Special Graphic Post:
New Bumper Sticker by the Dark Wraith
Above is the latest bumper sticker created by your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums. This one's a beauty if I do say so myself. Maybe no more than a year ago, putting one of my bumper stickers on your car probably would have immediately earned you a set of slashed tires in many parts of the country. Times are different, now: most likely, your tires won't be slashed for at least a couple of days.
Wait...
Okay, I just read this marketing book that said something about not mentioning the downside of your product if you don't have to. I'm not sure what that's all about, but those guys are the experts, so you need to ignore that first paragraph.
Now, below is a graphical layout of all the bumper stickers I've designed and offered over the past year or so. Although the normal cycle I must follow is to pull one down before I offer another, anyone interested can order directly from me (not through the e-store) any bumper sticker in lots of 100 or 250 at a decent discount from the e-store retail price. If you would like to do so, contact me using the Feedback Form, which is always available over in the sidebar. Tell me which one you want (mouseover the desired image, and you'll see the inventory reference number), and specify how many you want to order in increments of 100 or 250. You'll get a quote within 24 hours.
Remember, this is a mid-term election year, so bumper stickers are mighty important. You can share them with your friends so they, too, can get their tires slashed by Right-wing thugs.
Wait...
That marketing book says it's not a good idea to mention how the product can bring harm to lots of people.
Lordie. Marketing certainly has its share of nuance.
Consider this an open thread as I gear up for publication later this week of the second article in the Dark Arts Politics series, along with a few other articles, including a rant on education, one of the very most rantable of subjects in my arsenal. (And I have no idea whether or not "rantable" is a word, but it should be. Of course, given that it has now been published here at The Dark Wraith Forums, it is.)
Say what you have to say. Sing praises, complain bitterly, speak obtusely, or bitch excessively. It's all part of a good thread on a quiet night here on the outskirts of civilization on the frontier of the 21st Century. Grab a chair and enjoy the company. In just a few short months, we'll know whether or not the neo-conservatives will rule for another two years with majorities in both houses of Congress, or whether they'll rule for the next two years with Democrats asking if it's really, really safe once again to have a spine. For God's sake, no one say, "BUSH" to them, or they'll vanish into a cloud of wuss-hood like they've been doing for the past six years. (And yes, "wuss-hood" is a word. See the parenthetical exposition above on "rantable" if you don't believe me.)
The Dark Wraith starts up the industrial-sized coffee pot for the evening's festivities.
Published 7/16/2006 06:18:00 PM
<< 13 Comments Total
So Dark Wraith, what do you think cam concievably be done about Hezbollah without starting a third world war?
I don't need coffee to wake people up!
If we had a government that wanted peace, a good first step would be to establish communications with both sides in the conflict.
That may be beyond their capabilities since there is no profit motive.
Any truth to the rumor that Jeb could step up as McCain's VP?
Would John survive the inauguration?
Good evening, nc gal.
Jeb Bush's star is waning rapidly. If I were a betting man, I'd bet on McCain playing a "national unity" card by tapping Joseph Lieberman to be his running mate if Lieberman loses his Senate seat. I honestly don't think that's as likely as some people think it is, but I might be wrong on that score. However, the fact of matter is that Lieberman's closest friend in the Senate is, and has been for quite some time, John McCain. It seems to me like a natural combination designed to fool people into thinking they can get the best of both worlds—two phony "moderates"—for the low-low price of handing America its ass on a silver platter.
That's how the Dark Wraith sees it, anyway.
Good evening, John.
Here's my solution, and I'll bet people aren't going to like it one little bit.
As others have suggested, bring Hizballah's leadership into secret dialogue, starting at a reasonably low level, but slowly working up to the top of the political command structure. Provide small, good-faith steps and don't worry if the leadership reneges on any reciprocations it promises.
At the same time, work diligently with the ruling party in Lebanon to bring it into a Camp David type of meeting, along the lines of what came about years ago that pretty much ended decades of tension between Israel and Egypt. Give every indication that Lebanon, too, can reap the rewards that have flowed to Egypt.
Avoid as much as possible allowing either the President of Lebanon or the political leadership of Hizballah to understand the extent and level of diplomatic contacts being engaged with the other party, but at the same time, don't make some big hush-hush secret of the contacts with the Lebanese President and his allies.
The issue with respect to Hizballah is not Israel: the Jewish State is a whipping boy for any militant Islamic organization that wants support among the Islamic equivalent of American rednecks.
The issue with Hizballah in particular, and with Hamas to a lesser extent, is its alliances. We need to peel the militants in Lebanon away from Syria, Iran, Russia, and China. That's no small order; we've allowed all kinds of interests extraordinarily contrary to American interests have a field day, and now we simply must get down to business.
