This is the new blog:

http://eighthcircleofhell.blogspot.com/

Enjoy.

BT

Posted on Sunday 07 of January, 2007 [08:05:29 UTC]

In 16 more page views this here blog will have had 40,000 hits. At that time, I'll be switching to the new improved site, URL to come.

Posted on Saturday 06 of January, 2007 [17:00:52 UTC]

I am astounded at the reaction of the commercial media to Nancy Pelosi's ascent to Speaker of the House. What a bunch of sneering heathers they are, alternately making condescending "you go, girl" type remarks and then scoffing at the idea that a mere woman should hold such an important role, and isn't she awfully cute.

CNN's home page currently features a video clip called "Puckering Pelosi and the new kissin' Congress", presumably a compilation of kiss-greetings by Speaker Pelosi. You think those supercilious bastards would ever feature a piece like that about a male Congressman (or a female Republican)?

Look, women have been accepted into leadership roles all around the world. Margaret Thatcher turns out to have been a woman. Germany is headed up by Chancellor Angela Merkel, the woman Bush groped during the G-8 Summit. There are many more, extending back decades. But in America, it's a male game. The real Nancy Pelosi story for the mainstream media is that she is female, not that she has anything to accomplish in Washington (to be fair, probably a moot point).

Slate entitles their lead story about the first female Speaker as follows: "Woman On Top". Golly, fellows, isn't that a little tasteless? Holy shit.

http://www.slate.com/id/2156969/

An ABC affiliate headlines their story "Year Of The Woman?", as if one woman getting an important job somehow makes any goddamn improvement in the lives of the other 180,000,000 women in this country.

http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=local&id=4909620

News Hounds ("We watch FOX so you don't have to") reports that Fox News

"marked the occasion of the swearing in of the first woman as Speaker of the House with coverage that mocked her authority and depicted her policy disagreements with other members of Congress as petty jealousies typical of women. With video."

Further along in the News Hounds piece:

"As the trio discussed the story, Fox News displayed a banner reading "Congress Catfight." The term "catfight" is a belittling term often used to ridicule disagreements among women, casting them as fights among animals (especially an animal that is often seen as fickle and hard to understand like a cat). Saying a disagreement among women is a "catfight" is akin to saying that the women are less than human and their disagreement is based on something other than rationallity, intellect or principle. Men do battle. Women have catfights."

It's staggering, really. What a bunch of snotty prom queens (male and female) running the news today.

http://www.newshounds.us/2007/01/04/fox_news_belittles_most_powerful_woman_in_politics.php

The thing is, even Pelosi buys into this crap. From the Towanda, Pennsylvania Daily Review:

"Madame Speaker reaffirms women have ‘right stuff’

Nancy Pelosi shattered the glass ceiling over the marble halls of the U.S. Congress Thursday when she was elected the nation’s first-ever female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“This is an historic moment — for the Congress, and for the women of this country. It is a moment for which we have waited more than 200 years,” Mrs. Pelosi said in prepared remarks. “Never losing faith, we waited through the many years of struggle to achieve our rights.”

This is crap. Women don't have health care, unfettered reproductive freedom, jurisdiction over their own bodies, equality in pay, or freedom from bitchy reporters treating them with the arch patronization of high school senior girls choosing which freshman girls will make it to the Homecoming Committee. Madame Pelosi knows better, but she's gotten swept up in the applause for the one thing she hasn't achieved: being a woman. She was born female, and yet somehow that's the important thing, not what she's accomplished since then.

Posted on Saturday 06 of January, 2007 [15:45:39 UTC]

Humans,
I will shortly be moving this blog to a new location in a tonier neighborhood. There will be a new URL and bookmarks will require updating and so forth. The good news is the new location is far more comment-friendly, and lively debate via comments is what this curmudgeon likes best. Squabble amongst yourselves.

