In an article published today, April 24, 2009, at Big Brass Blog, contributing writer Father Tyme tells the reading audience that MSNBC political commentator Keith Olbermann has pledged to donate to charity the sum of $1000 for every second that Right-wing FOX News torture apologist Sean Hannity sustains what is known as the "interrogation method" called "waterboarding." Earlier this week, Mr. Hannity stated on national television that he would actually volunteer for the treatment.

To the purpose of making this idea a real television event, I hereby volunteer to spearhead the waterboarding exercise on Sean Hannity.

No, I'm dead serious. I want to make sure that proper procedure is followed. It seems that the mainstream media sages have all settled on how waterboarding is done, and that method I've heard described and seen being simulated is most decidedly not the only way this particular "enhanced interrogation method" can be carried out. I would be terribly disappointed if the brave Torture Boyz we pay to do the real deal do not know all about the creativity and variation that are essential parts of the horror.

Context is hugely important, too: a prisoner who has been mistreated prior to the waterboarding, who knows his life will get no better after the waterboarding, and who is convinced that more waterboarding and other forms of violence against him are a certainty is a man who will surely become bent of mind as well as of body. As days stretch to weeks, weeks stretch to months, and months stretch to years, the concept of "will" becomes meaningless. Survival becomes an autonomous process separated from conscious thought, which itself, at best, reduces to encoded scripts, rituals, and other devices of mental defense in the all-consuming hopelessness of the situation. Training helps; so does fanatical dedication to cause. Essential features of up-bringing, blood, and beliefs play in, too.

People recover from such life-changing experiences: some reconstitute their highest cognitive, emotional, and empathic skills phenomenally well; others, not so well. At worst, only the shell of a human of high-order thinking, feeling, and other-connecting abilities endures.

Mr. Hannity can get waterboarded, and I want to help; but he and all the others who think they might be okay for the experience would remain, in the incidence of this form of torture, clueless.

They just would. When the show is over, they get to go home. They know they're not captives, and they know their handlers are not out to kill them.

Fortunately for them, they thrive in the protective enclosure of false light. Unfortunately for the civilized among the populous, the Right-wing cowards who listen to the false bravado of fellow Right-wing cowards will be emboldened to carry on under the delusion that they are — in their sniveling individual lives and the putrefaction of their collective pack — something other than unrepentant, clueless cowards who will run from any fight that is not staged and flee from any battle that is not a mere simplistic simulation of real life, death, and the bravery that compels warriors to risk the former in the blood currency of the latter.

To Sean Hannity: Contact me, son. I know a waterboarding method that will rock your world. Let me do that one to you.

Yes, you're going to be stripped naked, and then mocked and otherwise humiliated; but that's not the worst of it, junior: you don't get a blindfold. That's what makes this waterboarding technique so cool. You, yourself, get to watch the action. Some people have said they actually see themselves while it's happening.

Ten seconds in; then I pull you, ask you a question you will most definitely not want to answer on national TV, and if you don't tell me what I want to hear, you get 10 more seconds.

I promise, that first 10 seconds will be the longest of your miserable life. The second 10 seconds will make the first 10 seem like a walk in the park. We'll let the viewing audience do a call-in vote on when we stop if you haven't already cracked on one of the first two pulls. Most definitely, you're not the one who decides the parameters of this game. You have to be powerless, just like the detainees to whom we do these things. Maybe even if you tell me what I want, I'll tell you you're a liar and keep at it. That's how it works with state-sponsored violence.

When we're done, I'll share with you something really important. Even though you might be shaking, even though you might be blubbering like a baby, even though you might be soiling yourself, I'll tell you the big news, and I'll say it like this, right in your ear, just the way the drill sergeants used to tell it to all the boot camp trainees to tear them down so they'd die on command like so many pack animals:

"You, Sean Hannity, ain't nuthin' but a pussy."

But, then again, Sean, you and your fellow Right-wing authoritarians already knew that, didn't you?

I'll be seeing you down by the watering hole, boy.

CNN has hired Right-wing extremist Mary Matalin as a political commentator, joining the ratings-starved station's whacko brigade of Bill Bennett, Alex Castellanos, and Ed Rollins. Sam Feist, CNN's 'political director' and vice president of Washington programming, hailed the acquisition of Matalin in the following words: "As one of the best-known and best-connected strategists in the country, Mary will join our line up of top Republican analysts... We are thrilled that CNN viewers will be able to tap into Mary's vast political experience advising candidates and presidents from both inside and outside of the White House."

Yes, this is Mary Matalin, late of the propaganda bureau of Dick Cheney's shadow government. Ms. Matalin is a genuine, 100 percent showpiece, inextricably — and apparently quite proudly — associated not only with the worst presidential administration in modern U.S. history, but also with the core of a criminal enterprise that engaged in lies to start war, torture, a rogue assassination squad, and political intrigue that included control of the entire Executive Branch by crazies of the Religious Right who think the world must soon come to an end in Rapture and neo-conservatives who took their orders from Tel Aviv and think the world would come to an end if the AIPAC doesn't own every politician and pundit inside the Beltway.