This is why the idea of "wiping out" Hizballah is simply specious: the militant movements throughout the Middle East have some greater or lesser degree of self-styled justification for their bitterness, their violence, and their very existence, but that goes nowhere unless there's a continuing source of fuel.
The good news is that Israel actually wants very badly to pull its horns in, reduce its territory that it must defend, and be left alone. That's what the Ohmert government is all about. If we can get the political leadership of the militant groups in the area to pay attention to us, we can begin a long, slow, painful process of weaning them off the crack of Syria and Iran.
The problem is that a far bigger threat in the long run is the Shanghai Coöperation Organization, to which Iran is trying to attach itself like some big parasite. That mercantilist organization is going to do what's in its best interests, even if what's in its best interests causes theatre wars that sap Western alliances strength, resolve, and resources.
As SCO gets stronger, it will be less and less likely that we can get a handhold on troublemaking organizations like Hizballah, which means we need either to get them into our clutches, if possible, or to wreck them by making it look like they're in bed with us.
If we have to, we must use whatever intelligence resources we have to the end of making the leadership of the radical organizations a target of propaganda coming out of Iran and Syria aiming to appease even more radical elements. That will accomplish one of two things: if the leadership of Hizballah survives, it will be weakened immeasurably; if it doesn't survive, all that will be left (which will be there in scenario one, anyway) is a far more radicalized, militant wing that's easier to target as a terrorist organization that we can pay good money to the center of Lebanese power to extinguish. We were halfway there with the PLO at one time, but we never fed Arafat the money he needed to crush the burgeoning provisionals within al Fatah and the violent splinters that arose to become the nexus of Hamas.
This time, we need to do it right. It will take time, serious money, and a whole lot of subterfuge.
It will also take killing some people; but if we do it right, the blood will be on other people's hands, and we can stand back with a concerned furrow in our brow as that grim business gets handled by those who can do it better than we.
The Dark Wraith will lay off this for a while, now.
Good evening Dark Wraith:
I have just this evening returned from a gig in Las Vegas. I am happy to report that I escaped with my soul and self-respect reasonably undamaged. While wading through five days of email I found this from an American History professor who taught at the same junior college where I taught strings and audio production. It's thought provoking on the surface (minus some nit-picky little things I'm too tired to get into tonight) so I thought I'd throw it out here to be kicked around...
p.s. love them stickers.
G-8 Leaders Work to End Mideast Crisis?
Source here and also here.
* * *
Back room deals?
Rantable wuss-hood?
Or growning a spine - and a pair?
Guidance and/or critique, please.
:-(
Ooop...my bad:
Guidance/critique link fixed.
Good Morning Dark Wraith,
STRELNA, Russia - The United States and other world leaders reached an accord Sunday on a statement faulting the militant wings of Hezbollah and Hamas for violence that threatens "to plunge the Middle East into chaos," but also called on Israel "to exercise utmost restraint" in its retaliation.
The thing is, Hezbollah and Hamas are just a symptom. Until justice and liberty live in international law, and the law is applied, equally to all, there will be problems.
I have no idea how to get there from here.
Good Morning Dark Wraith and friends:
What my previous comment became was an example of trying to post when exhausted. Here is the email which is a post from bookseller:
A Theory
by Bookseller
Alexander Fraser Tytler [Lord Woodhouselee] once wrote:
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.
From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
Sounds familiar doesn't it?
Sadly, it does.
Tytler goes on to say:
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith
From spiritual faith to great courage
From courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to selfishness
From selfishness to complacency
From complacency to apathy
From apathy to dependency
From dependency back to bondage.
Here's the corollary I've compiled based on this last quote:
1695-1735: Bondage to Spiritual Faith [Roughly, from the time of the Salem Witch Trials to Jonathan Edward's Great Awakening].
1735-1775: Spiritual Faith to Great Courage [The Great Awakening to the Battle of Lexington, which began the American Revolution].
1775-1815: Great Courage to Liberty [The onset of the American Revolution to the Battle of New Orleans, which ended the War of 1812].
1815-1855: Liberty to Abundance [The so-called "Era of Good Feelings" to the emerging sectionalist crisis between the industrial North and slaveholding South].
1855-1895: Abundance to Selfishness [From Sectionalism to Imperialism].
1895-1935: Selfishness to Complacency [Imperialism to prolonged Total Warfare and Economic Depression].
1935-1975: Complacency to Apathy [World War II to the Nixon-Ford-Carter Malaise].
1975-2015: Apathy to Dependence [The National Malaise to Economic Ruin brought on by the Bush regime].