There is much happening in the political assphere of Washington; notably, Democrats are opposing Bush's plans to throw accelerant (in the form of more US troops) into the flames of the Iraq civil war. They are snarling like fierce little kittens. I look forward to lengthy 'how dare you, Mr. President' speeches followed by immediate and total capitulation. Their 'First 100 Hours' program should be a hoot.


Meanwhile, my good friend Courts is working at Myspace lately (it was that or live under a bridge abutment). He pointed me at a salty discussion of Sam Harris's book Letter To A Christian Nation. As I have a primitive and unused Myspace account I was able to weigh in with lengthy, bitter diatribes against the religious thimblewits attacking the book sight unseen. Don't know why I bothered-- it's like beating up a third grader on the playground because he likes Spider Man better than the Hulk. But I did, and here is one of those comments o' mine. If there is a god, I'm fucked.

The reason I put this up here is really the comments from the Jesoids. Observe the sequence of homilies and cliches stuck together to form sentences, the use of one's own personal experiences as evidence of something universal, the tendency towards bathos, and a petulant complaint against being questioned in the untouchable realm of religious belief, where unicorns and magic are real.

Visit the discussion for a real feast of such comments. The folks supporting the book are lost at sea, including myself; the enemies of godlessness, on the other hand, are in rare form.

__"Sam, it is always easier to be against something than to be for it. As a very wise man said, There is nothing new under the sun. In the past as well as in the future, people have said there is no God, but most of them have been forgotten, but the name of Jesus and his teachings live on. My dear husband of 54 years went to be with the Lord with the name of Jesus on his lips"

The name of Jesus is on my lips whenever I drop something on my foot, but that's not evidence the lord exists. Five thousand years ago you heard the name Anubis thrown around pretty often. It will be L. Ron Hubbard in another thousand years, the way things are going. The fact of the matter is that people love religion, they love whatever god their mammies told them about, but it's all fairy stories to keep them from getting lonely.

Folks on here tend to extend their own faith as proof that god exists. Married 54 years? Way to go! That is not, however, a qualification that proves god, any more than expiring with His name on one's lips.

"I don't believe this Harris guy even wants to examine or take a deeper look into the metaphors and literary devices the bible has. A lot of the content in the bible is laced with puns and deeper meanings than a common person cannot see right off. I'm glad he is firm in his belief in whatever he believes in but...crap."

Harris actually takes a big curly dump on the whole line about metaphors and literary devices. It says right in the Bible that every word of it is true, and if you don't believe it, you're screwed. Puns? There are no puns in the Bible, big stuff. I know what you mean though. You mean you're one of those wishy-washy cowards that thinks god will let you off the hook if you believe fifteen percent of his dictums, and you're so frigging clever you can see deep meanings in the Bible that a commoner like Sam Harris couldn't possible discover.

My guess? You haven't read the Bible, or Sam Harris's book.

There is ample evidence among these comments that people believe belief is a virtue in itself, like honesty or charity. But belief --or Faith, to use the preferred term-- has no more intrinsic worth than taciturnity or a tendency to stammer when nervous. This may be the root of the thing. If people could get past the idea that mere faith is an end in itself, they might see that there isn't anything else behind their faith except a willingness to believe.

Falling back on canards about how "if it's in the Bible, it must be true" is more of the same thing: backing up faith in something wholly imaginary with faith in something imaginary that is at least printed in a real book.

Two thousand years from now, there will be a new god that is the only true god, and instead of the Bible people will offer as proof of this new god reprints of a Cincinatti telephone book from 1978. Will that make the new god any more real? No. But the people of the future that believe in the phone book will rant and rave just as strenuously that it is proof their faith is worthwhile.

Oy.__


http://collect.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=books.feature&asin=0307265773

Posted on Saturday 06 of January, 2007 [15:02:53 UTC]

"The budget "will address the most urgent needs of our nation,'' Bush said. "In particular, the need to protect ourselves from radicals and terrorists, the need to win the war on terror, the need to maintain a strong national defense, and the need to keep this economy growing by making tax relief permanent."

So quoth Bush according to Bloomberg.

