"The Wall" in Berlin, 1990 - Anti-American Postmodern Nostalgia and PBS Fund-Raising (...spooky)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Stupid PBS Tricks
While I'm writing this, several civil-service suits from PBS's Boulder, Colorado affiliate are urging me to give them lots of money in exchange for videos, CDs, and DVDs of Roger Waters' multimedia performance of the rock opera the Wall on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If I had lots and lots of spare change (I don't) and were inclined to support what I consider the morally bankrupt political agenda followed by PBS (I'm not), I'd pop for the package that includes ALL of the Wall Berlin 1990 multimedia stuff, and a Dark Side of the Moon CD and a "Making of" documentary on "Dark Side," having been idiot enough to miss Pink Floyd when they did a concert at Louisiana State University and I was there anyway trying to get through a pre-med degree.

But enjoying Pink Floyd and at least some of Roger Waters' dark vision doesn't mean I've gone out and had a lobotomy. I've seen this video four times now, thanks to Boulder PBS (and every time they say it's the "Colorado Broadcast Premiere") and each time, a little of the glamor flakes off, revealing the shoddy thought processes behind it all, masquerading as moral insight.

Somehow, shoehorning Cyndi Lauper and Sinead O'Connor and Bryan Adams and Jerry Hall and Thomas Dolby and the Scorpions and the Hooters and Marianne Faithful and the Marching Band of the Combined Soviet Forces in Germany (I kid you not) and Van Morrison and Alan Parsons (as sound engineer) into this production diminishes it. Too damn many cooks...

Cyndi Lauper's bogus Cockney accent and capering around the stage kind of screwed "We Don't Need No Education (Leave Those Kids Alone!) up beyond saving. Not to mention the weird overtones caused by Sinead O'Connor singing "Mama," asking if her new girl would break her balls... a moment only Melissa Etheridge or k.d. lang might fully treasure.

And the macabre irony of bringing the damned Red Army - who helped throw the Wall up and mine a quarter mile on their side of it and set up machine gun nests to kill any poor East German ungrateful enough to want to get away from the Workers Paradise - to do the orchestral backup only throws the utter stupidity of the people who so fatuously praise the Berlin 1990 performance into razor-sharp relief.

What the perky PBS lady just called a "conceptual masterpiece" may in time become known to historians as a piece of dark, pro-totalitarian propaganda (those poor, poor Soviets - damn our forces for humiliating them, anyway) which rivals Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for technical virtuosity in the service of the enemies of democracy.

Roger Waters is protesting the choking, corrupting power of a State which controls every facet of its people's life with the help of... a state which used choking, corrupting power to control every facet of its people's lives - until the money to do it with ran out. I wonder how much Waters or his backers paid the Russians to stop threatening West Berlin for an evening and do a bit of orchestra playing.

And if enough people had succumbed to Waters' vision for the strong Western states which held Communism at bay to have let down their guard and lay down their guns, how many of Waters' fans would have survived either the resulting war of Soviet conquest or the purge that followed?

But the audience was sure pumped at the end of "I Want A Dirty Woman," when the plaintive "Mrs Floyd" and a nasal operator introducing herself as "the United States" gets hung up on... twice. That showed us nasty Yanks, didn't it? We'll sure think twice about taxing our own economy into several recessions to defend Europe from invasion next time, huh?

And the Red Army was there in full force for "Bring the Boys Back Home," the early parts of which were performed against comic-bookish drawings of wartime tragedy (one of which was helpfully labeled "Vietnam" - for which the Red Army did more than its bit, equipping North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gunners and interrogating downed American airmen in shithole POW camps, not to mention egging North Vietnam on to invade neighbors at which it was at peace, initiating the hostilities which inspired that comic book page against which Waters emoted so brilliantly). How many Vietnam veterans did Waters check with before using their war - their blood, and anguish, and sweat and valor - as a fig leaf for Communist expansionism?

But Roger Waters is apparently irony-proof, and his audience for the Berlin 1990 concert were apparently just too stupid to see the cognitive dissonance of using a military orchestra that under other conditions might have been marching down that same Potsdamer Platz in triumph as West Berlin and the rest of Europe were crushed under Stalin's (or Brezhnev's, or Gorbachev's) heel.

