Special Blog Post: A Realist's Best Shot at New Year's Wishes

May your job last a few more months.

May your physical maladies be somewhat less than agonizing.

May the wind be from your back and not from your backside.

May your pets not eat you when you die alone in your home.

May you have few and relatively unobtrusive new liver spots on your skin.

May you watch hours of congressional hearings where Democrats pretend to have a spine.

May the emotional problems of your neighbors not involve you too much.

When you lose your job, may you discover that you actually like the flavor of dry dog food.

May you not be sitting on the john in a public restroom when the person in the next stall screams, "JIHAD!"

May your prescriptions cost less than your annual income.

May the disappearance of sensation in your reproductive organs not bother you too much.

May you not hear what kids say about how you smell.

May you continue to live under the illusion that you don't look too bad when you're naked.

May Bill O'Reilly not give out your home address on his show.

May the collapse of the banking system not happen right after your paycheck has been deposited.

May you not be rendered to a secret CIA prison in the Second World.

If you are rendered to a secret CIA prison in the Second World, may you be allowed a latte break each day.

May your dossier at the National Security Agency not be requested by Dick Cheney.

May your dossier with the Mossad not be marked "Pending Action."

May you not be stopped by a cop whose badge reads: "It's Giuliani Time!"

May the RFID chip you are forced to wear to keep your job not have electrical surges.

May the Chinese let you keep the clothes you're wearing when they call in all the debt we owe them.

When you pass through the machine that shows your naked body to the TSA screening guys, may you not hear them laughing hysterically.

May you not hear your surgeon say, just as you're going under anesthesia, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

May the administrative director of your region when martial law is declared not be Pat Robertson.

May the genetically modified produce in your refrigerator never say, "Feed me."



And finally...

May you be holding a giant banana cream pie when George W. Bush walks up to shake your hand.


And so, in summary...

May you have a Wonderful New Year!

Special Graphic Post: Justice, the Main Event

This graphic may be reposted with attribute.



The Dark Wraith thanks the neo-cons for getting the ball rolling with the warm-up act in Baghdad.

Editorial: The Execution of Saddam

Update
10:20 p.m. EST--Saddam Hussein has been executed.

◊            ◊            ◊
Saddam Hussein is "hours" from execution, according to his attorneys. In my editorial of November 6, 2006, "In Moot Defense of Saddam," I set forth my condemnation of what constitutes yet another brutish violation of international law by the Bush Administration and its various agents of opportunity.

Writing at her blog, BlondeSense, Liz notes that Saddam's execution is the result of conviction on capital charges related to "...killing 148 people who were planning to assassinate him back in 1982." In comments on the thread from that article at BlondeSense, I expressed my assessment of what will result from Saddam's hanging. In edited and expanded form, I herewith publish that assessment as an editorial position of The Dark Wraith Forums.

Spiteful vengeance breeds spiteful vengeance. Despite the belief by neo-conservatives and a fair number of supporters of capital punishment that they are the best at all manner of retributive violence, and despite the American people's belief that we are seeing the worst of the quagmire that has become our unjustified, illegal attack on and occupation of Iraq, we as a nation have not even begun to see what horrors may rise from the sands of that grim and ancient land.

The old saying, "Paybacks are a bitch" is an understatement when it comes to the consequences that will flow from the execution of Saddam Hussein. The Sunnis who were Saddam's associates, allies, and family will ensure that the payback for our killing of him constitutes the kind of bitch that will keep on giving and giving, generation after generation. We are opening something far worse than the garden-variety war we've been losing in Iraq.

We are, in fact, about to open a tribal blood feud.

George W. Bush, the man whose base of support in the Christian Right has long looked to him to return America to a country of traditional values, has now succeeded in reviving for all Americans one of the deepest and most ancient of such values. The right of a tribe to exact revenge upon an offending tribe will now be exercised by the Sunnis, be they Ba'athist remnants, al-Qa'ida terrorists, villagers from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, or some other force with timeless values, old means, and newly inspired motive.

Whether we in our individual leanings be conservative or liberal, Leftist or Right-wing, we are now—perhaps in a way entirely foreign to us in all our modernity—members of a tribe by virtue of an act by the leader. As such, each of us individually now qualifies by ancient rites and privileges of the aggrieved to pay for what has been done to a member of another tribe, one far more attuned to "traditional values" than we.

And yet, when that payback is visited upon us—and it will come to us—we shall scream bloody murder at the injustice of the outrage. That, of course, is to be expected of a tribe that has lost its understanding of tradition.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

The Written Peace: Open Forum of December 27, 2006

A nice open thread is in order. Since Christmas Eve, I have been traveling across the heartland of America. My Jeep broke down along the way. That happened late last night. It was bitter cold, and I was in the middle of nowhere. It was some time thereafter that I lost my Christmas spirit. I could not find decent irony even in the fact that I might die from hypothermia with the effects of global warming so close at hand.

Stupid Winter. Stupid old truck. Damnable repair bill.

So much for a new computer for another six months.

Everything is relative, though. At least I'm not in some secret prison being tortured by the agents of freedom-loving America, and at least I'm not some hapless citizen of Baghdad wondering if a new surge of U.S. troops is going to use more humane methods to lay waste to my neighborhood than the local militias have been.

I have now made it back to my base of operations, and I should like to hear what's on readers' minds. We have plenty of news to discuss.

Former President Gerald R. Ford has just passed away. Although I understand some negative sentiments toward him, I cannot share in anything remotely resembling disdain or dislike for the man who briefly held the Presidency. His tenure was marred by acts contrary to my positions—vetoing the Freedom of Information Act comes to mind—but pardoning ex-President Richard Nixon is not something I hold against him. That said, the silliness about "healing" after Watergate is just so much mainstream media sappiness. Ford was a man of his time, and a certain type of Republican of an unusual time in the arc of modern conservatism.

In that time, a brutal struggle was underway within the GOP. Nixon's impeachment was, in my judgment, not a turning point, but instead merely a post hoc excuse by those within the Republican Party who would ultimately prevail. A relatively moderate (by later standards) wing—call it, if you will, the "Rockefeller Republicans"—played by a set a rules in which civility was important. Gerald Ford was in that wing. So was Barry Goldwater to some extent, despite the character assassination done upon him by Johnson's campaign media geniuses. This civility was a mirror image of that within a strong faction of the Democratic Party. Jack Kennedy was in that wing, but Lyndon Johnson was not.

The viciousness of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and other early monsters of operational modern conservatism became a template for what would much later, in our time, be the ascendant beast that has consumed virtually the entire Republican Party, and Nixon became their very own martyr. Ford kept him from becoming their very own crucified deity.

Somewhat more introspectively, while we're on the subject of who was in which camp of the Republican Party before it became so thoroughly venal, perhaps it would do well to look closely at what was not so bright and sunny within the Democratic Party of the 1950s to the 1970s. Perhaps if LBJ hadn't been, himself, such a mean, overbearing son of a bitch, he wouldn't have found Hoover so useful to keep. And while I'm on the subject of Hoover and the Democrats who let him become a role model for institutional Right-wing insanity, perhaps if John Kennedy had been in some semblance of control of his desire to feed his wealth-and-power domination complex through sexual conquests, Hoover wouldn't have had so much on dirt on him (and just about every member of Congress, too, for that matter) that JFK couldn't stop the wicked FBI director from establishing the foothold of venality that would control Washington D.C. for two generations and teach the Republicans things they needed to know about turning hate from a tool of federal law enforcement into a weapon of Machiavellian power politics.

But that's all speculative with respect to the rise of cruelty in party politics. The Republicans of today have many inspirational leaders; and although they're going to drool over the body of a fundamentally decent man like Ford and make it look like he's what they're really all about, we all know differently. George W. Bush and his neo-con cronies don't hold a candle to Gerald R. Ford and the old, moderate wing of the Republican Party.

For my own part, when warriors depart the battlefield having had their bodies separated from their souls, the time of war with them is over, and honoring them is only right, despite what may have been bloody conflict when they were alive. That is why, despite how much I disagreed with Pope John Paul II on many issues, I could not join the chorus of disrespect for him that swept some parts of Blogosphere Left upon his passing. It is a matter that goes beyond the word "civility" and touches upon the very nature of ideals about what we want from our society.

In that same measure, though, I shall not "honor" George W. Bush when he passes from this Earth, as he surely will some glad day. Such disrespect as I shall hand him during his life and upon his grave every bit as much reflects that 'very nature of ideals' about what I want from this society and what he and his enablers did to diminish the hope of ever achieving them.

Agree or disagree in comments as you feel necessary.

I should turn to other matters. Welcome must be given to new commenters, including Kathy McCarty of the Kathleen McCarty Website, Queen Mum II, Joe, trog69, and snuffy. Some of these good people aren't exactly new around here, but I cannot remember for the life of me whether or not I've ever welcomed them.

Once I have gathered for myself a night's rest and a day's work prepping for next semester, I'll begin the long-planned code and architectural upgrades here, at Big Brass Blog, and at The UnCapitalist Journal. That could get really ugly.

Ah, yes, and about those challenging problems I posted a couple weeks ago in "Scholarly Snippets and Quantitative Quandaries": although readers hit most of the right answers, a few should be provided here, with more to come later. The gravity problem was apparently too easy.

Here's a question for the Isaac Newton fan club. Suppose you're on a sailing ship cruising at a decent speed over the waters. You have a 16-pound bowling ball in your hand, and you climb up the main mast so you can stand with your bowling ball in the crow's nest. Once you get up there, you face the stern (rear) of the boat, which you might recall is flying along at a nice clip, and you drop your bowling ball. Oops. That's going to hurt if it lands on somebody's head.

If someone is standing on the deck, would it be safer to be right below the mast you'd climbed, or would it be safer to stand near the rear of the boat? What's the reason for your advice?

nightshift66 was the first of several, including Minstrel Boy of Harp and Sword, to stomp on that one. It is, indeed, far safer to stand toward the rear of the boat than right under the mast because the ball as it is going down the mast is carrying all of the forward momentum of the ship and the fellow who had just released it. That's conservation of momentum at work: an object in recti-linear motion tends to stay in that motion unless acted upon by a countervailing force. In this case, the only countervailing force would be the air through which the ship is traveling, but even that isn't going to be an issue of any magnitude for two reasons: first, the mass of ball will to a large extent overcome air resistance (as nightshift66 points out); and second, since this is obviously a sailing ship (hence, the mast), it is probably traveling in the direction of the prevailing air current, which means a considerable component of the overall air pattern around that bowling ball will be moving with and at a speed close to that of the ship and everything on it, including the bowling ball, thereby further reducing the air around the falling ball as a 'countervailing force' upon it.

A surprising number of people in the modern world get misled about conservation of momentum because, when an object is thrown out a car window, it seems to lose all of its speed almost instantly, disappearing behind the vehicle as if it has lost all of its forward momentum. That, of course, is simply the result of the object being thrown into a wall of non-moving air, which presents the 'countervailing force' that alters the forward motion.

And while we're on the subject of conservation, the following, fairly well handled by our long-time commenter OddJob, was another problem in that article.

Horace is on a diet, but he's dying to have some delicious pie, so he makes a decision that tomorrow, all he'll eat in a 24-hour period is half-a-pound of pie, and all he'll drink is eight ounces of tasty soda pop. His reasoning is obvious: the total weight of what he consumes tomorrow will be exactly one pound—eight ounces of pie and eight ounces of drink—so the very most he could possibly gain as the result of his one-day excess is one pound. That's all: one lousy pound. And he gets to satisfy cravings that are driving him out of his mind.

Is Horace's logic correct? If not, why not?

Horace is relying upon what is essentially a conservation principle involving weight. If he ingests only one pound of food, then no more than one pound of weight, probably less, could possibly stay in his body and become fat. No matter how you re-arrange atoms and molecules, the resulting atoms and molecules cannot weigh more. The end result of such alterations could have a different density, but not a different weight. Thus, Horace would be entirely correct if all he were to have ingested was one pound; but, unfortunately, he ingested more than one pound through that 24-hour period. In fact, he ingested a whole lot more than merely one pound of food, even though he had no idea that he was doing so.

What was Horace forgetting? Air. Lots and lots of air, which contains oxygen. Air is actually quite heavy. We don't notice its weight for a couple of reasons: first, air pressure on our bodies is counteracted by pressures from within and surface rigidity on the exterior of the body that give us the impression that the air around us is without weight. Moreover, even though air is heavy, its constituent atoms and molecules are not connected like they are loosely in liquids and rigidly in solids. This means air "gets out of the way" very efficiently as we move through it, giving the impression that it isn't a substantial thing, even though it is. That one pound of food Horace ate could very easily become considerably more than one pound of weight gain, not because the food, itself, changes weight, but rather because the constituent molecules of the food have considerable and continuing opportunity to react with the many pounds of oxygen Horace will inhale through the 24-hour period of his experiment. That's why a pound of food can produce metabolic energy and a goodly load of waste products while still having enough punch left over to add some fat to your body.

The moral of the story is clear: if you want to lose weight, not only must you reduce your total food intake, but you must also stop breathing so much.

One more problem solution should be enough for the evening.

Suppose you're in a room with other people. How many people would have to be in that room for there to be a 50-50 chance that someone shared your birth date (month and day)?

A) Fewer than 25 people.
B) Between 26 and 50 people.
C) Between 51 and 200 people.
D) Between 201 and 365 people.
E) More than 365 people.