Can you find the most dangerous part of this presidential jawboning?

"protect ourselves from radicals and terrorists". That's the scary part. There have been dozens of instances of this new premise, 'radicals and terrorists', in the last few weeks. Watch for it to become part of the news lexicon without much examination, like 'surge' or 'normalcy'. And by June it will be just plain 'radicals', which includes anybody to the left of Pat Robertson, domestic or international, and then we're truly fucked.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aj9_F1Hd7i4c&refer=home

See, at the moment 'radicals' means 'militant Muslims', but if you thought 'terrorists' was a vague, general term (applied without distinction to animal rights activists, militias, actual terrorists, and opponents of CAFTA), you'll love 'radicals'. It can be applied to anybody at the edge of any debate.

From Pakistan's Daily Times:

"President Bush told a news conference on Wednesday that he was considering an expansion of the US army and Marines in Iraq for “the long struggle against radicals and extremists”.

He didn't even mention terrorists that time.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C12%5C21%5Cstory_21-12-2006_pg7_1

We'll also be seeing more of the term 'Islamofascism', which means nothing at all but is intended to evoke certain feelings in the auditor (fascism is "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism" according to the American Heritage Dictionary. Remind you of anything?)

This is all to say that far from catching a whiff of defeat, the extreme right in the US is cheerfully taking the terms of the debate (and the fight) straight into thousand-year-war territory, in which Christ and Mohammed duke it out in somebody else's desert, and they have no more real concern about losing Iraq than any other minor skirmish. In the big picture, they're winning.

Posted on Wednesday 03 of January, 2007 [17:00:34 UTC]

Read it and weep. First time I've seen the membrane of nostalgia penetrated by the stylus of true grief.

I'm not a Theroux fan-- but he mentions Bangalore, where I just spent some time, and I grew up in proximity to his own birthplace. What he describes, I know well, on both ends of the earth. I can only say that he's written the elegy for an America I also seem to have misplaced.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0102-63.htm

It's not all that good to be back here in the States, honestly. There are good people and places here. But the bigger entity, the aggregation we call America, is a heartless, false thing. India is one gigantic clusterfuck, sure, but it's an ancient and well-established clusterfuck one can rely upon to deliver the same kind of chaos all the time. America seems to be mutating rapidly, Hulk-fashion, into something mean and mindless.

I'm having a hard time working up the spit to say much here on ye olde blog, if only because the Democrats are so obviously not going to do jack diddly shit about any of the important crises facing the world today, and even if they tried it, Bush and his gang of rectoids are going to ignore their efforts and just keep on making things worse. A 'surge' in troop levels in Iraq? What the fuck does that mean? An 'increase', presumably to be followed by a decrease, as in 'a surge of electrical power' or 'a surge of tidal waters'. When will this decrease occur? Next year? Ten years from now? Meanwhile where are the public schools going? How about meaningful healthcare? The list goes on.

I think the problem is when one leaves the country for a few weeks, the spell is broken. It's like sitting cross-legged for five hours, as I did in India a number of times. After the first forty minutes your legs go to sleep and it's no longer a problem. But god help you if you get up, because the awakening process is damned uncomfortable. Leave America, and you get accustomed to the way most people in the world get through their days. Because it's somehow 'normal', however crowded and squalid 'normal' may be. Upon return to America's shores, you immediately sense something intangible but immense is wrong, as if in the USA gravity has been increased ten percent, or the color orange has disappeared from the spectrum. Our much-vaunted standard of living is so bitterly won, so grimly maintained, it's a joyless, exhausting thing. We make a thousand times more money and have a thousand times less repose. It is as if we are gifted with the power of flight, but only while we hold our breath and shove votive candles up our asses.

I still haven't gotten back in the swing of things. On the other hand, I'm not used to India either, so I'd better just calm down and get my American mojo back. Maybe I'm just all out of votive candles.