I have to admit to massive emotional conflict. This music formed a large part of the soundtrack against which my life has played out, and I have watched this production four times now because it is so brilliant, possibly one of the finest pieces of art to which the term "rock opera" has been applied.

And yet it was used to condemn militarism when the only militarism in any way responsive to Waters' arguments - Western militarism in all its efficient and deadly and civilian-controlled panoply - was the only thing defending Europe and Western Civilization from being destroyed by the soldiers of the very same totalitarian monster whose orchestra played so lustily on stage.

Replace the US Army in Europe and Canadian Forces and the British Army of the Rhine and France's forces in Germany, and the West Germans' own army from Germany at any point during the Cold War with Roger Waters and his brilliant conceptual work and all the jerks who condemn militarism by reflex, and the Soviet Army would have been staring across the English Channel at their next conquest a week later.

It would have happened, because the Russian economy never got out of trouble, all the time they were pointing missiles at us and keeping dozens of army divisions just on the other side of the Iron Curtain poised to roll all over Western Europe the minute we became weak enough to make that move worthwhile. All that time, they were hoping to be able to loot Western Europe to balance their checkbook and save their politicians' worthless asses.

Roger Waters - splendid musician, immortal composer and conceptual artist - and complete idiot where geopolitical and moral analysis are concerned.

What the hell, we play Wagner again and again and again even though we know that he had no problem whatsoever with German militarism and German adventurism and the whole line of immoral crap that compelled German armies to tear Europe apart in 1870, 1914 and 1939 - where all that was concerned, Wagner apparently had no conscience.

Their music is just so damn cool.

Jon Stewart as Rather's "permanent replacement" - who does that ding worse?
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Dumb Press Tricks

I inadvertently left my TV tuned to the local station that broadcasts "Access Hollywood" tonight and learned something valuable, just as inadvertently - 53 percent of their viewers think Jon Stewart should be Dan Rather's permanent replacement on the CBS Evening News. I think it was a "Yes/No" question, but I try not to allocate valuable space in my asymptotically shrinking middle-aged memory to things like whether that poll may have mentioned an more appropriate choice - Chevy Chase, maybe.

Think about it, though. Even CBS president Les Moonves (in an interview I referenced a few months earlier in this blog) thinks Jon Stewart might be a reasonable choice for the job. His network's competitors probably think Jon Stewart looks good for the CBS Evening News, too - which goes to show that Moonves and the people polled by "Access Hollywood" may not know the crucial difference between a comedian and a joke. (I'm willing to give Moonves' competitors credit for having a sly sense of humor and a morbid curiosity as to how long it would take the CBS Evening News to self-destruct - further - under a Jon Stewart regime).

Jon Stewart is rumored to be a comedian (I don't see it) and does, in fact, portray a television journalist on what is purportedly a comedy show (again, I don't see more than sporadic comedy in the little of his show I've watched). As a television journalist, Dan Rather was undoubtedly a joke on what is purportedly a news program (one which spends up to half its air time editorializing against the party which more than half the voters choose every time they get a chance. That Rather, his producers and their bosses hate the President and the Republican Party is not news, believe me, which means that much of each episode of the CBS Evening News is not, in fact, spent on news).

But to proceed from there to saying that Jay Stewart would actually make a good television journalist is like saying that when Bill Cosby was playing Dr. Huxtable on his 1980s feel-good prime-time comedy show, he should been licensed to practice medicine in real life on the strength of his performance and ratings.

Or is it?

Journalism is not to comedy as medicine is to comedy.

You don't have to:
- go to college for four years of pre-journalism training in some allied but less rarefied field (which is a good thing, because contrary to popular myth there aren't enough credit hours offered in basket-weaving at most universities to fill up a four-year degree program since the NCAA tightened up its rules);
- then take a special Journalism College Admissions Test and compete against thousands of other would-be journalists for a place in a School of Journalism in which you are worked twelve to sixteen hours a day for four years;
- then compete all over again for an internship and residency, for a total of eight to twelve years of post high-school education... just to work at a local paper or radio station.

You don't have to have one hour of post-baccalaureate/graduate school education in order to work as a journalist.

You don't have to pass a state-administered licensure exam and/or a nationally-standardized journalism board exam in order to practice journalism.

If you got your journalism training overseas, you are not required to pass a Examination for Foreign Journalism Graduates before being allowed to practice journalism in this country.

There are no significant barriers to Jon Stewart's crossing over from playing a journalist on television to being a journalist on television. He is not obliged to make the stereotypical disclaimer from cold medicine ads, "I'm not a journalist, I just play one on TV."

I just can't decide who should be more offended by the breathless buzz that Jon Stewart might make the transition from mediocre comic manque to journalist manque - real journalists or real comedians?

The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Dumb Bipartisan Tricks

Useful Phrases for the World of 2015:

That kick in the ribs was wonderful, Sir, may I have another?

That's my last kidney. Please consider not harvesting it.

My home is your home - shall we sign the deed now, Comrade?

 

Of course I'm not resentful because you nuked the West Coast! At least you got Hollywood.

I have just added a new topic category, "Dumb Bipartisan Tricks," to this blog because the White House has really done something dumb, had bipartisan support for it on the Hill, and I just found out about it. I'd feel worse about missing this story when it might have made a difference (a blogger storm during the confirmation hearings, for example), but I made the mistake of thinking that something this heavy would have made the major network news shows. It didn't, that I can tell.

Consider Elaine Chao for a minute. Her father, James S.C. Chao, is chairman and chief executive of Foremost Maritime Corporation of New York. He ships goods to China and buys ships from the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Mr. Chao and Chinese President Jiang Zemin were college classmates in Shanghai and have kept in touch ever since. Chao, his daughter Elaine Chao and her husband, Senator Mitch McConnell visited China and met with Jiang in 1994. In 1995, Chao returned to receive an honorary professorship and presidency at the Shanghai Maritime College, and his daughter went with him then, too.

Now, if you were President of the United States, charged by law and obliged under oath to a God with Whom you're supposedly on good terms with defending the Constitution and the People of our country, and you were choosing someone to be Secretary of Labor - to protect American workers and defend them from unfair competition from overseas, and really do it, not just go through the motions - and along with the President, defend the Constitution and the people of the United States, would you pick this lady?

I have never as much as Emailed, much less met Elaine Chao. I confess that I don't know what she would do if placed in a position where the business and political interests of her father and her husband were to conflict with the good of the workers of the United States and its people in general.

The problem is, it doesn't look good, folks. The People's Republic of China and the United States of America now have interlocking directorates.

Chao has real conflicts of interest and has used her political contacts to get an analyst at the Heritage Foundation (which used to be a conservative think tank, but should be registered as an agent of the Chinese government) fired for saying that the United States should hold up on approval of enhanced trade relations with China until national security issues relating to China were resolved.

Why? Apart from this guy's reports being a large part of the supporting documentation for the Cox Report (which, you may recall, blew the covers all the way off the stories about Chinese espionage at Los Alamos, the transfer of ICBM design information by Loral Hughes to the Chinese Army, and the sale of supercomputers with nuclear weapons design information still on them to China).

It must be hard to see a family friend like Jiang Zemin have his most favored nation trading status and World Trade Organization membership held up because he turns out to have authorized massive spying against our country - spying which had as its object improving Red China's ability to kill Americans. But she got her revenge on that Heritage analyst. And now she's in the Cabinet.

It could also have something to do with Heritage donor Hank Greenberg (who gave Heritage $180,000 in 1998 and at least $100,000 a year for more than a decade) communicating his displeasure with the analyst's reports. Greenberg does a lot of business with Chinese clients through his insurance company AIG (American International Group), and presumably would have to keep Chinese regulators happy to continue doing so. Greenberg and AIG have also been good to Chao's husband Mitch McConnell's Senate campaigns through their PAC. AIG also does a lot of business with Henry Kissinger, who (through Kissinger Associates) has been a tireless hired gun for American companies wanting better access to Chinese markets, and for huge Communist dictatorships wanting better control of Congress. Conversely, Greenberg, who has been a staunch lobbyist for China on the Hill through his US-China Business Council in the past, is rumored to be a prime source of funding for Kissinger's firm.

I don't know who I'm angrier with:

- Bush for nominating someone with a number of clear conflicts of interest (as Secretary of Labor, Chao automatically gets a Top Secret clearance, something someone with her family connections might otherwise have trouble getting, being family friends with the leader of a major military threat to the United States whose generals have threatened to drop a nuclear weapon on Los Angeles if we defend Taiwan independence) or

- Congress for rolling over on her nomination, or

- the mainstream media, who should have been squawking about this incredibly bone-headed move from the word go, drumming the facts I have just outlined into our brains, as they tried to do with those faked Air National Guard memos.

What gives? Bush puts a family friend of someone who had his finger on the button controlling a nuke aimed at L.A. (among other places he is sworn to defend) in the Cabinet and Congress and Big Media give him a pass on it?  I had to get this information from World Net Daily, which is very far from being part of the mainstream media.

Weeeellll, part of the problem is that China has been very bipartisan in how it doles out political contributions.

We all know about how good the Chinese Army (whose Second Artillery Division would be in charge of vaporizing the greater Los Angeles area in the event that we decide to make the Taiwan War a contest) were to Clinton and Gore's campaigns. We aren't as hip to the fact that (for example) Senator Feinstein's (D, Calif) husband is on the board of COSCO [The Chinese Army's Chinese Overseas Shipping Corporation] and has other investments in China. Because of this, Feinstein, who is energetic in drawing attention to Bush foibles that pale in comparison to this, has remained mum. By contrast, the late Paul Wellstone, Senator, renowned liberal Democrat and all-around good guy apparently either didn't drink from the Chinese cup or didn't let it affect him, because he was one of the people who was instrumental in getting Chinese labor camp survivor Harry Wu before Congressional subcommittees to testify about the people we were about to give "normal" trade status to.

I think if it were any other country in the world, except possibly for Russia, the very fact that they have what can only be described as a gulag more horrible than the Soviets' - Stalin, at least, never made side money by harvesting his prisoners organs - would have derailed their chances of getting any trade status with us. Instead, we (and I'm just as guilty here as anyone else) buy tons and tons of things which, for all we know, may have been made by those very prisoners while they wait to die from hunger, disease, or... one organ harvest too many. If Wal-Mart were a sovereign state, they would be China's fifth largest trading partner. How many other Senators, Republican, Democrat or Jim Jeffords, are in China's deep pocket? And why aren't we, the voters aware of this?

When Big Media wants us to know something, we bloody well know it - not only through the news, but what is loosely called the entertainment media. David Letterman has taken the at times lonely position (say, during the Oscars or when the weather's nice in Malibu) of Bush-Hater of the Night, while Jay Leno (who at least is somewhat bipartisan with his jokes and has Dennis Miller over to do stand-up dissections of the Left) also manages to get the Democratic party line out there in his jokes - but they're not plausible jabs at Bush, just the sort of stuff you might expect to get if you're mildly dyslexic or whatever the President is.

Why don't we know about the hijacking of our Government by the Communist Chinese from these guys, or one of the always politically-aware prime-time shows, like Law & Order, whose screenwriters managed to call the President a liar on WMD in Iraq in dialogue between the detectives on the show, or ER, which basically insinuates the Democratic Party's platform into their plot a plank at a time? Oops, I forgot - their advertisers might want to sell stuff in China, too. Isn't the subornment of BOTH major political parties in this country by a foreign power that spies on us intensively, has forced an aircraft of ours down over international waters, and declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons on American cities, AND is in the midst of the greatest military build-up (for any country) since World War II a story for the big mainstream media?

Why haven't even Frontline or Bill Moyers' show NOW run features on this? I always thought the virtue of PBS was its independence from corporate funding (that's baloney - they depend on money from corporate charitable foundations, which means a corporation - ExxonMobil, for example - offended by something they saw on PBS would have to make a phone call to someone else who would make a phone call to PBS.... ) but it seems that even they don't see this elephant pacing around the room - which, again, says loads about the priorities of the foundations which prop PBS up.