Is Matalin joining CNN bad news? Certainly not. CNN is losing its mainstream viewers, so it's going after the FOX News crowd, which means the two operations will now competitively beat each other into the ground as they desperately fight for the same, narrow, niche market. That is the power of free market competition at its very best: the dregs of an industry backing into the same corner of an identifiable, understandable, targetable, malleable demographic/psychographic cohort group; and there, they destroy each other... and themselves.

And by the way, for readers who don't believe me about how ludicrous CNN has become, watch the video below about the appalling arrest of a reporter and his cameraman by an out-of-control policeman. As shocking as the video of the incident is, CNN newscaster Rick Sanchez leads in with embarrassing, buffoon-like pomposity masquerading as some attempt at objectivity welling up from some deep reserve of extraordinary wisdom about such matters. Once the clip of the incident, itself, is finished, Sanchez picks right back up with his over-the-top, "I'm-a-serious-newsguy-type-of-person" schtick.



Yes, that was Rick Sanchez, who qualifies as a newscaster at CNN and who would, in an alternate life, serve as a role model for comedic parodies of news at The Onion. Throw that kind of wince-inducing reporter in with Right-wing windbags that include the likes of Bill "Gamble-'n-Tie-Me-Up" Bennett and Mary "Georgie Was a Great Prez" Matalin, and you've got all the makings of a news station that's going to give FOX News a real run for its money.

Let the good times roll, fellow citizens: the Forces of the EndTime are coalescing into a spinning sphere of Stupid at neutron star density.

The Dark Wraith will be available for on-air reviews of the show when the whole Stupid Thing hits critical mass and collapses into the vortex of a black hole that finally causes everyone to exclaim in unison, "YO, man. This really SUCKS!"

Dark Wraith Publishing presents The Dark Wraith Audio Lecture Series, specially edited, streaming audio versions of academic lectures in economics and business offered as a public service to visitors at this Website.

Lecture 10: "Radical Economics"
Duration: 0:55:08
Size: 50.4 Mb

Click on the link above to launch the lecture in your computer's default media player or use the shockwave player below to play the lecture.



This is the final lecture of the economics classes I teach, and it is here that I abandon all pretense of "objectivity," which is to say that it is here that I stop pumping out standard principles of economics thinking as if it is "truth" in some absolute, universal sense. Although in some parts, where I must gruesomely over-simplify concepts and philosophical constructs because of the time constraint, I mince no words and spare no feelings. This lecture is 55 minutes of hard-core, unapologetic academic speech at roaring volume.

UPDATE: Dark Voices Radio, Special Episode 2, Saturday, April 18, 2009, at 10:30 p.m. EDT. Click on the graphic below to see the program page and sign up for a reminder.

In comment to Father Tyme's recent post, "The Black Hole," at Big Brass Blog, his fellow contributing writer, Peter of Lone Tree, drawing from Edgar Allen Poe's story, "A Descent into the Maelström," quotes Anglican minister, philosopher, and merchant Joseph Glanville (1636-1680):

The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.

Anon, I must rejoin, and in so setting my thoughts to an epistle, carry good news back to Mr. Glanville, and thence forward, to Peter of Lone Tree and Father Tyme. I invite others to read that which follows and comment as they will.

The ways of God in Nature are such that our Religions, along with their cousins in obligating belief, the Sciences, cannot see them; yet, still, in our spiritual contemplations and our physical experiments, we seek to know, even to that which is on the other side of that maelström we call Death, itself. Surely, the magnificent Augustine, himself, called us to inquiry in necessary preface to the singular and last step of belief. I would dare to speculate that this iniquity of doubt, which might easily descend to sinfulness, is the very essence of the victory of the Prodigal Son and the sweet fruit of joy upon his return that his father felt. Should we be of no father other than ourselves, our joy will be no less as the pulp and juice of freedom flow from the fruit of the tree of knowledge which shelters us from the wind's hateful chain of inexplicable Fate.

It is when we mistake our journey out of ignorance for our arrival in certainty that we fail where that God of Nature resides, for it is in that awful blackness of eternal night that we are forever compelled to travel into a light we can only imagine but never see.

That, my fellow walkers through the unending night, is just and always what distinguishes us from that God of Nature so dear to holy men, philosophers, and fools, alike: as God stands still in the light of certainty about all things now, then, and forever, we — that imperfect, mortal, and soiled Creation; that flesh falling inexorably into the maelström — move on, animated by nothing but our dreams of that which we shall never find.

Rejoice in Life and in Death: the former is our journey; the latter is our Fate. In both, we are victorious over the maelström, even as we are consumed by it.

Yes, the online properties of Dark Wraith Publishing have returned. The MySQL databases are again as they were.

It's all good.

Except maybe for the usual suspects. That would include...

Well, never mind. May God bless them all. Or at the very least, may He stay out of the way.


The Dark Wraith should get back down to business.

And don't forget: