Every sacred project they've worked on for the last thirty years could be overturned in a rush to grant leases, issue pipeline permits, and get to work on nuke power plants. This wouldn't be the placid atmosphere of the Bushie Years, there is panic in the air. The stampede will bring the fences down in a rush.
Can the Dems still win? It's possible but not likely. They have a complete dearth of leaders. The only one who can speak in public is Obama and he's been off his feed lately and is out of his depth on the energy issue. Handing the Republicans the Tire Guage image shows what a complete muppet he is. A nice clear visual image that an eighty-IQ retard can grasp perfectly clearly--WE"RE NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT HIGH RISING ENERGY PRICES!!! There isn't anyone who can put the Democratic message across because they can't put their message across; shrinking the economy and putting the government in effective control of it isn't something you really want to shout too loud about in times like these. The Republicans now have a clear, positive issue that people understand and genuinely agree with them on. Paris Hilton's 'Wrinkly Old White Guy' is starting to play to huge, enthusiastic crowds. States like Michigan are ripe for the taking. Even states like Pennsylvania. Ohio is not going to jump on the Depression Train with Mr. Tire-Gauge and the Red Army Chorus in Congress. If the Dems are going to pull this out they're going to have to come up with a reason why you don't want gas for your car. It's as easy as putting air in a tire, isn't it boys?

A Giant Dies

"When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."
Shakespeare 'Julius Ceasar' Act 2 Scene 2


On August first there was a solar eclipse in the far arctic North. The deep night moved across the Earth. The ancient Romans believed in portents that pointed to every important event or death and if we were to take Plutarch or Livy as a guide, as Shakespeare did, this omen presaged the death of one of the great geniuses of world literature. The media is misreporting this story hideously because as important as 'Gulag Archipelago' was in the course of the Cold War it is shunned by the glitteratti and ignored by the prestigious universities, which are far more likely to offer a course deconstructing 'Batman' than one exploring the 'Gulag Archipelago'.
'Gulag Archipelago' is not a book about the Stalinist prison system. There are plenty of fine books that explore the brutality of the Stalinist years. "I Chose Freedom' by Victor Kravchenko is one. 'Soviet Gold' by Vladimir Petrov is another. More penetrating looks into the true nature of the regime and the way that it thought were given in Malcolm Muggeridge's 'Winter In Moscow' or Eugene Lyon's 'Assignment In Utopia'. The stark, murderous cruelty of the Soviet regime was graphically portrayed by Nicoli Tolstoy in 'Stalin's Secret War' and 'The Great Betrayal'. Robert Conquest wrote several books on the subject well worth reading. So what makes 'Gulag Archipelago' different than all of these books? Why is Solzhenitsyn a genius who will live forever?
Solzhenitsyn explores the effect of utopian Marxism on the human spirit; both that of the obvious victims and on the perpetrators as well. He makes no bones about the absolute moral superiority of the Christians who were steadfast in their faith to their fellow prisoners and their guards. He describes, at one point, the effect of sincere belief acting on the brutal and bloodthirsty guards like a cross on a vampire. One old woman laughs at her interrogator, "You're afraid of your boss and all the people who work around you. You're terrified of failure but I know that I'm going to heaven and I'm not afraid." And the oaf backed off!
The first two books don't deal with the Gulag camp system at all. The first one is about arrest, interrogation and trial. Solzhenitsyn holds the Soviet penal code up to a scathing analysis, showing how abandoning the basic concepts of common law lead to complete, unrestrained brutality in the name of The Collective. The second is about transportation into the world of the camps.
The third book is about life in the camps broken down by subject; work, informing, food , children, women, all the various 'waves' of prisoners, life in the Gulag during The War and then the surge of inmates as the war ended and the secret police moved into Eastern Europe.
The fourth book, 'Soul And Barbed Wire', is about redemption. It tells how the camps were, in a way, the most free places in the Soviet Empire. A person could use their complete lack of material possessions and the freedom from the endless lies of a horrifyingly brutal and stupid ideology to become a wise, reverent and good person with a spiritual strength that stands in contrast to the moral squalor around him.
The last three books describe the road out of the Gulag and the death of Stalin.
I read the eight-page obituary in the New York Times. It was completely worthless. The writer didn't speak of Marxism or Socialism or Christianity or anything to do with the philosophical questions Solzhenitsyn raises in all his books about the evils of socialist ideology and in his later years the corrosive evil of modern consumerism; "our mass-living habits" as he described them in 'A World Torn Apart'. The obit-writer didn't go into the cataclysmic effect the books had in the intellectual life of Europe of the 1970's, where Marxist apologists for Soviet aggression and brutality were isolated and the satellite communist parties of the West began to decline. 'Gulag Archipeligo' explained why Marxism is wrong in the moral sense and wrong because it's a failure as a workable system. It's a part of history the Eastern Establishment was and is on the wrong side of. Also, because it questions the sense of the direction our elitists want to take us, Solzhenitsyn's works are very disturbing to the Modern Reader. You can't help but notice that the people who write for the New York Times had their equivalents in Tsarist Russia. The ruling class and the intellectual and artistic elites dabbled in a fashionable neo-Socialism, eventually discrediting and bringing down the corrupt and feeble ancien regime. The happy parlor revolutionaries then became the first victims of a New Order that labeled them as 'class enemies' , scooped them up like rats and herded them into brutal interrogations to break their spirits after which they were dispatched to lives as starving slaves in filthy, freezing prison camps living on the edge of survival. The thread that holds civilization together is called morality and the works produced by Solzhenitsyn are about what happens to a nation which removes that thread. Like the socialists are doing in this country now.
This is a giant. He stands shoulder to shoulder with the greatest writers in human history. Because the theme of good and evil in the human heart is a universal one his work will be read in a thousand years, if books are read at all. Only Orwell, in the Twentieth Century, can be compared to him. The shadow of the moon that ripped across the empty ruins of the Siberian death camps was a omen that one of the titans of human history was about to leave this world.