The answer is A). More specifically, the answer is 23 people. That's right: in a room with only 23 people, there's a (slightly better than) 50-50 chance that someone will have the same birthdate as you. I shall not fatigue you with the mathematics of the solution. Suffice it to note that this is a classic problem in a first course in probability theory that demonstrates how so-called "conditional probabilities" can make actual answers deviate considerably from what "common sense" would otherwise lead people to believe. It is this inaccurate common sense, by the way, that allows all kinds of shenanigans to be used by statisticians, the media, corporations, and even law enforcement officials to mislead the average, even well-informed person to incorrect conclusions based upon uncritical assessment of statements that have quantitative underpinnings. This is the case in everything from "68% of voters identify themselves as 'conservative'" to "this drug test is 99.9% accurate."

If anyone is interested, I should be teaching a stats course again this Summer. Take my course, and you'll come away with quite a different perspective on statistics, probability, and the way numbers are presented as objective when, in fact, numbers are an essential ingredient in many of the best lies we are told these days.


Enough rambling. Leave some comments. Nothing is off-topic here at this bleak outpost on the frontier of a joyless and altogether rather scary new century. If the crowd wants, I'll leave the espresso bar open all night. There should be some relatively fresh chips in the back room, provided Mr. Goat hasn't been back there already and eaten them, and there should be some relatively stale jugs of something that used to be wine under the cabinet, provided blackdog hasn't been prowling around again where he's not supposed to. If the crowd gets rowdy, maybe we'll have a nude breakdancing competition.

Or maybe not.




The Dark Wraith will be back after he's gone out to the parking lot one more time to see if his Jeep looks any different with five hundred bucks worth of repairs on it.

Special Blog Post: Christmas 2006

Special Analysis: Words, Pictures, and Reality

Several days ago here at The Dark Wraith Forums, in the sidebar frame, "The Dark Wraith Recommends," I posted the link to a YouTube capture of a CNN story from late November about an attack on a convoy in Iraq. The video was shot by a civilian named Preston Wheeler, an employee of Halliburton who was driving one of 12 trucks with a five-vehicle U.S. military escort.

Somewhere along the trip, the convoy made a wrong turn onto a road that would prove to be a dead end. As the convoy went along, people started throwing stones at the vehicles. The first frame at left shows a single Iraqi hurling stone at the convoy. Shortly thereafter, what at first appeared to be little more than potshots from AK-47s started hitting the trucks. Wheeler's truck got hit. The second frame at left shows his front windshield with a bullet hole. Whether or not he, himself, was hit during this first volley of gunfire is unclear, but Wheeler can be heard on the video yelling, "God damn!" perhaps from the sheer shock of having bullets come that close to ending his life right there and then.

The convoy came to the dead end in the road, and everyone turned around to backtrack. Returning back up the same road they had just gone down, they encountered not stone throwers or a couple of singleton shooters, but instead what the CNN narrator describes as an "ambush." Bullets and rocket propelled grenades started pouring in at the civilian and military vehicles. According to Wheeler, the military escort vehicles started to speed away, leaving the civilian truckers completely undefended. In the first frame at left, one of the armored vehicles is pulling around Wheeler's truck and leaving the scene, although a military spokesperson disputed that characterization, saying that the vehicle was instead moving to a position away from the "kill zone." Meanwhile, Wheeler was yelling into his two-way radio, "I'm fixin' t' git killed, goddammit!" A rocket propelled grenade had slammed into his truck and disabled it. RPGs and small arms fire were also crippling the other civilian trucks. The second frame at left shows the view from Wheeler's cab of one of the other civilian trucks from the convoy now on its side. Wheeler announced that he had just watched the Iraqi attackers kill one of the truckers up in front of him.

Without the military vehicles to keep them at bay, the attackers had their way with the drivers. The frame at left is from a video taken by a spy plane that was overhead. The men on the ground are Iraqis who have dragged one of the truckers from his cab and are in the process of stripping him naked and stoning him to death.

Mr. Wheeler was rescued 40 minutes later by a Blackhawk helicopter. A subsequent military inquiry into the incident found no fault in the way the soldiers dealt with the situation. In fact, one of the soldiers in the incident was recommended for commendation. The inquiry concluded that the troops' response to the attack was proper: leave the zone of fire and form a defense line from which they could then shoot back into the original area of confrontation.

In his brief statements aired on CNN, Mr. Wheeler was clearly and rather understandably unhappy with what had happened: three of the five civilian drivers had been killed, and he had been left with two AK-47 slugs in his arm to cower in the cab of his wrecked truck for almost three-quarters of an hour.

While the portrayal of the incident by CNN might seem to indicate that the soldiers had acted improperly, it is the report, itself, that gives such an impression, and it does so through a use of words that alters the perception of both what happened to Mr. Wheeler and, much more broadly, what is happening in Iraq.

However, before moving to generalizations, with respect to the incident described above, soldiers do not as a rule simply leave a firefight. Unless panic has set in—something not evident in that video—soldiers stay or redeploy based upon a quick situational assessment. There had to have been a good reason for forming that perimeter—"line of defense outside the kill zone," as the military characterized it—and the most likely reason is that they had come under the kind of fire that is not going to be suppressed by a volley or two of bullets from a couple of M-16s, M-60s, and other, similar weaponry in direct-fire exchange. The inquiry noted that more than 500 rounds were ultimately used to suppress the enemy fire.

The soldiers obviously—and, most probably, correctly—determined that they and their military hardware were at severe risk. Regardless of whether or not five civilian contractors' lives were at stake, a discretionary response that has the potential to wipe out the military personnel in the convoy, disable their vehicles, and ultimately lead to the weaponry on those vehicles falling into enemy hands is not to be chosen if other options are readily available. Moving away from the immediate scene and then firing back into the zone of original confrontation considerably reduces the risk of military casualties and the danger that military hardware will be destroyed and its weaponry transferred to those who could subsequently use its lethality on other American soldiers.

This does not mean, of course, that no concern should be paid to Mr. Wheeler's dismay at how he was treated or how his fellow civilians involved in the incident died. It is far too easy and inhumane to dismiss his anger because he's an employee of Halliburton or because he's over there of his own free will. Nobody deserves to die the way that trucker who was stripped and stoned did; and nobody deserves to sit in a vehicle while soldiers who were there specifically for the purpose of protecting him just leave the scene without so much as an explanation of what they're doing or what he should do.

In the end, of course, 500 rounds of various destructive calibers were most likely sufficient to turn at least some of those savages masquerading as "freedom fighters" into jig-meat puzzles that were pretty tricky to re-assemble for proper burial by bereaved survivors. Allowing for a fairly brutish, paleo-conservative moment, if the attackers pick off unarmed civilian trucks as expressions of their desire for freedom, then they get to risk surprisingly swift death in the process. That is, perhaps unfortunately, how the unapologetic calculus of military violence works. Once we're out of Iraq, we can return to some softer, fantasized belief about the nature and depravity of humanity in conflict.

Here's the core problem with the whole story, though: just a few words of great importance were replaced with words of lesser significance, and such misuse of words creates a persistently deflected understanding of specific incidents and a continuing falsehood about what is happening in Iraq.

Ambush. CNN used that word both in the text overlay for the story and in the narrative, itself. What happened on that dead-end road was no "ambush," which is a pre-planned tactical set-up established with foreknowledge or prediction of a place the opponents will be. That convoy was on that road by accident, so there was no way the attack could have been an ambush in the normal sense of that word.

There is no reason whatsoever to imagine that someone got a whole group of Iraqis together and said, "Let's all hide on a dead-end road, and sooner or later maybe a big convoy of military vehicles guarding some lumbering civilian trucks will accidentally make a wrong turn and end up in our clutches." That's just plain nonsense; but what really did happen on that road leads to the second incorrect word used both in that CNN story as well as all throughout the mainstream and alternative media.

Insurgents. The very word conveys a sense of disaggregation, of ill-defined internal structure, of provisionalism and detachment from a larger socio-political entity. Think carefully about what happened on that road: after what appeared to be some potshots, seemingly out of nowhere appeared a band of enemy fighters with enough firepower to drive a well-armored, fiercely armed slate of American soldiers to choose a military response that involved an almost inevitable loss of American civilians' lives.

Those weren't "insurgents"; that was a squad, and I mean that in the same way I would describe a type of contingent of soldiers in a regular military force. As apparently savage as they were, as apparently impromptu as the battle appeared to be, that was an organized unit with not just hard-core firepower, but organization. When a road in the middle of nowhere has the potential for that kind of incident, the enemy is not some diffuse, thinly spread bunch of thugs. We are not fighting an "insurgency"; we're fighting a military entity that by any honest assessment would be described as an army. Internally fractious and fratricidal as that army might be, what happened on that dead-end road is evidence of a military entity so deep, so seasoned, so dangerous that it can attack a convoy no one was expecting to be where it was, and it can attack with such ferocity—or at least it has the American soldiers convinced that it could do so—that those soldiers pull out of the immediate fire zone and write off the people, vehicles, and materials in transport that were the entire reason for the convoy in the first place.

That's the work of an enemy that has attained the rightful status of an army, and whether or not the Pentagon is using that word or even contemplating its use in describing who's killing our soldiers in Iraq, we are now (and probably have been for a while) engaging the enemy as the opposing military force as it really is: a real, live, lethally effective army, one that is not just kicking our asses, but doing so without the benefit of air power, mechanized infantry, centralized command and control, or even uniforms.

And that leads to the last and most important word, one that is used from time to time but not fully understood for what it means.

War. The United States is not in a difficult, expensive, unsustainable "occupation" of Iraq; we are, instead, in a war—a real, live, full-time war, one that is much more classic than it is unusual, despite the language of obfuscation that favors terms like "asymmetric," "improvised," "anti-government insurgents," "militias," and even "unlawful enemy combatants" to make people believe that the enemy is not the self-legitimized, mature force it really is.

That's why what we're doing over there has gotten so expensive; that's why it has generated so many lies by the ones who started it; that's why it is so difficult to get any decent agreement on exactly what to do. As offensive as it might be to progressives who want us to simply leave in four months, six months, or whatever, this is no longer, and probably has not been for a long time, merely some violent version of trying to wrest control of the channel changer from the idiot who put a bad show on.

Far worse is the fact that various factions of this enemy that has become a military entity—an "army" in my lexicon—are getting funding from sovereign and other entities. The Sunnis are being funded by Saudi Arabia, by Saddam Hussein's family in exile, and by others; the Shi'ites are getting money and other support from Iran, Syria, and quite possibly Russia and China; the Kurds are getting support from Israel and others. We, in fact, are the only ones stupid enough not to be fighting this war by proxy: we're using our own citizens to prosecute what we cannot bring ourselves to call a war.

The best we can do right now is argue about the term "civil war," as if that has anything whatsoever to do with our current military situation in Iraq. From the perspective of the United States, whether or not Iraqis are killing each other is completely irrelevant. The fact that they're killing us is what matters, and that puts the term "civil war" in the category of obfuscating language. We should be talking about war, regional war, and even the beginnings of a low-level global war.

Yes, "global war," and not that worthless "Global War on Terror" spanning the planet, but rather "global war" right there in Iraq, with everybody and his uncle throwing money into what the American and British neo-conservatives, along with their backers in other countries, set up as a high-stakes battle for control of the massive oil fields that will fuel the economic engines of most nations for the better part of this new century.

Wars have winners, and they have losers. Right now, we're losing, and it's because we're fighting an army that has proven to be more than our match in no small part because our political leaders, as well as a fair number of their sycophants in the Pentagon, have yet to face the fact that the diffuse, ideologically pure, well-orchestrated "Global War on Terror" has utterly frustrated any hope of dealing with the very real, terribly dirty, horrifically violent, pretty much garden-variety war we've gotten ourselves into thanks to the Bush Administration, its Republican allies in Congress, and their spineless Democratic colleagues.

We started it; but like most wars, it will end of its own accord once there is a clear winner and an unfortunately large number of losers. Adding twenty to thirty thousand more troops might work if this were some minor problem with an otherwise smooth occupation that had clear milestones on a transitional course out. Adding twenty to thirty thousand troops to a war will have no probability whatsoever of altering the outcome. We'll just get some of them killed, and we'll be escalating the war.

The only good thing about that would be the possibility that the American people and maybe even the media would finally be forced to stop using the wrong words to describe the mess we're in. The longer we keep lying to ourselves about what, exactly, this thing is we're doing over there in Iraq, the more likely we are to lose, and the more catastrophic that loss is going to be.

As the situation now stands, the catastrophe is going to be large. That's what wars do to the losers.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Special Blog Post: Exits at the Bus Station

The writer konagod, cross-posting at Big Brass Blog, published an article entitled, "Lesson in History: Dinosaurs Were on Noah's Ark," describing the school district in New Jersey where a 12-year-old student complained about a teacher who for days was aggressively promoting fundamentalist, literalist Christianity to his students. It seems that, although the teacher has received some unspecified censure, the student who registered the complaint (and who documented the harangue of proselytizing by secret recordings) has been subjected to everything from condemnation by some in the community to an actual death threat.

The comment thread for that article by konagod has been lively. The Fat Lady Sings expressed what might be the sentiment of many progressives with her comment:

I have really had it with these holier than thou hypocrites. So they want the student expelled and killed do they? Fine. Then they can get out. I mean it. Get the fuck out. Go join the Taliban in Afghanistan where ignorance is bliss and women are expected to perform like whores. I’m sure they’d like it fine there. Of course – they’d have to change allegiance form Jesus to Mohammed – but who cares - right? It’s the end result that matters – a theocracy. So I say lets all go to Kearny High School, pack up these assholes shit and send ‘em to the Middle East where their inflexibility and single-mindedness will be appreciated.

As an annex to her comment, and in no small part intended as a taunt to the fundamentalists, I offered the following:

Actually, The Fat Lady Sings, it seems to me that the worst punishment to visit upon these mental dwarves is to force them to live in a culture where the age-old concept of liberal education is forced down their throats every day of their lives.

Lord knows, I do my part at the college level to take religionists' kids and corrupt their minds to the point where they slowly become an abomination to their parents and the culture of ignorance.

My efforts don't get results all the time, but I do get results in more than a few cases. It just delights me to no end to see my work pay off in a young person who slowly grows out of the hateful baby fat of smothering ignorance. Mom and Dad won't be pleased at all, of course; but, hey, they can register for classes, too, and get with it.

Otherwise, they can stay at home and twist their hearts out at a world moving on (and taking their kids) without them.

And as for that school, when a district gets that out of control, reputable institutions of higher learning begin to shy away from the kids: scholarships and other academic opportunities begin to dry up. Eventually, the brighter parents in the community realize that their kids can't go anywhere but to the local Bible Beater University, and the employment opportunities for grads from that place are surprisingly limited. If they've got a nearby, regional community college that has open admissions, they find out fairly quickly that "open admissions" means "we'll take your money until you flunk so many times you can't get any more student loans, and that means it's time to go to work at Taco Bell and start paying off the ones you've already accrued and have nothing to show for."

Yes, it's that harsh, and I have no problem with being a part of that long-term corrective process. Every semester, I deal with a cluster of students from a community just like the one in konagod's article, and the failure rate is nearly 100% for those kids in college classes. This has been going on for a very long time, and it's finally soaking in at school district meetings out there: something's got to give, and it isn't going to be higher education that yields. High drop-out rates; high out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates; meth abuse that's running rampant among the kids; all kinds of rumors of really weird-ass stuff going on with the teenagers and even weirder-ass stuff going on in small groups of adults in the town; and, of course, those nearly 100% failure rates at the college level.

Ouch. Yeah, something's got to give.

Eventually, deviant communities learn a modicum of self-control. If they don't, we've got plenty of kids from decent high schools who are ready to go to real colleges and then go out into the work force with real educational credentials.

That school district can put off making a serious change of course for only so long. Meanwhile, the world will move on.

The Dark Wraith bawls out, "ALL ABOARD!

Unfortunately, as perhaps rightfully should happen, that comment of mine, too flip as it was, proved vulnerable to harsh criticism, delivered in this case by the commenter Aslan365:

Dark Wraith has his head buried. What happens is not that those students can't get into a college and fail when they get there; they simply go to the fundamentalist colleges that are springing up all the time. The money is flowing toward these schools and away from educational institutions--there are enough nuts with big bank balances to found the schools, and enough of the religiously indoctrinated to keep them going. Then they get jobs in Washington. No amount of self-satisfactory dreaming by Dark Wraith or the rest of you impedes this progression one damn bit. It's time to stop ridiculing and start actively engaging the irrational forces loose in this country.

That broadside set me late this afternoon upon a sober mental journey, only partially connected in specifics to what Aslan365 had written.

I shall in the remainder of the present article set aside for some the notion that I know not what I'm talking about as far as higher education goes; but more importantly, whereas sharp criticism is the right of the malevolent commenter, I should lay my own hand to the quality and character of my life and work if I am to get something even remotely close to the condemnation I actually deserve. As such, I offer the following exposition to Aslan365 and to anyone else who can suffer the tediously long read that lies ahead.

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Let's get down to business, Aslan.

I have lived this scenario throughout my professional life as a college teacher. I know exactly what I'm talking about. I've seen liberals lament the supposedly massive funding of those fundamentalist Christian colleges, and I've seen it with my own two eyes because I've taught off and on at some of those very colleges. It's just not happening the way people think, but the damage they do is far worse than if they were merely generating a legion of academically stunted, religiously zealous graduates.

Those religious institutions to which you refer are, indeed, getting money, but it's a mile wide and an inch deep. The schools use the money to construct externally attractive façades, but the core curriculum is often corrupted, as are the infrastructure and essential base of teaching tools, save for those pictured in the brochures and for the tours to sucker in the parents of potential enrollees.

Quite a long while back, I told the following story in a comment here at The Dark Wraith Forums; but while that comment was a rather vague and quite truncated version of how certain incidents went down a couple years ago, here I shall be far less circumspect and much more vivid in details.

My last gig at one of those religious colleges is instructive on several levels. If I were to tell you the name of the college, you might recognize it right away. It has been the beneficiary of large infusions of cash, pretty much all of which has been spent on a few buildings, including the chapel, a student union, and the administrators' offices. These places on campus are just gorgeous, and people see these in the college recruitment brochures and on the campus tours.

The building in which I taught and had my office wasn't in any brochure and never did get included in tours given to parents and their high school-aged kids. My office was in a room on the top floor. It had no heat, so it was unbearable to be in there during the cold months. My classroom on the bottom floor of that building had water pouring into it through the ceiling every time it rained outside. In the warm months, because there was no air conditioning, the entire building was so hot that teaching and learning were quite a challenge, but no one was allowed to open the windows because the hornets would come in from their nests that had been in the overhangs of the roof for so long they could be seen from the street.

This building wasn't the exception, either. One permanent professor there told me I was lucky to be in one of the "good" buildings, falling apart as it was but protected by its status as a landmark.

Now, let's talk about the students. A handful of religious zealots dominated the campus; everyone else just stayed out of their way. During the 2004 Presidential campaign, the voter registration table was in the cafe where a group of old alumni sat around with the young religious bullies loudly yelling vile, sometimes even sick, invectives against Democrats. This went on every day of the week, all to the tune of Fox News blaring on a big TV in the corner.

Aside from the howling religious nuts, most of the students I met wanted to be elsewhere. Many, many of the kids had become disillusioned within the first couple of years of schooling there; some within the first couple of months. They hated the place, and they knew what prospects awaited them on the outside with their degrees. Only those committed to life within a religious community were very much at peace with their educational progress, but the overriding sentiment felt by students was that they were trapped by financial and psychological dependence on their parents and others. I was surprised by how many grasped that they were not getting anything remotely like a genuine, academically challenging, liberal arts college education.

It took a very short amount of time for the student body to figure out that I was an aberration there, someone who had been picked up because both the institution and I were desperate.

Let me now get to the specifics of just how much I have my head in the sand about religious colleges.

The last significant incident in my mind about that place was trying to help a girl in her first semester hide the fact that she'd gotten knocked up by one of the football players. She was scared to death, and the pregnancy was making her a total physical wreck from the get-go. She was a small, mousy girl who could have passed for fourteen. She had little, puffy cheeks that framed large brown eyes she would raise up to me as she kept her head down out of some kind of deference to male authority figures. She trembled in even the slightest chill of autumn breezes. For this story, I shall call her "Ellie."

She was a stunningly good math student, at least at first. After about a month, though, she started missing more and more classes. Not too long after her absences had become a matter of concern to me, one of her friends in the class told me about the pregnancy. An older woman in the class whom I'll call "Janice" was right there at the time and explained to me that this had to stay a secret: Ellie would be expelled if the administration found out. Ellie's friends were covering for her as best they could. In fact, they were covering for more than a few girls. Janice, who lived in the area and picked up classes from time to time at this dump, explained that it was like this every year: girls getting knocked up and trying to hide it so their parents didn't find out and the school didn't hear about it.

Janice, herself, was bitter about the college. It seems that only a matter of weeks before the semester began, she had undergone a hysterectomy, only to realize that the classes she had already paid for would be a real challenge to attend. The college had no handicap access in the old buildings where most of the classes were held. The administration variously claimed the buildings were exempt from requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act because they're landmarks, or the whole school was exempt because it's a "private religious institution." Whatever. All Janice knew was that she had to have a couple of the big horse-type guys help her up the steep steps so she could get to classes, including mine.

Anyway, Ellie was being torn up by the pregnancy, and her emotional state was something almost indescribable. She came to class only rarely. She'd generally be there if one of her friends in the class told her I was going to do a "surprise" quiz. (I started violating my long-standing policy about not warning of impending quizzes just because I wanted Ellie to know when she simply had to show up at class.)

Meanwhile, Janice—a tough broad who had been everything from a truck driver to an auxiliary law enforcement officer—finally got up the nerve to hint that she could get Ellie to an abortion clinic in the big city. I let her know in no uncertain terms that I would help. That meant I was going to stand ready to pay for the procedure.

My days at that school were numbered, even though I was still lying to myself by thinking that my great teaching would win the day. I had a religious lunatic for a department chairman: he would even sometimes stand outside the closed door to my classroom just so he could listen to my "unacceptable" use of language. In one instance that sent him into a hissy-fit, when I was about to pass back a test, a student asked me how they all did, and with a grin on my face I said, "Well, your tests sucked," to which the students laughed. All except for two, that is: young men with butch haircuts and a mission to tell the school authorities and their parents about every awful, horrible, un-Christian thing that happened at college. Both of those fellows, by the way, were failing my class miserably, and the other students hated their guts, in part because they squealed on everyone and in part because they were otherwise bizarrely withdrawn human beings. As one of them told me as he looked everywhere but into my eyes, "I am in this world, but not of it." (I replied to him with perhaps too much levity that he still had to study for my class and pass my tests or I would flunk his ass cold.)

Returning to the main story, Ellie's friends knew what we were planning, and several of them approached her with the way out of her mess. All I heard about that part was that she couldn't bring herself to reject the idea out of hand, but that she was simply horrified by the very idea of going even further into sin than she already had gotten. She wouldn't even tell anyone who, exactly, it was who got her pregnant; that part was left to one of the other girls at the party where it happened. (The young man, by the way, never suffered any punishment for his role in her pregnancy.)

If Ellie was going to get in even more trouble than she already was, she had no intention of taking anyone else with her. As November progressed, Ellie withdrew even further from those who wanted to help her. She missed the last term exam in my class, and no one volunteered any information about what was going on.

The last time I saw Ellie was in the cafe. The place was eerily empty despite upcoming finals. The TV wasn't even on. But there was Ellie. She was sitting in a chair with her legs pulled up to her; she was curled over in almost a ball. She had her back to the entrance, so she didn't know it was I who had come in until I was just behind her. She turned around and lifted those brown eyes up to me.

That smile across her pale, sunken face nearly made me choke. In her hand she was squeezing a bus ticket. She had nothing but the clothes on her back. Her light flannel hoodie was all that would keep the bitter December wind from her frail body.

I had nothing I could say to her. She'd been ratted out by one of the Christian psycho-bitch enforcers in her dorm. She was expelled, her parents were told about the outrage of it all, and everybody on campus knew she was the latest case study in the wages of sin.

She was so small that she vanished quite easily from that world of decent people.

And there I was. I could have done something about it, but I didn't. All I had was a pat solution that freaked her way too much. I could have put alternatives in front of her: adoption agencies, and not those Christian predators, either; friends who would have gladly taken her in and helped her ride it out if that was her choice. I could have offered her more than a mere cowardly professor's detached, meaningless gestures by proxy. I'd been going extra miles for years, but there I was, off my game, somehow fantasizing for too long that I could make a living for a few years by playing both sides against the middle in that dump. Ellie vanished from my sight while I was standing there flat-footed like every other useless non-player in the high-stakes game of life.

The next semester I got a gig at a regional community college. The first day of the semester, I was out in the smoking area when around the corner came three young men, all from that religious college. They'd had enough, so they were willing to drive more than an hour just to get something approximating a real education.

They all stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me with huge smiles. "Oh my fuckin' God!" one of them said.

I walked right up and shook hands with them, welcoming them to real academia. They were so macho-tough-excited-giddy-laughing-profane. They were so normal, and they were so glad to see a familiar face. I told them I was glad to see them, too; but I told them I was still going to kick their butts if they were unfortunate enough to end up in any of my classes.

They informed me that they were but three examples of a continuing leakage that religious college had of kids who manage to find a way to get out. Apparently, the community college, along with several other colleges and universities in the region, had long been the beneficiaries of that continuing stream of students escaping what would otherwise have been a miserable, pseudo-college experience leading nowhere. One of those young guys even mentioned the "bullshit" that happened to Ellie and how that's the kind of thing that makes students get out of there if they can. It's just that most can't.

There was yet another option I didn't think about in my bag of tricks for Ellie. That community college is dirt cheap, getting a surprisingly generous matrix of subsidies from all kinds of sources.

God Almighty! had I been off my game. What a dumb-ass I'd been through that whole messy experience at that religious Hell-hole.

Four years before, I was running a two-year school that trained paralegals and court reporters. It was in an urban ghetto, about as dangerous as a place could be just going to and from the parking lot after dark. The students were mostly female, mostly urban African-Americans along with low-income Whites. Every last day was a ride through rough terrain, and I was at the top of my game. I could solve any problem, I could get even some of the most hopeless cases through the curriculum and out into decent jobs. I swear, it seemed some days like I could have fixed the whole damned world one person at a time.

God! how far I had fallen by the time Ellie and others at that Christian college needed me.

Someday not too long from now, I'll leave this part of the country where so many churches dot the landscape. Too many people here love their god; they love their god more than they love the child-women and child-men stumbling and falling on the hard concrete of adulthood where they then look up with soulful eyes to see if anyone's there to help show them the way to their feet again.