Posted on Wednesday 03 of January, 2007 [06:16:15 UTC]

Dear reader,

I am off to India for a couple of weeks. This means you will have to get your daily fix of you-know-damn-well-he's-right pessimism somewhere else for a few days. Mountain-moving (in the strictly secular sense) efforts will be made by this author to get to a computer and report on things there in the subcontinent. This will not be easy. In America, we have all the computers and no telephone help technicians; in India, the opposite condition pertains.

The occasion is the wedding of my esteemed co-worker Drone S. Iangar (I did not make his name up) and his appealing if very, very tiny fiancee Nirmitha S. Kumar. When I say tiny, I mean she appears to be sixteen feet away even if she's standing right next to you (or one, to put things in proper terms).

We will be starting in Bangalore, which I was astonished to discover is not in Maine, and progressing (if that is the word I want; devolving might be more apropos) by choo-choo train to Ahmedabad, which I am relieved to report is not the arms dealing capitol of Afghanistan as I originally thought (that is Asadabad). So in top Paul Theroux form I will be traveling with a crowd of drunken brahmin a thousand miles between acts of the wedding, which ought to be interesting.

The wedding itself includes all sorts of Hindu revelry such as 20-hour chanting sessions (for which stand-ins are hired) and the bride and goom sitting on mats at five in the morning holding coconuts while guests (the three guests awake at that benighted hour) pour milk all over them. There will be feasts and music. The groom's mother is a classical Indian singer of some repute, so we might get a few bars of Tosca out of her if the bourbon does its stuff.

This is all very interesting, but it lacks pathos (unless striding fat, hated, and wealthy through crowds of starving children with upraised palms strikes you as moving; I find it merely a hindrance, and will not hesitate to wield my Panang lawyer to good effect until the blighters learn their place, dharma and all that). So for some good old Anglo-Saxon (or rather Celtic) dramatic tension, my beloved and extremely pale lady friend Corinne will be at my side the entire jaunt. Unless she meets a film star.

The reason this adds spice to an already well-herbed broth of exotic travel high jinks is Corinne has a bizarre but interesting genetic flaw (some would call it a defect; I scorn such obloquoy) that causes her immune system to believe that her eyeballs belong to somebody else. So her body has spent the last decade trying to eject them from her head. I kid not. This condition can be staved off by a combination of huge, poisonous shots administered directly into the skin of the eyeball with a needle the diameter of my Aunt Ada's wrist, and massive doses of a chemotherapeutical stew that gives the recipient a profoundly depressed immune system. It's like volunteering to have HIV, but without the awkward bath house connotations.

Take that to India, where they have amoebas the size of small dogs, and you have an interesting dillemma. One (or you) wishes to immerse oneself in the cradle of human affairs, yet one must also wear gauze masks, smear gelled alcohol all over one's hands, avoid ice cubes, fish tacos, and bat guano, and generally keep a weather eye out for sources of disease. When I say 'one', really I mean Corinne.

Luckily she is bold and fearless and will probably not get half as sick as I will, but you must admit, gentle reader, that it does add a certain Je ne sais pas ce qui se produit to the proceedings.

All of which is an apology and a gloat at the same time. Indian weddings are spectacular, and this one will be as splendid as any. We've been charged to take a couple bottle of liquor through duty-free for lubrication purposes; after that we're leaves on the mighty river, with nothing to do but grace the proceedings with our deplorable American mixture of hubris and condescension. The train ride will be memorable, of course, and the opportunity to traverse the subcontinent on someone else's dime is not to be missed. Apparently the drivers hired for our convenience in Bangalore are very excited as they've never driven white people before. I'll soon cure them of that nonsense.

So there you have it: things are just getting interesting in America, what with my roly-poly new puppy (a small dog the size of an amoeba), leaked memos and the implosion of the White House, Bush's delusional refusal to envision pulling our collective asses out of the hottest fire a torrid region can provide, the worst Congress in American history limping out of session with shit in its britches and egg on its face, the dollar folding up like a cheap screenhouse in a high wind, and the holiday season upon us. Yet I will be gone far away, posing as a Canadian, eating unwashed mangoes and contracting dysentery in that great exuberant crucible of humanity that brought us Ghandi, the Kohinoor Diamond, and Bajaj motorbikes.