Pollo Chavez

Bush Lies Again! How much more of this are we expected to take while that warmonger runs amok all over the planet smothering the dreams of the hungry masses yearning for social justice?
In Columbia we are seeing the signs that the armed bullying tactics of the BushLied clique are forcing another indigenous resistance group to fold up it's tents and retreat. This is sickening. Can't these bloodthirsty imperialists ever get the message that their military bluster is not the answer to the world's problems? One look at the diplomatic successes that have ended the war in Darfur and brought peace and justice to its people, the negotiations that have brought electoral fairness to Zimbabwe, the UN's successful mission to bring food aid to the typhoon victims in Burma should show the futility of military efforts and the power of unleashed diplomacy!
Now, added to the bragging about the so-called 'victory' over 'terrorism' in Iraq we have to contend with more insults to cultural diversity as these retrograde fascists gloat at the destruction of the FARC resistance group.
In March of this year a force of elite Columbian troops, trained and equipped by the US, crossed the Ecuadorian border and raided a FARC training camp. One of the leaders of the FARC was killed and several computers were grabbed containing, apparently, loads of damaging information about the group. In the months since then the FARC has suffered defeat after defeat.
In the days after the raid Hugo Chavez made a bunch of noise about the sanctity of international borders. Here's how Reuters, a left-wing news service extremely sympathetic to Chavez put it:

Colombia’s police chief said documents were found in the raid in Ecuador showing that Chavez gave the FARC $300 million. Venezuela denied the charge and said it had its own evidence that the police chief was a drug-trafficker.

Colombia also linked the slain commander, Raul Reyes, with an official close to Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa.

“The government of Ecuador energetically rejects these accusations which cynically add to the hostile attitude shown in the recent violation of our sovereignty,” Ecuador’s government said. [Reuters]

Chavez rushed tanks to the border and made threatening noises but backed down extremely quickly when confronted with the Columbian military; well-trained with years of operational experience. Chavez can't say either of those things about his military. He also must have some doubts about his conservative officers and how loyal to the regime they might prove. Military defeats have brought down dictators in South America before and Chavez had little to gain and much to lose by pressing the issue. Even just with the limited noise he made his climbdown was a humiliation. As the economic scene in his country grows ever more grim and the crime wave unleashed by the gangs of thugs aligned with the ruling party effects more and more people his popularity continues to erode.
Which brings us to the real point of this post. Here we have an anti-US terrorist group that has been funding it's violent activities by selling cocaine in the US market decisively defeated. A bombastic enemy of our country, who denounced us before the UN and compared our President with Satan has suffered a humiliation and a loss of prestige. The forces of Democracy have struck a winning blow! Read All About It!
Except you didn't. The US media prefer Chavez to Bush. The Democrats are openly hostile to Columbia's ruling party. Nancy Pelosi recently spike a free-trade deal with the Uribe government. This war, another war won against terrorists by the persistent Bush, is viewed as a defeat for the forces of good by these 'citizens of the world'. The media has only one story line and they're not going to report news that doesnt fit that storyline. Even when the Columbians, using information captured in the Ecuador raid, rescued a bunch of long-held hostages the coverage was long on hugs and kisses with the family and short or background or analysis about the crumbling fortunes of the FARC or the success of Bush's policy in Columbia. One of the hostages, a French woman effusively thanked all the left-wing groups who had begged and sent petitions to Chavez, the UN and the thugs at FARC imploring them to release her and had scant praise for the Columbian military who rescued her and of course didn't mention that they had been trained and equipped by the US under Bush. They should have left her in the jungle with her ideological soul brothers. her fellow citizens of the planet on the left are none too happy about these developments and it shows how much the media is controlled by the left that this entire story has been effectively spiked or buried.