Someday I'll go back to the streets that are mean in ways I handle better. I'll try to do a lot of good and little harm, and I'll finish this life trying not to think about the awful failures on my conscience. I don't think I'll do too well at forgetting, though, since I'll be seeing Ellie in every class, on every street, and in every bus station where some kid is looking up hoping someone has a good reason that one-way ticket to the end of the line isn't the only choice left.



I'm finished writing for the evening, now.

Special Analysis: The Long Twilight of Economic Empire

No fewer than six e-mail messages have come to me since yesterday evening concerning what apparently started as a claim on the Hal Turner Show. The gist of the claim is that Monday, December 18, 2006, the Chinese government is going to dump one trillion greenbacks onto the global currency markets in its on-going effort to reduce its holdings of American dollars. The claim was repeated on a thead at the Rigorous Intuition message board.

Worries about the stability of the current international economic regime are not unique to breathless doomsayers. The continuing, unstoppable budget deficits being run up by the Republican-controlled U.S. government have caused great concern among both astute private observers and global currency traders. The U.S. dollar has lost a tremendous amount of value, having now reached a 14-year low against the British pound sterling and a 20-month low against the euro.

But while longer term prospects appear bleak, the short-term outlook is certainly not pointing to any kind of end-time on Monday. Metals prices have backed off, and the overall market outlook is good going into the new week. While some might argue that traders are at the gates of the cemetery preparing to whistle as they take the Monday morning tour, little if any evidence can be found that otherwise cravenly greedy capital markets and their participants are willfully positioning themselves for a relatively calm Monday knowing that they're going to get slaughtered by doing so.

However, setting aside what is not likely to happen tomorrow, the long-term economic indicators do not point to an endless road to riches for the American Empire; and no amount of cheerleading by the Bush Administration, the mainstream media, or the residue of Republicans with their heads in the sand can change the fact that the underlying substrate of economic factors points to a serious and near-permanent re-alignment of currency exchange rates wherein the U.S. dollar will be worth far less against other major currencies than it has been in many decades. These indicators in their scope are telling, but the most damning of all is the chain of federal deficits the United States government has been running: these deficits represent revenue shortfalls that simply cannot be stanched because the American people are so completely ingrained to very low marginal tax rates, and the U.S. is committed for years to come to unchangeable patterns of outlays, both in terms of social programs like Medicare and of military commitments like the Global War on Terror. Draconian as any budget cuts might be in the coming years, they will be a drop in the bucket compared to non-discretionary spending to which the federal government is unavoidably bound. It is those budget deficits that have fueled an otherwise inexplicably robust economy for these past five years, while it is the accumulation of those deficits as national debt that has been digging the grave of the American economy as pre-eminent in the world of the 21st Century.

Last Friday, a post by Jersey Cynic at BlondeSense asked the question, "Do Deficits Matter?" to which I offered a comment with links to previous articles I have written on the subject:

...I have written a number of articles about the subjects of budget deficits, trade deficits, and their interrelationship. I believe the last major pass I made at it was in my article, "Foreign Trade and Debt"; but before that, one of my earlier articles on the subject was, "Seven Principles of Macroeconomics." I also took a pass at the issue of budget deficits of the Clinton and Bush Administrations in a lambasting I did of Bush's former budget director in the article, "Treasury Secretary Calls Clinton Budget Surplus 'a Mirage'."

The folks who promote nonsense about how budget deficits don't matter should be required to read the above articles...

Jersey Cynic came back with a follow-up question:

I read all of your posts...

You say in your link

"Now, the only place the Chinese can spend all those greenbacks they gather is in the country of origin of the currency—the United States of America"

What do you mean by that?

they can only spend (?buy) things in the US and nowhere else. We spend our dollars in other countries, don't we? Don't you just exchange the dollars for whatever currency that country uses?

Why couldn't China say for example, take those dollars and invest in oil exploration and production in say Canada? Bite the bullet, take the loss on the conversion of the money and make it back via investments elsewhere?...

Is it because of the large amount of money were talking here?

Can't they unload some here and some there?

My response, edited and expanded here, was as follows:

...You answered your own question. The Chinese would have to exchange the greenbacks they've earned in trade were they to want a currency other than the greenbacks. In other words, as long as they hold greenbacks, they have to use them in the country of issuance. If they want, say, euros, they'd have to enter the euro/dollar currency market and sell dollars to buy euros.

But let's say they did that. As they sold the dollars, the supply of those greenbacks on the world market would surge, which would drive down their price. At the same time, because the demand for euros was skyrocketing, the price of euros would go up. Thus, were the Chinese to do a wholesale dump of dollars to get euros, they would end up shooting themselves in the foot because they would crash the value of all their dollar-denominated (i.e., American) holdings, while making the value of euro-denominated assets (i.e., things they wanted to buy in Europe) rise to nose-bleed prices.

The short-term rational strategy for the Chinese is to continue to hold the dollars and use them to invest in the United States. Most of those "investments" are in the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury to support the deficit spending of the Bush Administration and its congressional Republican allies. In the longer term, the Chinese can slowly move their dollar-denominated holdings to a more diversified portfolio that includes assets denominated in other currencies; but this has to be done carefully lest world currency markets and the traders therein get skittish and start to "lead the plunge" by selling their dollars first and using them to buy euros, which would drive down the price of greenbacks and drive up the price of euros before the Chinese could unload theirs.

The Chinese have to keep their smiles very tight and act like there's nothing in the world they want more than to get more and more greenbacks because they don't want anyone to jump ahead of them in line for a wholesale dump.

The problem is that small versions of this cascade of devaluation are already happening. Currency traders are already skittish, and they act on visceral instincts. Every time they even so much as smell some desire by the Chinese to re-denominate their portfolio of holdings, those traders do a round of sell-offs.

The central banks of the developed nations do what they can to stop these potential death spirals, so nothing really ugly has happened so far. However, in a seriously ugly scenario, the world currency markets could easily, if the conditions were right, swamp any coordinated efforts by the central banks to defend the dollar, and everyone knows that.

This is why it is crucial for everyone to act like we really can defy gravity and walk miles above the true price level of the dollar for as long as possible. If and when the end comes, it could be spectacular.

More likely, though, is a long-term draw-down scenario, the world finance version of the U.S. dollar going out, not with a bang, but with a very quiet whimper.

Truth of the matter is, that whimper will probably be so quiet the average American won't even hear it. Joe Sixpack and Jill SelfAbsorb will simply wake up one morning and wonder why the American dog is lying tits-up in the global finance swimming pool.

And a lot of those Joes and Jills will be all kinds of receptive to the Right-wing idiots who will tell them that it was the liberals and the secular humanists who drowned the dog.

Sadly, the dog won't be around to tell them that it was the neo-cons who gurgled the pooch.


The Dark Wraith will hold a brief yet tasteful memorial service for the bloated mongrel once it's been drained back down to reasonable proportions.

Returning now to the specific claim that Monday will be the day China unloads a trillion U.S. dollars, such predictions, along with a few others swirling around the Internet, need to be taken out and shot. It's not going to be as simple and swift as some B-grade Economic Apocalypse Now! movie extravaganza.

It is true, as some are claiming, that the United States has issued rules that limit the amount of money in greenbacks that can be converted; and despite one representation or another by the government that this is some kind of counter-terrorism measure, it isn't. It's a circuit breaker intended to limit the amount of self-fulfilling financial collapse that could happen if there were a run on the currency. If too many people started to panic all at once about the soundness of U.S. dollar and tried to exchange large sums of those dollars for euros or some other currency, there would not be enough of those other currencies readily available to immediately fulfill all of the requests, and this would look to the average person like global currency markets were suddenly rejecting the dollar as a medium of exchange. That would serve to "prove" to people that the dollar had become worthless, and then everybody would be trying to unload their dollars, which would exacerbate the situation to the point where banks and other financial intermediaries would have to close their currency exchange windows and eventually their doors as people tried to pull their money out and exchange it for anything commodity-related, like gold, cans of food, or even (God forbid) bullets.

An all-consuming flash-fire of economic panic would be bad, and a limit on the amount of U.S. currency that can be converted in any given period of time is in place to keep that from happening, even though the rule is, in and of itself, a very grim sign of the times. It is not, however, a sign that December 18, 2006—or any other specific day, for that matter—is going to be a good day to stay in bed with a loaded gun, a bag of gold, and an extra-large box of chocolates.

Monday will not be a day of catastrophe for the dollar. Even though it could very well slide further, as I noted in my quoted comment to Jersey Cynic above, the Chinese would be destroying their own portfolio by dumping a trillion U.S. greenbacks in a single trading session. And as far as the slide of the dollar is concerned, the Chinese are as responsible for that as any country since it has in part been their portfolio adjustments that have rippled the markets, even as they continue their long-standing game of undervaluing the yen to boost their own economy while sucking ours dry. The trade talks between the U.S. and China last week weren't particularly fruitful for the American side. The Chinese gave the American authorities a long-winded lecture about the "special" circumstances of China, along with a particularly fatiguing review of 5,000 years of Chinese history. Needless to say, all that fluff resolved nothing, and that was precisely the objective.

The Chinese know exactly what they’re doing: they’re spinning the Bush Administration amateurs around and around just to keep the Chinese economic juggernaut/gambit going, while the Bush Administration officials twirl around getting dizzy and altogether frustrated, unable to do anything worthwhile about the abuse because the Republicans have been on such an irresponsible low-tax, high-spend orgy for the past six years they have no moral platform from which to stand up to the Chinese.

Were we to have actual professionals—maybe even competent ones, at that—running this country, we might be able to do something. As it is, though, we’re on a blood-letting gurney on the slow track to a Second World currency, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We have, as a nation and as individuals, been spending far beyond our means. We borrow money, and we care not a bit from whom we are borrowing. The federal government will accept bids from any country with the money to buy U.S. Treasury debt instruments; and as individuals, we borrow based upon need and terms of repayment without even the slightest concern for exactly who or what is the real source of the money. We bitch about jobs going overseas, and yet we buy the foreign imports with their low-low prices, and we gleefully accept the loans that are made with the very same money we sent overseas. Yes, that's where all that debt capital is coming from: it's coming from us. We are handing China, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and a host of other countries the very knife with which they are gutting the domestic holdings of equity in the U.S. economy. (See, for example, my graphical post "A Walk-Down Primer on the U.S. Trade Deficit with China.")

George W. Bush and his miserable, incompetent, war-mongering ilk are not the cause of what is happening; they are, instead, the last and greatest of the opportunistic infections pouring into a body that has for a long, long time been cutting itself open with greater and greater gashes to mask the withering of a real, equity-based growth engine of individual and national prosperity.

We had our chance. It was called the Clinton Administration, which had not only slowed down the deficits that had been the legacy of Republican Administrations going clear back to Ronald Reagan, but had finally reversed the trend and was running surpluses during Clinton's last years in office. Maybe that was too much for an American people who, in their heart of hearts, do not want a government with more fiscal discipline than they, the people, can expect in their private lives.

The truth of the matter is that, despite the continuing refusal by some liberals to recognize Mr. Bush as the genuine winner of Presidential elections by the will of the People, his ascendancy to the highest office of the land is nothing more than a reflection of the rise of the profligate, corrupt Republican Party to majority control of the federal legislature and of the even broader desire of Americans to seek the easy, feel-good way forward. Even when skyscrapers come down, massive federal budget deficits return, poverty rates rise, wars turn into quagmires, and international financial markets start to turn against the American Economic Empire, what happens? Why, we get the election of 2004, complete with another two years of Republican control of Congress and another four years of blistering, demonstrated incompetence elected to the Presidency.

Will the Chinese continue their portfolio re-alignment on Monday? Sure. So, too, will some other countries. That does not mean Monday is Kids Eat Free Day at the American Economic Armageddon Smorgasbord. The big banquet comes later; and for the most part, the vast majority of Americans won’t exactly notice that something’s really wrong when America is the featured special at the carving station. For those who do, there will be the usual line-up of Right-wing pundits and ignoramus mainstream commentators telling everything but the truth about who was responsible for the knife coming down through the meat of the United States High-Speed Debt-Powered Consumption Express.

People don't want to hear that the end was their own doing, both through their personal economic decisions and through their choice of leaders. More extensively, though, people haven't the wherewithal to hear the complicated story of how their over-reliance on debt was the result of decades of earning power erosion that forced them like herded cattle into that over-reliance on borrowed money. Americans of today have been no different from people of almost any country and any era: they wanted to believe that every today was better than the past, and the material goods and services of modernity were theirs to have as tangible evidence of growing prosperity. For a while—in fact, for a decent run of generations—the system and the debt that fueled it were an unbeatable duo; but as time went on, the engine had to be sustained more and more by the very debt that would one day make the days of the future decidedly not so good.

We are not quite yet at the time when most Americans notice that the sky is permanently and decidedly darker than it once was: dusk comes and the twilight of Empire falls not with the swift fury of a hammer, but instead with the false whisper that each moment to come will be as bright as every moment that has already passed.



The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Editorial: The Wall and the Wedge

At Pam's House Blend, Pam Spaulding published a post today on Sen. John McCain's proposal called "Stop the Online Exploitation of Children Act," which purports to "modernize and expand reporting requirements" for certain types of Websites including what are commonly known as "blogs." I published a comment on the thread from that article, and below I republish it in edited and expanded form.

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Unfortunately, whenever a free society creates an exception to freedom of expression, what seems like a small and acceptable crack in the wall of liberty will be exploited. It is not a matter of "might"; it is, instead, a matter of inevitability.