I will, if time permits and I'm sober, correspond from that distant clime; otherwise, I wish everyone a piss-poor holiday season until such time as I return. If I do not return, it is because I have gone native. Weep not for me then; I'll open a nice little ashram and sell yoga candles to Australians. All will be well.

Remember, my book makes an ideal holiday gift: merely click on the picture and buy a dozen copies today.

Posted on Tuesday 05 of December, 2006 [14:45:07 UTC]

Dear reader,

I am off to India for a couple of weeks. This means you will have to get your daily fix of you-know-damn-well-he's-right pessimism somewhere else for a few days. Mountain-moving (in the strictly secular sense) efforts will be made by this author to get to a computer and report on things there in the subcontinent. This will not be easy. In America, we have all the computers and no telephone help technicians; in India, the opposite condition pertains.

The occasion is the wedding of my esteemed co-worker Drone S. Iangar (I did not make his name up) and his appealing if very, very tiny fiancee Nirmitha S. Kumar. When I say tiny, I mean she appears to be sixteen feet away even if she's standing right next to you (or one, to put things in proper terms).

We will be starting in Bangalore, which I was astonished to discover is not in Maine, and progressing (if that is the word I want; devolving might be more apropos) by choo-choo train to Ahmedabad, which I am relieved to report is not the arms dealing capitol of Afghanistan as I originally thought (that is Asadabad). So in top Paul Theroux form I will be traveling with a crowd of drunken brahmin a thousand miles between acts of the wedding, which ought to be interesting.

The wedding itself includes all sorts of Hindu revelry such as 20-hour chanting sessions (for which stand-ins are hired) and the bride and goom sitting on mats at five in the morning holding coconuts while guests (the three guests awake at that benighted hour) pour milk all over them. There will be feasts and music. The groom's mother is a classical Indian singer of some repute, so we might get a few bars of Tosca out of her if the bourbon does its stuff.

This is all very interesting, but it lacks pathos (unless striding fat, hated, and wealthy through crowds of starving children with upraised palms strikes you as moving; I find it merely a hindrance, and will not hesitate to wield my Panang lawyer to good effect until the blighters learn their place, dharma and all that). So for some good old Anglo-Saxon (or rather Celtic) dramatic tension, my beloved and extremely pale lady friend Corinne will be at my side the entire jaunt. Unless she meets a film star.

The reason this adds spice to an already well-herbed broth of exotic travel high jinks is Corinne has a bizarre but interesting genetic flaw (some would call it a defect; I scorn such obloquoy) that causes her immune system to believe that her eyeballs belong to somebody else. So her body has spent the last decade trying to eject them from her head. I kid not. This condition can be staved off by a combination of huge, poisonous shots administered directly into the skin of the eyeball with a needle the diameter of my Aunt Ada's wrist, and massive doses of a chemotherapeutical stew that gives the recipient a profoundly depressed immune system. It's like volunteering to have HIV, but without the awkward bath house connotations.

Take that to India, where they have amoebas the size of small dogs, and you have an interesting dillemma. One (or you) wishes to immerse oneself in the cradle of human affairs, yet one must also wear gauze masks, smear gelled alcohol all over one's hands, avoid ice cubes, fish tacos, and bat guano, and generally keep a weather eye out for sources of disease. When I say 'one', really I mean Corinne.

Luckily she is bold and fearless and will probably not get half as sick as I will, but you must admit, gentle reader, that it does add a certain Je ne sais pas ce qui se produit to the proceedings.