2015-2055: Dependence to Bondage [Economic Ruin to Wage Slavery in the hands of multinational corporations].
Based on this model, I estimate that our present way of life has less than a decade left of existence. I can only hope that I'm wrong.
Me too, son. Me too.
I am rested now and regrouping rational thoughts...
My dear Minstrel Boy. Well that was depressing. Not that I am disputing one bit of it.
Guess I had better start a big ol' corporation this year.
Thank you, Wraith.
The favor of a reply is, as always, greatly appreciated.
Good morning, Moody Blue.
Here's my problem. The current situation in the Middle East has a dynamic that is so obvious to me that I could literally close my eyes and type for 30 minutes, laying out exactly what's going to happen. The particulars of the events on the ground from moment to moment and even from day to day are largely irrelevant to the trajectory and end-point.
Yes, certain members of the G-8 are trying to broker a backroom deal; yes, the Israelis are following a well-worn path of obliterating their potential adversaries at the very level of capacity to carry out the duties, rights, and responsibilities of sovereignty or, in the case of Palestine, future sovereignty; and yes, the Israelis, for doing all of this, are going to leave in place the symbols of the generations-old nemeses in the the Middle East. They never killed Arafat, even though they could have, time and time again, and they'll do the same with Nasrallah or one of several other trouble-making leaders of Hizballah. The whole conflagration will cool down in a while, and the brokers of record will move in, help clean up the mess in Lebanon, and feel like they were the agents of quasi-peace who finally got the guns to stop roaring.
Israel will then negotiate a final border solution with a castrated Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza, relieved as he will be of the overwhelming power that Hamas has had in shaping Palestinian policy toward Israel.
Israel will, in the meantime, establish a security buffer zone in southern Lebanon, probably something about 20 miles wide, up to just south of the Lebanese city of Tyre.
Then we'll see negotiations and playing around with the idea of replacing the Israeli troops with a United Nations peacekeeping force in the security buffer zone. That will go on for some time.
A nervous calm will eventually settle over the region, with hot rhetoric and a relative absence of gunfire. Ultimately, status quo ante will return, with the ante being weaponry poised at enemies everywhere, but relative peace and quiet.
Until the next round.
It's so easy to see.
Now for the problem: something in my gut is telling me that it's not going to play out this way. It's a tiny voice, and I simply cannot put my finger on exactly what's nagging the Hell out of me.
Mind you, there's always background noise, intrigue, and little sparklers of weirdness in these flare-ups in the Middle East. Small mysteries are like a persistent weed that grows on the landscape of deterministic outcomes in politics, and the current crisis has no small share of its oddities.
But I honestly don't think that's what's behind my uncertainty. I don't mind uncertainty: I can always qualify my calls with some ifs, ands, ors, and buts; however, this time, I just cannot lay claim to the well-spring of my concern.
No, it's not Syria. The government in Damascus is relatively weak militarily, and its leadership is not nearly as willing as it would have been a generation ago to engage in full-blown hostilities with Israel; and that government, despite having a mutual defense agreement with Iran, is less than thrilled about having Iran come to its rescue in a show-down with Israel.
And as for Iran—setting aside its constant barrage of anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic propaganda—has no intention of giving Israel a pretext to terminate the Persian state's nuclear program, which in my judgment is considerably closer to deploying (not 'developing'—deploying) nuclear weapons than most other analysts believe.
None of that is what's bothering me. It's something else, and I do not yet know what it is.
I'll figure it out, but I shall likely do so after the whole situation has settled down just the way my better judgment thinks it will come to resolution, temporary as that resolution will be in the grand history of the mania that is the Middle East.
The Dark Wraith does not much care for being off his usual swaggering certitude about how things will work out.
None of that is what's bothering me. It's something else, and I do not yet know what it is. DW, 12:12:01 PM
You know I value your input.
I understand, and agree it “seems like” there IS something else. I’m feeling too unsettled about this newest mess in the Middle East -- and especially more so after re-reading:
the article on the Middle East Policy Paper:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm: Is an ambitious 1996 Middle East Policy Paper. A Clean Break recommended toppling the government of Iraq, "rolling back" Syria and Iran, and "electrifying" support for Israel in the US Congress in exchange for new missile defense contract opportunities. Three of the eight authors have since become prominent policymakers in the U.S. government.
...and:
A Secret Blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure 'regime change' even before he took power in January 2001.[...]
The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says: 'The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.'
...I’m left feeling a whole LOT more apprehensive?
The Dark Wraith does not much care for being off his usual swaggering certitude about how things will work out.
You’re allowed. When the inmates are running the asylum, it’s certainly understandable.
May I pour you a Tequila Sunrise??
;-)