John McCain is that inevitability become a politically powerful legislator. We—in what we legitimately believe are tolerable and even rightful areas of censorship—become his unwitting, unwilling supporters. To stand against censorship of any kind is to be accused not merely of tolerating the vile, but possibly even of promoting and liking it. That is the price we pay as free citizens for standing firmly and consistently against even the smallest cracks in that wall of liberty. To imagine, much less to enshrine in statutes and aggressive law enforcement activities, that possession or expression of one kind could be contained was a delusion of Faustian dimensions. As utterly disgusting as exploiting children is, those who would use that vileness to the purpose of a far greater agenda of controlling other speech some deem unacceptable is an exponential increase in the exploitation of children. No person is a defender of children who needs their predators as a bloody shirt to wave in a campaign against the dangers of "too much" free speech.

Now, I shall take this occasion to note an even larger, if rather parochial, point. The idea among many in the Blogosphere that the Internet is just too big, too complex, too overwhelming for anything to ever effectively control it is just plain wrong. Although an underground of it can and will always exist, the Internet as a whole really is vulnerable to being "tamed" by statutory laws, court precedents, regulatory intervention, technology, and social norms.

How many readers and contributors here would actually refuse to comply with an enacted law arising from McCain's legislative proposal? It's one thing to say, "I shall defy this outrage!"; it's quite another to face fines, imprisonment, and societal condemnation with virtually assured, if wholly unjust, accusations of supporting a universally condemned form of pornography. I will tell you right here and now that's a battle almost sure to be lost: even our presumably independent judiciary has been eaten alive when a few of its jurists have tried to insert objectivity into the body of case law on this matter.

Terror is nothing compared to fear. Terror lasts for a moment and far too often sires retributive rage. Fear, on the other hand, is penetrating and far too often breeds surrender justified as willing and desirable compliance.

Technologically, the content of the Internet can be controlled. It is being done in many countries, and it is being done fairly effectively. The control will become more effective with time because the technology of monitoring, tracking, filtering, and blocking is moving forward apace at the same time the content creators most likely to resist control are, as a whole, becoming less and less able to understand the consequences of the coding architecture they use. A prime example of this is the evolving W3C set of standards, which the overwhelming majority of bloggers believe are something desirable, when they are in fact just another brick in the wall of the technological regimentation that is a critical underpinning of thorough, effective, and rapid Internet speech control and suppression.

That same backdrop of misunderstanding is being used by both sides in the "'Net Neutrality" debate: the corporate interests that want to prevent statutory language enshrining neutrality use the sheer ignorance of federal legislators to advance their agenda; but at the same time, the corporate interests that come to the table posing as heroic defenders of neutrality also have entirely self-serving motives, none of which involve free speech of the kind we in the Blogosphere value so highly. Yet virtually all bloggers believe that the 'Net Neutrality supporters like Google are somehow heroic defenders of free expression. They are not; in the long run, they will be its worst enemies. Just ask the Chinese about Google's dedication to free speech when a hugely profitable venture and a repressive regime arrive together at the other side of the fulcrum separating speech and repression.

The curtain is coming down on the freedom of expression the Internet has provided. John McCain is merely a small fob on the end of one of the drawstrings of that curtain. Fighting the nearly inevitable fall of that curtain to the stage floor is in all likelihood futile, and that is why I shall engage that fight for the rest of my days. Should others wish to be effective fighters, I offer this modest advice:

It is not enough to be outraged, and it is not enough even to become "educated about the issues." Neither outrage nor education are particularly useful on a battlefield. The day is won by those most masterful in the use of the weapons of war; the day is lost by those who believe something else matters.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Special Blog Post: Scholarly Snippets and Quantitative Quandries, Solution Post #1

This is the first in a small series of posts offering solutions and insights into problems posed in my Special Blog Post of December 12, 2006, "Scholarly Snippets and Quantitative Quandries." As I noted in the comment thread for that article, a goodly number of respondents were hitting right on or close to the correct answers and explanations for the problems and curiosities I offered. With a nod to nightshift66 and others who offered explanations for what was going on, below is one of the curiosities, a math trick, that was presented in the post:

Grab your calculator. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just one that does basic arithmetic operations. Don't forget to turn it on first.

Choose a three-digit number. It can be any number from 100 to 999. Key it in to your calculator.

Now, repeat the digits in the same order so you have a six-digit number displaying. For example, it you had chosen 749 to begin with, you should have 749749 now in the display window.

Remember, I don't know what three-digit number you initially chose, so I certainly don't know the six digit number, right?

But I do know that, whatever number you have on that display, it's divisible by 13. That's right, I know for a fact that it's divisible by 13. Go ahead: hit the "÷" button, then key in "13" and hit "=" to see that I'm right. You've got a whole number displaying, don't you?

But, wait; there's more. I know for a fact that the number you now have displaying on your calculator is divisible by 11. Oh, yes it is. Try it: hit the "÷" button again, then key in "11" and you'll see a whole number show up after you hit the "=" sign. Pretty neat, yes?

And here's the grand finale. The number you now have on your calculator is divisible by 7. Do it: hit the "÷" button one last time, then key in "7" and hit the "=" button.

Lo and behold, not only was I right, but you should notice a much cool something at this point. What is it you see on your calculator's display?

As it turns out, if you follow the instructions, you'll find that, at the end of the run of calculator key strokes, you'll end up with the same three-digit number you started with, no matter what number it was!

So, here's the somewhat formal explanation of why this trick works. I've laid off the algebra as much as possible, but there's still a little, especially with respect to what's called "factoring," which is where the same multiplier of two or more mathematical terms being added or subtracted is pulled out and represented just once outside parentheses, as in 12x+21y being the same as 3(4x+7y).

Suppose we represent a three-digit number by xyz, where x is the hundreds value, y is the tens value, and z is the ones value. So, for example, the number 749 would be such that x=7, y=4, and z=9. Now, we'll write the xyz more formally as

100x+10y+1z.
In the example using 749, we can say that this number is really 100·7+10·4+9·1. In fact, any number can be written in this form of descending powers of ten. Notice that this means any number, in base 10 or any other base, is nothing but a polynomial (a sum of powers of the same base).

Okay, we have xyz now representable as 100x+10y+1z. So, let's do the repeating of the digits to get xyzxyz, as in the example where 749 became 749749. Following the same procedure for re-casting as we did for the three-digit number xyz, we can do xyzxyz as

100000x+10000y+1000z+100x+10y+1z.
In the example with 749, which could be written as 100·7+10·4+1·9, we could write the number 749749 as 100000·7+10000·4+1000·9+100·7+10·4+1·9.

Summarizing where we are, if we start with the number xyz and then repeat the digits, we're going to end up on our calculator with a number that, mathematically speaking, is 100000x+10000y+1000z+100x+10y+1z.

Let's do some re-arranging of terms, here:

100000x+10000y+1000z+100x+10y+1z
from above can be rearranged as follows (using parentheses to group terms we'll want to play with in just a minute):

(100000x+100x)+(10000y+10y)+(1000z+1z)
Okay, now we're going to pull a couple of common factors out of each of those parentheses groups. Notice that the first little group has a common factor of x and a common factor of 100, the second little group has a common factor of y and a common factor of 10, and the third little group has a common factor of z and a common factor of 1 (which is rather trivial, but it's worth noting just for the record). Here we go with pulling the common factors out of each grouping:

100x·(1000+1)+10y·(1000+1)+1z·(1000+1)
Notice at this point that we have (1000+1) three different places, so in all three places we'll do that little bit of arithmetic:

100x·(1001)+10y·(1001)+1z·(1001)
And now we see that we have a three-term expression, where all three terms have the common factor of 1001, so we can factor that off to have the following (putting the common factor of 1001 on the back side of the resulting expression):

(100x+10y+1z)(1001)
Oh, but wait! Look at that first thing, the (100x+10y+1z): that's just the fancy way of writing the number we started with, xyz! Well, spank me hard and call me Florence: the number xyzxyz is nothing but xyz·1001, for Heaven's sake. So a six-digit number like, say, 749749 is nothing but 749·1001. Ditto for any other six digit number of the same form. As long as the first and second pairs of three digits are identical, the six-digit number will be divisible by 1001, and the result will be one of those identical pairs. So, for another example, 358358 is two identical pairs of 358, so 358358 will be divisible by 1001, and the result of the division (what's called the "dividend") will be 358!

The trick I pulled in the problem was to press into service the rather curious fact that 1001 is 7·11·13, so all I was doing by that run of "divide by this, then divide by that, then divide by the other" was a drawn-out version of having you divide the six-digit number by 1001, which I knew would return you from the six-digit number to the three-digit number you started with.

Very cool, yes?

Okay, this gives you an idea of why it's better to know me in cyberspace than in real life: on the Internet, you can close your browser window, and I go out of existence. Before you do that, though, I've got one more totally arcane piece of trivia about this problem that will probably make you not only want to close the browser window, but also want to clear your Internet cache just to make sure I'm really gone.

Remember that number 1001, and how it's 13·11·7? Here's something strange: 1001 is actually not just a number in base 10; it's also a valid number in base 2 (where only the numbers 0 and 1 exist, the basic language of computers). Well, it so happens that the number 1001 in base 2 is the number 9 in base 10.

Yeah, so? Well, so, remember 13·11·7? Did you notice that this is an ordered sequence of odd numbers (in base 10), except that one number is missing from the sequence? Yes, it's the 9, which is 1001 in base 2, and the 9 is missing from the number 2 position from smallest to largest in the sequence.

Yo. Is that cool, or what?

Okay, if you think it's cool, you're more of a math geek than you probably want to admit. We'll do lunch at the QuantHeads Café next week.



The Dark Wraith will post some more stuff tomorrow.

The Truffles Have Arrived

The picture above serves as evidence that the truffles made by Minstrel Boy of Harp and Sword have made it to their destination. The picture at left, below, shows that they are safely in the hands of the Dark Wraith, enshrouded as he is in shadow to conceal his true identity as he presents the trophy.

A few observations are in order. First, just looking at those beautiful things made my ass gain weight. Second, the first bite of the white chocolate truffle was a transcendent experience: the thing made my face throb with pleasure as I drew its succulence against my tongue and palate. I felt long-deprived fat cells come to life and rejoice as withered plants heaving back to the sky in the pouring rains after a decade of drought.

After that first morsel, I lifted what remained of the bodacious creature up in the palm of my hand. I held it up high above my head so the angels in Heaven could see the pleasures of the land they, themselves, could never know; and I heard the angels weep, even as the demons of excess, of gluttony, of sheer abandonment of will swirled about me in an orgiastic cascade of heathen dance.

I ate more. Yes, I ate that entire white chocolate truffle with glee and gladness, for I had not eaten anything so sweet in so very long. I ate it all, and then I lay back in my chair and stared upward; and as my stomach began to churn from the unmitigated indulgence, and as my head began to beat like a kettle drum from the rush of sugar, I said, "I'm gonna die. Uh-huh, yes I am."

It was, in summary, the experience of a lifetime.


The Dark Wraith shall eat another one tomorrow evening.

Special Blog Post: Scholarly Snippets and Quantitative Quandries

While your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums slogs through finals week, a little bit of entertainment for readers is in order. Below you'll find a random collection of faint facts, interesting insights, and probing problems for thrills and excitement.

Okay, perhaps 'thrills and excitement' is a bit of an overstatement. One way or t'other, here we go.

A Math Trick on the Calculator
Grab your calculator. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just one that does basic arithmetic operations. Don't forget to turn it on first.

Choose a three-digit number. It can be any number from 100 to 999. Key it in to your calculator.

Now, repeat the digits in the same order so you have a six-digit number displaying. For example, it you had chosen 749 to begin with, you should have 749749 now in the display window.

Remember, I don't know what three-digit number you initially chose, so I certainly don't know the six digit number, right?

But I do know that, whatever number you have on that display, it's divisible by 13. That's right, I know for a fact that it's divisible by 13. Go ahead: hit the "÷" button, then key in "13" and hit "=" to see that I'm right. You've got a whole number displaying, don't you?

But, wait; there's more. I know for a fact that the number you now have displaying on your calculator is divisible by 11. Oh, yes it is. Try it: hit the "÷" button again, then key in "11" and you'll see a whole number show up after you hit the "=" sign. Pretty neat, yes?

And here's the grand finale. The number you now have on your calculator is divisible by 7. Do it: hit the "÷" button one last time, then key in "7" and hit the "=" button.

Lo and behold, not only was I right, but you should notice a much cool something at this point. What is it you see on your calculator's display?

A Problem with Gravity
Here's a question for the Isaac Newton fan club. Suppose you're on a sailing ship cruising at a decent speed over the waters. You have a 16-pound bowling ball in your hand, and you climb up the main mast so you can stand with your bowling ball in the crow's nest. Once you get up there, you face the stern (rear) of the boat, which you might recall is flying along at a nice clip, and you drop your bowling ball. Oops. That's going to hurt if it lands on somebody's head.

If someone is standing on the deck, would it be safer to be right below the mast you'd climbed, or would it be safer to stand near the rear of the boat? What's the reason for your advice?

A Weighty Matter
Horace is on a diet, but he's dying to have some delicious pie, so he makes a decision that tomorrow, all he'll eat in a 24-hour period is half-a-pound of pie, and all he'll drink is eight ounces of tasty soda pop. His reasoning is obvious: the total weight of what he consumes tomorrow will be exactly one pound—eight ounces of pie and eight ounces of drink—so the very most he could possibly gain as the result of his one-day excess is one pound. That's all: one lousy pound. And he gets to satisfy cravings that are driving him out of his mind.

Is Horace's logic correct? If not, why not?

And Speaking of Dietary Knowledge
Myles goes to the store, and as he's walking through the frozen foods aisle, he sees a really attractive dessert. He opens the cooler door and grabs the little nugget of joy. The box reads: "97% Fat Free!"

Myles buys the item. When he gets home, his housemates start a conga line because Myles has brought home dessert.

Eugene, the analytic fellow of the group, reads the labeling and says, "And look at this! It says '97% Fat Free!'" But then he pauses. "Hey, Myles, what does '97% Fat Free' really mean?"

Myles stops what he's doing and ponders. "I think that means it's, you know, like, 97 percent of the ingredients aren't fat."

Jake, the other roommate, pipes up, "Actually, I always thought that meant that 97 percent of the ingredients by weight weren't fat."

Eugene comes back, "What if it's volume they're talking about? I'm not even sure what that would mean, though."

Myles, being the practical sort, cuts in, "I think we should eat the dessert, and then we should decide what '97% Fat Free!' means."

Everyone agrees; so they eat the dessert, and it's fabulous. Unfortunately, they get so full that they all go into the living room and fall asleep half-way through their DVD of Dark City.

By the time they wake up, just like in the movie, they've been shifted to other bodies, and all their memories of their previous lives have been erased. Among other things, that means they never return to the question of just what, exactly, that dessert box meant by the label, "97% Fat Free!" that was so much a part of their conversation the night before.

It's up to you, then. What does a label mean by "97% Fat Free"? You'd be surprised at how many people don't know, and you'd be even more surprised by what the right answer implies about the "healthfulness" of the food in the box.

The Myth of the Monkeys and Their Typewriters
Ever hear the one about how, if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room with a bunch of typewriters and have them just randomly pound out letters, you'll eventually get something Shakespeare wrote, provided you give them long enough—as in, say, an infinite amount of time?

Well, it's not true: the monkeys will very likely never produce even a modest page of Shakespearean literature, much less an entire play or sonnet. Random events don't work that way.

Unfortunately, probability theory—which underpins statistics—is so woefully under-taught that all kinds of myths are running through high-stakes statistical analysis, these day; and all kinds of utterly useless results are being pumped out that swiftly come to be unassailable gospel. Moreover, many real results from probability theory are actually kind of counter-intuitive, as we'll see in the next three little snippets.

Phony Data
Doris is the manager of the accounting department of a medium-size firm. Her most reliable confidant in the company has told her that one of two managers, Phil or Ted, has been playing games with expenses in his department for years. The informant refuses, however, to say which one of the guys it is.

In front of Doris are the expense reports for the two departments. Having a really good eye for detail, she notices a difference between the numbers in the two reports. All of the expense amounts in both reports are in the range from $100 to $999, but that's where the similarity ends. The expense numbers in the report from Phil's department are pretty uniformly distributed: there doesn't seem to be any particular bias toward any starting number. A figure in the $800 range is about as likely to appear as a figure in the $200 range. The numbers appear to be quite randomly distributed.

However, the expense numbers from Ted's department—and Ted has quite a few more expenses listed, so the total expenses of the departments come out to be about the same—are heavily weighted toward numbers in the $100, $200, and $300 range. As a percentage of all the numbers, figures in the $700, $800, and $900 are much less common.

Doris does some checking, and she learns that the two departments are virtually identical in their operational details, so this isn't some cost-control thing where Ted is managing department expenses differently from Phil.

This makes Doris very suspicious. Ted's numbers are "skewed" to the low end, while Phil's numbers are "uniform" in their distribution, and there's no good reason why there should be such a difference. She calls Ted into her office, and she tells him point-blank that she thinks he phonied up his numbers to make his per-item expenses look better. Ted goes bananas and says, "Are you crazy? Everyone knows Phil's been phonying the numbers he sends to you for years!"

Ted seems so earnest in his righteous indignation that Doris tells him she'll have to think about it over night.

Based just on the numbers Doris was reviewing, was she justified in hauling Ted into her office, or should she have dragged Phil in there?

Remember: your decision upon whom to suspect is based only on the numbers in those reports.

Birth Dates in a Crowd
Suppose you're in a room with other people. How many people would have to be in that room for there to be a 50-50 chance that someone shared your birth date (month and day)?

A)   Fewer than 25 people.
B)   Between 26 and 50 people.
C)   Between 51 and 200 people.
D)   Between 201 and 365 people.
E)   More than 365 people.

A Coin-Flipping Problem
You have a quarter in your hand, and you know it's "fair" in the sense that the odds of flipping it and getting heads is the same as the odds of getting tails. The coin has been flipped ten times, and every time, it's come up heads. What should you call on the eleventh flip?

A)   Heads.
B)   Tails.
C)   It doesn't matter.

And Finally, a Finance Problem
Ten years ago, you took out a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage loan for $200,000 that carries an annual interest rate of 6.9%. Your monthly payments (ignoring escrows, mortgage insurance, and other nonsense) are $1,317.20. After ten years, what percentage of the original principal (the $200,000) will you have paid off?

A)   Less than 15%.
B)   Between 15% and 33%.
C)   Exactly 33%.
D)   More than 33%.

In Conclusion
There you have it: a nice collection of little facts and problems to take your mind off the monotony of the holidays. Offer answers to the questions, your insights, and/or your thoughts in the comments. Correct answers will be provided in a follow-up post later this week.



The Dark Wraith hopes readers enjoy this kind of intellectual stimulation.

Special Blog Post: Notes for the Weekend

Your host is in the throes of final exams. It is getting ugly, good friends, once again seeking that right and appropriate balance between the evaluation instrument that adequately tests students' mastery of course objectives while at the same time not turning finals into the academic equivalent of a slaughterhouse.

Of course, there's also the small consideration of not wanting my tires slashed, too.

So what do I do? The same thing I've done for more than two-and-a-half decades. I write the finals, then I walk away from them for a day, then I go back and look at what I've done. When I see a question that makes me wince, I kill it and put in something easy as penitence. One big problem is perspective: everything I ask looks easy and obvious to me, but that is most decidedly not the case for students. Setting aside the undeniable fact that students in this era are woefully underprepared not just for the coursework, but for learning, itself, any teacher who thinks he or she is giving an "easy" test needs to step back and ask, "Easy for whom?"

It's still frustrating. The so-called "No Child Left Behind" initiative is a miserable failure. Ask a hundred parents, educators, and politicians what its primary objective was supposed to be, and you'll get a surprising diversity in answers. Was the objective to make students 'smarter'? better able to take standardized tests? more capable of performing well in the work place? more prepared for the next level of learning?

Even the best program of education rehabilitation could not achieve all of those noble objectives; but NCLB most definitely is compatible with the increasingly pervasive institutionalization of productive environments everywhere from the work place to the schools. Even colleges are becoming more institutionally rigid, with catch words and phrases like "standards," "assessments," "learning outcomes," and all manner of complicated, multi-word babble starting to sneak out of the administrative ranks and into the classrooms, themselves.

It all becomes a game with most outcomes not very attractive. On the one hand, I can be the outspoken, acerbic, snarling Luddite, growling, "Oh, knock it off with that crap, already," thereby becoming the lightning rod for all kinds of punitive administrative measures that come like finely honed knives in the back.

On the other hand, I can play right along, perhaps even out-doing the out-doers with babble-phrases and reams of evaluation instruments and proposals for assessment enhancements and multi-dimensional learning outcome checklists, thereby attempting to short-circuit the nonsense with the administrative equivalent of sensory overload. I thought this one was a good idea, so I did it a couple of years ago. Much to my horror awhile later, my crowning glory of utter insanity in a learning outcomes checklist (what is sometimes referred to these days by the gag-inducing term "rubric") actually showed up as a recommended instrument for implementation! Dear God, you want to talk about hate speech: no one would have believed me if I'd said the whole thing was supposed to have been a joke. Fortunately, the way academia works, if an idea can be stolen by bigger fish, it will be stolen by those bigger fish, and that's what happened. Only a small group of people ever knew that the instrument was my doing.

So much for creative rebellion.

I'll be administering tests next week. Most of my students will pass. Most of them will have learned quite a bit. Sadly, though, I cannot guarantee you that their grades reflect some absolute level of achievement or even aptitude with respect to the content of the course. They're not well-prepared academically when they come in, and they're not well-prepared academically when they leave, even if they have passed. But they do have knowledge and skills leaving that they didn't have when they started. Whether they wanted to or not, they learned quite a bit.

Although I cannot give you any assurances, I can say that it is my hope that, not only did they learn a lot about the subjects of the courses they took from me, but they also learned at least a little bit about how to learn.

Enough about that. Allow me a few disparate remarks on topical matters.

A Rant
If you are an Internet Explorer user and have not upgraded to IE7, DO NOT. It is an abomination that is hated by God.

As many of you know, I am no fan of Firefox. I have, however, really warmed to Opera: I keep getting more impressed with it the more I use it. Unfortunately, the sad reality is that Microsoft, albeit through criminal acts committed in the 1990s, controls the market, and I have to live with its products despite my eternal disgust with the company and with justice and regulatory systems in the United States that still, to this very day, are filled with ignoramuses and hide-bound by a statutory framework thoroughly incapable of handling the modern age of machines and the corporations and people who menace the world with their anti-competitive practices.

The point, though, is that I cannot do Web work without recognizing that the overwhelming majority of platforms on which my work will be seen and used come from Microsoft. More importantly, when I teach computer science, I would be grossly malfeasant if I were to spend much of any time at all on anything other than the Microsoft environment, and that goes for Internet Explorer as well as for the Office Suite. I would be nailing the coffin shut on my students' job prospects if I were to put in a syllabus, "Get Firefox."

On a much deeper level, the coding regimentation demanded by Firefox just set off my rebellious, Type B personality all along, and now that I understand just how that school marm of W3C is greasing the lightning of data mining millions of Websites these days, every fiber of my paranoid being is playing a high note.

However, I cannot fault those who prefer and like Firefox. Aside from its gimmicks and my personal paranoia about the way its developers present it as the obvious choice for those who want to fight the corporatization of the Internet embodied by Microsoft, I honestly grant that it's a good browser. I use it myself, especially when I'm testing changes to cascading style sheets on Websites.

All of that aside, Microsoft is once again displaying classic symptoms of monopoly. IE7 is outrageous. Install it, and you'll first notice that Microsoft is now trying a knock-off of that "tabbed browsing" from Firefox. It was a ruse with Firefox, and it's a ruse with IE7. (No, you can't get something for nothing: tabbed browsing is like painting the windows of a car with different scenery so people think the car is multi-dimensional and super fast, when in fact it's nothing of the kind.) Far worse, though, is that IE7 goes into the workings of Windows, itself, and in its little "upgrades" for its own purposes, it suddenly makes older programs having nothing whatsoever to do with it or even the Internet suddenly stop working. Any federal regulator within half a light-year of astuteness would see this as a blatant violation of antitrust law. Microsoft uses that sneer for which it's famous about "legacy" programs and how they might be affected, and that's just Microsoft-speak for another round of destroying competitive companies and their products that are so good that people are still using them after five years.

Let me get off the Microsoft rant now before that pain starts radiating through my left arm.

A Few Up-coming Events
Readers might have noticed a few minor architectural changes both here at The Dark Wraith Forums and at Big Brass Blog. Here, I also finally repaired the links to previous months' content, and I updated the links to major posts, including in the list a couple never posted here at The Dark Wraith Forums: "Assassinations and the Beneficiaries," published at The UnCapitalist Journal, and "The end of all things," published at Pam's House Blend.

Over the next month, the advertisements will be removed. The only one I'll retain is the Barnes & Noble book ads, but that's because I need a way to promote books I want to recommend. Other than that, I have finally and completely wearied of giving free exposure to companies that use the extraordinarily unlikely prospect of commissions to get hundreds of thousands of Webmasters suckered into what is a one-sided game of 'You do for me, and I'll do nothing for you'. Should flat-rate, reputable advertisers with tasteful ads (specifically, those that don't go blinky-blink, dancy-dance, jerky-jerk) contract for exposure across my Websites, then readers will see advertising again here. That is not likely to happen: just like the mainstream news media, advertisers are completely convinced that the Blogosphere comprises a handful of giant, dinosaur blogs, along with some undefinable, unworthy, amorphous mass of damnable and useless little Webpages in the caverns underneath. Fair enough.

More changes to the Websites of Dark Wraith Publishing Co. will be coming once I've turned in final grades for this semester. At Big Brass Blog, I'll be widening the center, main column. The principal reason for this is so that the contributors can put in YouTube video screens at full size. Here at The Dark Wraith Forums, I'll be moving the site to Nucleus. The layout will fill the entire screen at 1024x768, with symmetric sidebars girding the middle. If I get ambitious, I'll add a third color scheme for people who don't favor either the default Midnight Embers or the Afternoon Ashfire. The third, if I do it, will be Blue Ice: a sheer white background with blues and greens for text and borders.

I shall also be completing my repairs of The UnCapitalist Journal, and I'll finally get around to bringing Big Brass Alliance back to life.

Finally on this topic, as I mentioned quite a long time ago, I still have the intention of running a blog radio news and talk show. The hold-up is hardware: about three thousand dollars worth, to be a little more exact about the nature of the impediment. We'll see how the new year plays out. To be brutally honest, if I'd get off my fat ass and stop being precious about myself, there's janitorial and other low-end work just going begging right now.

That goes right to a point that was made by the Classical economists: all unemployment is voluntary. If I want a job, I can get a job. If I want more, I can work more. It's one thing for me to be sympathetic to the plights of others in their economic difficulties, but I know very well that in my personal life, I cannot play the game of claiming oppression by some mean-spirited engine of systematic economic violence. That's just not the way it is, and it puts me in the somewhat self-contradictory position of being a progressive economist in the public sphere while being unable to ascribe my personal circumstances to those same views.

I often wonder how many others share that seemingly contradictory duality of perspective.

Enough of that, too.

An Observation on Geo-Politics
Readers who've been following the tale of the recently assassinated former Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, might or might not agree with the following observation I must make, but I am compelled to lay this on the table. We now have at least two other people who are clearly sick and will probably die from the same radioactive poision, Polonium 210, that killed Mr. Litvinenko: Italian security specialist and professor Mario Scaramella and former Russian agent Dmitry Kovtun have both been hospitalized. In addition, Polonium 210 has been found in Litvinenko's wife, in Kovtun's wife, and in two London Metropolitan police officers, as well as in others. As I set forth in my article, "Assassinations and the Beneficiaries," Litvinenko minced no words in laying the blame for his murder right at the feet of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Now, put the current round of poisonings in the following context: twelve journalists killed in the last six years, including an American editor for Forbes. The last of those journalists was Anna Politkovskaya, who was preparing a scathing investigative article on the Russian army's outrages in Chechnya. Throw into the mix some imprisoned, formerly prominent Russians, individuals who were in the way of the oligarchic thugs who are Putin's friends and who are now languishing in ungodly, Soviet-era prisons after ludicrously phony trials.

Here's the question: At what point does some government, any government of a supposedly respectable nation, state the obvious? This madness is now, without question, terrorism; and the possible involvement of Putin or his associates puts it right smack into the league of state-sponsored terrorism. A deadly poison, traces of which are showing up all over Europe, in airplanes, hotels, restaurants, apartments, even people? For Heaven's sake, if this kind of fool's assassination weapon isn't creating terror, what could?!

Where's the outrage? And never mind the dullards in the Bush Administration. What about the British? Does Tony Blair not grasp that a foreign interest, possibly even a foreign government, is using Great Britain as an assassination field and doing so with a stupidly dangerous weapon? There's a reason why radioactive materials like Polonium 210 are handled in those labs with the people sticking their hands into gloved holes in thick containers: radioactive materials are indiscriminate in whom they kill. And now we have the former spy Kovtun probably having been poisoned in Germany, and the Germans are staying eerily quiet about all of this?

Yes, there's a reason for the roaring silence. It's not a good reason, but it's a reason, nonetheless. I shall leave it to the readers to offer speculation, should they so desire.

And Finally, Concerning that Handbasket
Several posts and comments I've seen lately have either directly or implicitly had to do with the recent plunge of the dollar and the dangers facing the U.S. economy. To the matter of Iran shifting away from denominating its oil in U.S. dollars and toward denominating it in euros, as I have stated before, this is not going to happen anytime soon, at least not as some instant, shocking switch-over. It is a process; it's underway, and it's not just Iran that's doing it: all across the Middle East, oil producing states—even our so-called allies there—are denominating some contracts in euros, now, and this practice will get more and more common over the coming several years. As I explained before, the euro is just not strong enough, nor does it have nearly enough depth, yet, to absorb the full weight of an enormous commodity market like petroleum. It will be able to do so in time, and what's happening right now is the process by which the financial markets are developing the complex machinery necessary for the euro to be the currency of choice and standard. Eventually, a "market-basket" of currencies structured as a denominational index might show up, but that's not as likely as a single currency coming to the fore. An index might be a good front, however, and might be used as a way to keep the U.S. dollar from becoming completely ostracized from the international scene, but the euro—at least as the overwhelmingly dominant currency in a market basket—is still my call for the long-run choice. Just pray that the yuan never gets much of a foothold. That would be a disaster, considering the overhang of that lousy toilet paper just waiting to blow back into a hyper-inflationary spiral on the Mainland.

The descent of the dollar from primacy in world markets won't be the end of the world for the United States, but it most certainly will be the death knell for the American people living high on the hog as the banker's kids. Soon enough, we'll be subject to the retail market for financial capital, and that will be a hard adjustment for us, given that we've been getting borrowed money at wholesale for quite a few decades.

Going to war with Iran will not stop the inevitable. Unfortunately, the neo-conservatives and a whole lot of other people who don't know any better are thinking right now that this process can, in fact, be stopped if Iran gets its ears boxed back.

I'll tell you right now that we are gearing up for a military confrontation with Tehran. I'm getting too many independent lines of evidence to dismiss the prospect. Whether or not war comes, however, does not depend upon us. Even if the Bush Administration neo-cons weren't the incompetent, lying war-mongers they are, the United States could only marginally alter the current trajectory of events.

Yet another war in the Middle East, this time involving Iran, is not inevitable. It is likely, but it is not inevitable.

So what can we—you and I—do to ensure that this new war does not come about? That's easy: absolutely nothing.



The Dark Wraith invites comments on anything and everything.

UPDATE: Via Shakespeare's Sister comes a short quiz ostensibly designed to determine how evil one is. These are the results for the Dark Wraith.


How evil are you?

The Dark Wraith is altogether unamused.

Editorial: Details and Devils

Last Sunday, the blogger litbrit of The Last Duchess crossposted her article entitled, "The Dead Don’t Give A Damn What We Call It" at Shakespeare's Sister. Her post concerned a New York Times article by Frank Rich about the use of language by the media to frame the situation in Iraq and by Mr. Bush to literally construct his own perception of what's happening there. Mr. Rich used as an example of Mr. Bush's extraordinary disconnect the recent incident with newly elected Senate Democrat Jim Webb of Virginia: Bush asked Webb how his son (a soldier in Iraq) was doing, and Mr. Webb responded by saying, "I’d like to get them out of Iraq," to which the President snapped that he didn't ask what Mr. Webb wanted.

The comment thread from litbrit's post included a running exchange between Minstrel Boy of Harp & Sword and your host here at The Dark Wraith Forums, with others, including litbrit, herself, offering thoughts on Rich's column and on Mr. Bush's state of mind.

As is often the case, conversations with Minstrel Boy can be interesting and informative, his words being the product of both his experience as a soldier in the Vietnam War and his extensive knowledge of military history. During our discussion in that comment thread, he offered an important judgment that I wish to emphasize and then use as a touchstone for a point of my own; but first, it would be proper form to reproduce here some of the exchange on that thread from litbrit's post.
◊      ◊      ◊

just a quick expansion of the webb story. three days before the reception at the white house webb's son's unit was ambushed in al-anbar province. the vehicle next to his son's was bombed, killing three members of the unit. young corporal webb behaved like the webbs have behaved in battle since the french and indian war for this country. with courage, compassion and selfless courage. senator elect webb had a lot on his mind and went to the reception because of his sense of duty and deference to the institutions of this nation. he purposely avoided the reception line because he did not want to make nice with the man who is stubbornly and idioticly putting our children's lives at risk for no good reason. mr. bush (who knew exactly what the situation was with webb's son, he fucking knew exactly) broke ranks and sought him out for a little session of frat boy bullying. the implied threat of "i can kill your son if you fuck with me." asshole. reprehensible asshole. i would have bitten throat out of that rear echelon mother fucker. then hit the buffet. webb has a lot more character than i do.

— The Minstrel Boy

Thanks, MB. I wasn't sure what would happen if I put up the whole thing (men in black NYT vans suddenly pull up outside my house and pull me from my laptop while I'm still in my pink, sock-monkey-print PJs?) so I excerpted as heavily and as appropriately as I could.

You gots more balls than I do, Sir! (As Son Two would say, Well, Deet-dee-dee..., which I'm told is the new Duh in Hipworld.)

The Webb incident was just the latest installment of what has become a far-reaching collection of utterly unbelievable, utterly disrespectful Bush declarations. Think Cindy Sheehan. Think every parent or loved one of every soldier, the fallen and the still-standing alike.

AAAAAAARGH.

— litbrit

Good morning, litbrit.

While I am glad for Frank Rich's column, allow me a tempering thought, here.

Poll question for the American people:

Which would you prefer?

A) A change of military strategy by the Administration that would allow us to win in Iraq.

B) A change of political strategy by the Administration that would allow us to leave Iraq.

In my judgment, Choice B) is the runner-up, the one the electorate has now chosen merely because Mr. Bush lost his credibility in delivering A).

When this war in Iraq is over for the United States—and that, by the way, will be a long, long time from now—I shall be woefully impatient with the inevitable "soul searching" in which politicians, pundits, and commoners will engage. They got what they wanted when they wanted it: razzle-dazzle, slam-bam, shock-and-awe right on the tellie. Must-see TV for the Payback Time Generation.

Senator Webb's son gets to have the other side of the coin: while we as a nation will someday gladly leave Iraq, those soldiers of our country who stood that ground in a miserable Middle Eastern country will get to have their own version of the old Charlie Daniels Band Song. Anyone remember it?

"I Am Still in Saigon."

Mr. Bush might very well ensure that soldiers remain in Baghdad for quite a while to come, but it was the American people who were ultimately responsible for ensuring that Mr. Webb's son and tens of thousands of others like him will spend the rest of their days still in Iraq, regardless of how far from that awful place they run for the rest of their days.

Let us never forget to thank the voters for that for the rest of their days.


The Dark Wraith has had his say.

— Dark Wraith

...[T]o answer your question, I choose B because I was always against the illegal and immoral invasion; now, as then, I believe our military muscle and national treasure are put to their best and noblest use protecting and providing for Americans right here at home. Defending the Constitution, fighting "food insecurity", and all that.

I should add that A is probably impossible, unless you're one of those who'd happily wait for that infamous infinite number of monkeys--the ones with infinite typewriters and limitless time--to churn out a bit of Shakespeare.

Something tells me you're not, though. B it is.

— litbrit

I find it altogether troubling that Mr. Bush is still able to frame the debate about "pullback" in terms of "win" and "lose" being mutually exclusive opposites, which is not the case in a conflict that has become a slow-bleed war of attrition. Only by allowing a failed military/political strategy, one that from its inception included both lies and wholly silly theoretical underpinnings, to distend into what Iraq has become for us does "losing" become the alternative to "winning."

Mr. Bush has dug his own grave, and he continues to do so. I just wish he would continue his descent into Hell using a shovel not made from the bones of Americans and Iraqis.


The Dark Wraith can't wait to see the look on his face when he makes it all the way down to Satan's office complex.

— Dark Wraith

another factor to consider in "get out now" (which by the way is something that should be done except for the reasons i'm about to go into)

for the last eight months or so i have been pointing out to people (along with wes clark, colin powell, david hackett fisher and a few others) that the situation on the ground in iraq, the geography and the mood of the people there precludes us pulling out without a bloodbath along the lines of la noche triste where cortez had to fight his way out of tenochtitlan. there was another british retreat from afghanistan (i think 1920's about the time they made up the concept of iraq and set the stage for today's current clusterfuck) where they were slaughtered by small tribe after small tribe.

the distances, the anger of the people, the geographic choke points, the fact that our forces have been stretched and bled dry on this misadventure for the last five years all show that a quick bug out is not wise or even plausible.

so then, what to do?

some folks argue that forting up might be the key. turning the u.s. presence into knights in a castle who ride out when the residents light a bonfire (or flash the bat signal to the sky). great idea except that then we have sitting targets for mortars, rockets and other long range weapons. which they will get, and use. because they hate us so much.

a massive rescue effort (taking far more personnel than the suggestion of john mccain's 20,000, which by the way, is troops we do not fucking have). link up, join in and (to quote the old good bad movie "the warriors" bop our way home. this would require the saudis to accept another massive u.s. ground presence. the turks also.

withdraw to kurdistan (a de facto entity folks it was that before we invaded and will remain so). same as a retreat to the south except with a much more harrowing final exit route. (north through the soviet union, or through turkey, the turks might be bought off with an entry ticket to the EU so there's some small hope)

this scenario plays out like the crows anthem from the wiz which is returning to broadway soon, but i digress.


you can't win
you can't get even
and you can't get out of the game.

this is a clusterfuck of monumental proportions. bush is the spiritual heir to quintus varius. (look it up)

— The Minstrel Boy

"These (Aztecs) then came and I told them to observe how they could not triumph, and how each day we did them great harm and killed many of them and we were burning and destroying their city; and that we would not cease until there was nothing left either of it or of them. They replied that they had indeed seen how much they had suffered and how many of them had died, but that they were all determined to perish or have done with us, and that I should look and see how full of people were all those streets and squares and roof tops. Furthermore, they had calculated that if 25,000 of them died for every one of us, they would finish with us first, for they were many and we were but few."

--Hernan Cortés--

— The Minstrel Boy

And so, then, we came to the only possible option remaining.

We fed them to each other; we pitted them against their own brethren in a spiraling vortex of blood spraying up into the caustic sky. Hatred that had festered in rotting tombs for centuries, we dredged it from the very soil, itself, and we made them to feed; and so they did. Great was their hunger, and flesh—any flesh—was their supper that night as we watched in awe at what we had done.

But anon, we would have to leave; and leave we did, amid the screams, amid the wailing, amid the roar of war become the glowing iron of self-destruction.

We departed, and they did not see us in our quiet flight.

We departed, and they did not care, for we had shown them an enemy to hate far more than they could hate us: we had shown them the enemy that is themselves.

One day, God forbid, we shall see that enemy here in this land, too, for that enemy lives in the hearts of all men who would surrender, willingly or by duress, to the animals of our nature.