All of which is an apology and a gloat at the same time. Indian weddings are spectacular, and this one will be as splendid as any. We've been charged to take a couple bottle of liquor through duty-free for lubrication purposes; after that we're leaves on the mighty river, with nothing to do but grace the proceedings with our deplorable American mixture of hubris and condescension. The train ride will be memorable, of course, and the opportunity to traverse the subcontinent on someone else's dime is not to be missed. Apparently the drivers hired for our convenience in Bangalore are very excited as they've never driven white people before. I'll soon cure them of that nonsense.

So there you have it: things are just getting interesting in America, what with leaked memos and the implosion of the White House, Bush's delusional refusal to envision pulling our collective asses out of the hottest fire a torrid region can provide, the worst Congress in American history limping out of session with shit in its britches and egg on its face, the dollar folding up like a cheap screenhouse in a high wind, and the holiday season upon us. Yet I will be gone far away, posing as a Canadian, eating unwashed mangoes and contracting dysentery in that great exuberant crucible of humanity that brought us Ghandi, the Kohinoor Diamond, and Bajaj motorbikes.

I will, if time permits and I'm sober, correspond from that distant clime; otherwise, I wish everyone a piss-poor holiday season until such time as I return. If I do not return, it is because I have gone native. Weep not for me then; I'll open a nice little ashram and sell yoga candles to Australians. All will be well.

Posted on Tuesday 05 of December, 2006 [14:44:08 UTC]

I am pleased to note that John Bolton, one of the most unpleasant men in Washington, will not be keeping his post as UN ambassador. I'm sure Bush will find some equally shitty individual to fill the post in Bolton's stead, but at least it's one more poisonous asshole being removed from a position that would allow him to piss on the rest of the world.

Heavens, reverend, such language.

Posted on Monday 04 of December, 2006 [15:34:30 UTC]

I've been saying it for years, but it is now visible to the naked eye: George W. Bush is insane. He no longer makes sense when he talks, and I mean just for a few seconds. His utterances are devoid of information or accountable facts. He simply says things, and you can believe them or not, it doesn't matter. Because they are just statements, absent context or content. My kid talked the same way when he was two years old, but he wasn't president of the United States at the time, so nobody made a big deal out of it.

Perhaps more worrisome, Dick Cheney, the putative vice president but the man generally understood to actually be directing the government, is also insane, and as with Bush, it has become resoundingly obvious. His bellicose pronouncements against Iran, Democrats, and reality in general are particularly striking of late. He maintains long-debunked fictions like the existence of Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction' (a preposterous but catchy term that I cannot help using) and the notion that al Qaeda somehow cunningly manipulated America into the situation in the Middle East, as opposed (for example) to America having started the whole fucking thing on its own. Let us remember that although Bush sends armies against imaginary enemies, and those armies are killed by different enemies (which is awful), Cheeney not only heartily agrees with these efforts, but also likes to mass-slaughter captive game birds and blow his friends' faces off with a shotgun. At least Bush is afraid of weapons. That's a start. I am guessing Cheney would love to do a little aggressive interrogation of his own, if he could get access to some copper wire, a couple of tank batteries, and a nice quiet CIA oubliette stuffed with Afghanis.

I'm maundering about these things because we're in an odd lull period: there's lots of exciting news, all of it is bad, and even the major commercial media have decided to admit Iraq is gripped by 'civil war', a term dreaded for some reason although it's no more dreadful than ordinary 'war' or 'occupation'. But none of this news is surprising or novel in any way. It is exactly what one would expect, given the circumstances. At the same time, the 'new broom' Democrats, who are about to take control of the least branch of government, the Legislative Branch (beneath, in ascending order, the Judiciary, Executive, and Lobbying Branches), are already revealing themselves to be incapable of aggressive, steadfast governance. They're exactly the pack of weak, media-unsavvy, squabbling, scaredy-cat cool-kid heather-wannabes we all figured they were.

So the next few weeks, extended by the holidays, are going to be entirely rote. Unless an outside actor decides to raise hell and we get another terrorist attack or something. Martial law, kiddies, heh heh heh. Waiting and seeing is unsatisfying.

Posted on Sunday 03 of December, 2006 [20:47:16 UTC]