Already, I can hear it howling patiently from my shores, even as I come marching home.

Even as I come marching home the defeated hero that I am.

--Dark Wraith--

— Dark Wraith

◊      ◊      ◊
The American pullout scenarios envisioned by many on the Left and even some on the Right merit in their details the kind of harsh light Minstrel Boy brings to bear. One solution touted by the some was mentioned favorably by Andrew Sullivan in a December 5, 2006, column entitled, "The Gathering Storm," a wide-ranging op-ed piece that begins with his own, personal endorsement of Robert Gates as the new Secretary of Defense, this despite Dr. Gates's status as what could easily be described as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Reagan Administration's criminal acts collectively known as the Iran-Contra scandal, as recapped by, among others, Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA.

After the endorsement of Dr. Gates to resume his former career as a public official with a history of manipulating intelligence to get Congress to do Presidential bidding, and before launching into a simplistic characterization of 16th and 17th Century European history as "...a massive, sectarian, regional bloodbath" that will happen all over again in the 21st Century, Mr. Sullivan makes this passing statement about the situation in Iraq:

"The best hope for Iraq is perhaps a temporary surge in U.S. troops to make one last effort at some effort at a relatively peaceful de facto partition, before the near-inevitable U.S. withdrawal and subsequent involvement of Saudis and Egyptians in support of the Sunnis and the Iranians on the side of the Shia."

Mr. Sullivan puts it on the table, the emerging silver bullet: partition. His version has the shiny, testosterone gloss of one last roar of U.S. troops kicking serious booty to get all those fractious Iraqis into line before we bug out.

Oh, yes, and the Saudis will flow in to see to it that our will be done as far as that partition goes, this despite the rather inconvenient situation on the ground with the House of Saud having to deal with its own running battle with internal anti-government militants. We'll get this mess under control, if only Dr. Gates can get Bush to see the light of letting Iraq break apart into three states, something called "Kurdistan" for the Kurds, some miserable piece of left-over turf for the Sunnis, and the rump Iraq with lots and lots of oil for the Shi'ites.

Yes, that's a good endpoint at which the United States should now aim, according to Mr. Sullivan. Unfortunately, that scenario, or some minor variation on it, has a good chance of becoming the widely preferred combo meal at the American Opinion Drive-Thru Solutions Diner.

Now, let us briefly but objectively think about the details of the pieces of this partitioning solution.

First, whether or not "Kurdistan" will ever be recognized as a full-fledged state, it already exists, but that does not mean it's not going to be a problem. Neighboring Turkey will have on-going and serious issues with even an unrecognized but de facto homeland for the Kurds since provisional Kurdish militias still routinely make cross-border, terrorist-type raids into Turkey, and Turkey routinely reciprocates with cross-border, punitive attacks to kill Kurds who might or might not have been involved in the original raids. That conflict will continue to simmer for decades, and it will inevitably flare up every now and then into something that looks an awful lot like war. And adding a rather strange twist to that mix will be Israel, which has a difficult but deepening matrix of commercial, political, and military ties with both Turkey and Kurdistan. One might argue, of course, that perhaps Israel's greatest movement toward maturity as a nation-state will be when it finds itself in the unenviable and entirely novel position of having to act as a peace broker between two of its allies that it really wants to keep from each other's throat.

So Kurdistan—what was once northern Iraq—will be a source both of hope for stability and of spasmodic warfare in the coming decades; and as a point to Mr. Sullivan, that on-going tension and occasional, open conflict will not be "sectarian," nor will it necessarily be a "bloodbath."

Below Kurdistan is another matter: a bloodbath awaits almost any solution at this point, but no matter how many times the mainstream news media and some bloggers call it "sectarian" violence, that does not make it so. The Sunni/Shia distinction is obvious right now, but that is merely a pair of focal points for many issues that internally divide Iraqis, those being the divisions that Saddam Hussein was so masterfully able to contain in a way that makes George W. Bush look like an utter, incompetent, pathetic, rank amateur by comparison.

Cleaving a border to wedge the Sunnis and the Shi'ites from each other is a fool's goal, and the tragedy is that it has a very good chance of being the final solution, once President Bush is no longer an impediment. In any partition, the Shi'ites will get most of the territory that has the oil under it. The Sunnis will get dirt, and it will enrage them for generations, if not centuries, to come. The talk of bringing Iran and Syria into the brokered settlement is just brilliant, too: they're going to broker the maximum deal for the Shia majority of Iraq, and then they're going to run that new, rump Iraq of the Shi'ites like their own fiefdom. Lebanon under Syrian political and military domination was nothing but a shell of a state. The difference between Lebanon and the rump Iraq of the Shi'ites under the political shadow of Iran and Syria is that there won't be any chance whatsoever for an eventual Cedar Revolution for the latter, but there will be a very high probability that, sooner or later, Israel will feel compelled to use military force to contain what it will perceive as a clear and compelling threat to it.

The very idea that Iran needs to be brought into any "solution" to the crisis in Iraq shows just how miserable the choices are at this point. Any place where you find yourself in a poker game where the Devil is welcome to the table is a casino you never should have entered. But here we are: a weak, annoying little state that once in a while used to sponsor terrorism—despite Dr. Gates's mid-1980s lies to the contrary—has now become a regional pain in the backside able to just sit back and wait for us to come begging.

As a rhetorical question, just for the record, who brought us to this unhappy place, the poker table where the Taliban and Ba'athist enemies of the hegemons in Tehran are no longer around to keep Iran in a vice grip? Why, that would be none other than George W. Bush and his neo-conservative genius war-mongers.

And finally, let us be clear about the on-going and coming "bloodbath" in Iraq: whether we stay or leave, for a long time to come, that word will characterize the miserable land we invaded. All we're debating right now is how much American blood will be in the rivers of it that flow through the coming decade. Is anyone bold enough to openly say the awful truth about our eventual departure?—that part about how we Americans have made an unbelievably huge mess, a human tragedy of just about epic proportions, but now we need to leave so those Muslims can kill each other and leave us out of it?

Whether the President who caused this eventually goes to the gallows or into disgraced obscurity, we as a nation now must carry the blame for a catastrophe we simply cannot undo, cannot fix, and cannot find someone else upon whom to lay the blame.

Fortunately, we can always use our wholly facile, irrelevant language of "sectarian violence," "civil war," and "pullback" to assuage our national conscience and mitigate the glaring discomfort that comes with direct, unavoidable culpability; and we can bring back to power a skillful liar from another deceitful Administration; and we can put into power a party of men and women who consistently, for six long years, cowered before the neo-conservatives when the winds of popular support blew far from the world of measured skepticism that should never have been abandoned as the hallmark of statesmanship.

The good news is that it really is okay if we walk away from Iraq without feeling overwhelmingly mortified by the bloodbath that bears our imprimatur. Someday, just like always, we'll pay, and we'll pay dearly.

And when we do, watch just how morally outraged we'll be by the injustice of it all.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Editorial: They the People

In a post published at Shakespeare's Sister, The Heretik comments on a Sunday, December 3, 2006, op-ed column by Eric Foner in The Washington Post entitled, "He's the Worst Ever." As the title of the Post article suggests, Mr. Foner proposes that George W. Bush will go down in history as one of the worst Presidents, if not the worst, in the history of the United States. He argues that Mr. Bush shares qualities of leadership style similar to others in the 'bottom rung' populated by the likes of Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, James Polk, and Richard Nixon. Having shown similarities between Bush and others considered among the worst, Foner concludes of George W. Bush:

"[I]n his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors."

For his part, The Heretik concludes on a resonant note with the following:

"People who go with their gut feeling and brag about it regularly eventually are recognized for who they are: people too lazy to use their brains. This White House has been run by people who have presumed the people could be fooled all the time. We are smarter than that. We have the heart and the compassion our leader does not."

While Pierce, Buchanan, and (let us not forget) Hoover might indeed have been bottom-rung, failed leaders, it is important to keep in mind that every one of them was, as is George W. Bush, an elected leader. The very real possibility that Mr. Bush's two election victories were the result of fraud does nothing to mitigate the glaring fact that a large number of Americans from time to time vote into office, and then choose to retain to that office, extraordinarily incompetent, venal, corrupt, ineffective, and/or just plain bad individuals.

That quite a few of Mr. Bush's former supporters now want him out of office is no evidence of fundamental change within them; they remain what they were when they voted for him, praised him, and supported his actions: they are a deep shadow cast by the American psyche, something to which this nation in its elected officials will revert again and again.

These people, just like those who ultimately repudiated the likes of miserable Presidents before, are not supporters of progressivism, not in any meaningful sense of the word; they are instead fickle users, people who will in the fullness of time return to their tendency to find mean-spirited stupidity in those they hold in esteem. Neo-conservatism in general, and George W. Bush in particular, offered methods of governance that voters found attractive. That neo-conservatism as it was operationalized by Bush failed merely means he failed. Offer up to those same voters another Republican or even a Democrat every bit as pretend-tough, "down-home" mean, "gut"-oriented in decision making, and they will jump right on the bandwagon.

Below is a graphical presentation of the latest Quinnipiac University National Thermometer poll of "warmth of sentiment" held by voters toward prominent politicians.


Published on November 27, the results are telling. Topping the list is Republican Rudolph Giuliani, whose supposedly "liberal" views on matters such as choice are at least arguably overshadowed by his legendary reputation as a get-tough law enforcement type. More tellingly, setting aside Bill Clinton, who cannot run for President in 2008, the top of the chart is dominated by Republicans and their ally, Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat in name only when it comes to many of his foreign policy positions, which are stikingly neo-conservative.

But some might point out that Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) certainly seems to hold a good second place in the graphic above. Unfortunately, other data collected during the Quinnipiac survey reveals that, while Mr. Obama scores high on warmth of sentiment, that might be only because many of those surveyed don't know much about him. The graphic below shows the percentage of poll respondents who didn't know enough about the politician to offer a response to the "warmth of sentiment" question. Obama scored 41 percent on the lack of recognition component of the survey, placing him in the lower half of the 20 on the list.


This is even more troubling than it first appears. The simple correlation coefficient for Democrats shows a slightly negative relationship of -0.092 between "warmth of sentiment" and lack of recognition. This is barely if at all statistically significant and means respondents were slightly more likely to associate high warmth of sentiment to those Democrats about whom they knew. The correlation coefficient for the Republicans is even less significant at a value of -0.065.

Sen. Obama bucks the slight overall tendency evident for both Democrats and Republicans: he scores high on the "warmth of sentiment" measure, but also scores high on lack of recognition. In fact, the extent of Mr. Obama's anomalous combination of results for warmth of sentiment and lack of recognition is revealed when the correlation coefficient for the Democrats is run removing his data: the value of the correlation coefficient more than doubles from -0.092 all the way to -0.22. This indicates that, taking out the only Democrat in the top four, respondents reveal a statistically significantly greater warmth of sentiment the more they know about Democrats. But because no Democrats are among the top four when Sen. Obama is removed from the poll results, that warmth of sentiment for Democrats is shared by fewer people than is the same sentiment for Republican candidates.

That does not bode well for Democrats going into the 2008 Presidential campaign and renders at least superficial evidence that the underlying current of sentiment among the majority of Americans remains Republican-leaning conservative.

Indeed, it was not conservatism or even perhaps neo-conservatism that the voters rejected in the rout of Republicans on November 7 of this year; instead, it was the incumbents who were implementing conservative policies who were thrown out of office.

No doubt, a sound argument can be made that the results of a single Quinnipiac University poll should not be used to make some sweeping statement about current, general voter sentiments. On the other hand, it is no less a sweeping statement to declare that the very same electorate that twice put a man like George W. Bush into the Oval Office has somehow in two short years had a fundamental change of mind about what constitutes desirable qualities in a President. To assume that a welcome transformation of the majority of Americans toward progressivism is underway is folly. Far more likely, the majority is looking for what George W. Bush was supposed to be as a conservative that he failed to be in that role.

Should that be what was truly behind the Democratic gains in November, the outlook is bleak. Republicans could very well hold the White House in 2008 and might even re-capture either the House or the Senate then. Any reciprocating "warmth of sentiment" Democrats might have toward the majority of voters right now must be tempered by the real possibility that a care-taker Congress has been put into place while the electorate sorts out which purveyor of Right-wing policies can best achieve the results Mr. Bush could not. This possibility makes the next two years crucial for the newly elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate because they will have but 24 months—just one session of Congress—to do what they can to repair the damage wrought not merely by George W. Bush, but by the politics of a Republican Party that remains incapable of wise, prudent, and responsible governance.

It is altogether possible that the moral and financial mess wrought by the Republicans cannot be undone, but it is the duty of the Democrats to do what they can. Sadly, though, they should not labor under the misimpression that any repair they do will be rewarded by the voters in 2008, at least not as far as the Presidential race is concerned. The majority two years from now will be quite a bit like the majority that put a failed President back in the White House in 2004. To imagine that those voters have really learned their lesson is to ascribe to them something last month's elections did not and certainly could not demonstrate, something the Quinnipiac poll shows is still missing. The people who voted for Mr. Bush have not learned contrition, much less have they become ashamed of themselves for what they did in 2000 and 2004.

There is precious little evidence that the majority of Americans understand that George W. Bush is more than just another failed President: he is, in fact, a failed President they chose, not once, but twice.

It would be nice if someone would bluntly point that out to them.

They the People deserve to be reminded not just of what they've done to this country, but also of what they are for having done it.



The Dark Wraith has spoken.