The Eleventh Commandment of PBS must be "Thou shalt not make a liberal Democrat look like a unprincipled crook." Especially Senator Hillary Clinton (D, NY), who sits on Wal-Mart's board of directors and whose husband Bill Clinton made sure the Chinese got up-to-date nuclear weapon and ICBM designs in the 1990s, or Senator Barbara Boxer, (D, CA) or Senator Diane Feinstein, both of whom have gotten much more than fortune cookies from the People's Republic of China.

I guess THAT'S where Hitler and Tojo screwed up - they didn't buy the major political parties and the press of England and America off with trade and bribes while they were re-arming for Round Two. The Nazis could have pretty well ridden the Channel ferries into England unopposed. Meanwhile, the Western Continental Divide might have had new significance as the postwar border between Japan and Nazi Germany.

But Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, William Shirer and Andy Rooney wouldn't have been able to say anything to the people had they wanted to, because their bosses, or their bosses' bosses would have been afraid of offending those famous contributors to both parties' political campaigns, Krupp and Mitsubishi.

How's your Chinese, everybody?

WILL SOMEONE INVOLVED WITH THIS MESS GROW A CONSCIENCE, PLEASE? OR A BRAIN, A BRAIN WOULD BE NICE, TOO.

From an editorial page in Romania...
Mood:  surprised
Topic: ...Those Who Will Not See
Lately, and especially during the election, we were force-fed information by our news media about how the rest of the world despises us because of things like the war in Iraq. To hear them talk, no one over there ever disagrees with the people who have nothing to do but show up at street rallies to burn the President in effigy and trample and spit on our flag.

Well, this came in my Email the other day. It's an editorial in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei (which translates to "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day"). A fellow over there named Cornel Nistorescu sent in a letter and the paper ran it. So much for European opinion being solidly against us. Then again, the Romanians can probably remember being oppressed by Muslims recently enough that they aren't interested in having it happen again.

"God Bless America
We rarely get a chance to see another country's editorial about the USA.
Read this excerpt from a Romanian Newspaper.

The article was written by Mr. Cornel Nistorescu and published under the title "C"ntarea Americii, meaning "Ode To America") in the Romanian newspaper Evenimentulzilei "The Daily Event" or "News of the Day".

An Ode to America~

Why are Americans so united? They would not resemble one another even if you painted them all one color!
They speak all the languages of the world and form an astonishing mixture of civilizations and religious beliefs.

Still, the American tragedy turned three hundred million people into a hand put on the heart. Nobody rushed to accuse the White House, the army, and the secret services that they are only a bunch of losers. Nobody rushed to empty their bank accounts. Nobody rushed out onto the streets nearby to gape about. The Americans volunteered to donate blood and to give a helping hand. After the first moments of panic, they raised their flag over the smoking ruins, putting on T-shirts, caps and ties in the colors of the national flag. They placed flags on buildings and cars as if in every place and on every car a government official or the president was passing. On every occasion, they started singing their traditional song: "God Bless America!" I watched the live broadcast and rerun after rerun for hours.

Listening to the story of the guy who went down one hundred floors with a woman in a wheelchair without knowing who she was, or of the Californian hockey player, who gave his life fighting with the terrorists and prevented the plane from hitting a target that could have killed other hundreds or thousands of people. How on earth were they able to respond united as one human being?

Imperceptibly, with every word and musical note, the memory of some turned into a modern myth of tragic heroes. And with every phone call, millions and millions of dollars were put in a collection aimed at rewarding not a man or a family, but a spirit, which no money can buy. What on earth can unite the Americans in such a way? Their land? Their galloping history? Their economic Power? Money? I tried for hours to find an answer, humming songs and murmuring phrases with the risk of sounding commonplace. I thought things over, but I reached only one conclusion...Only freedom can work such miracles.

Cornel Nistorescu"

Thanks, Mr. Nistorescu. And good luck with your country's own democracy. We appreciate the help your people are giving us in the Coalition of the Willing, and appearances to the contrary, we don't forget our friends.

The last one out of NORAD, please turn out the lights....
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Take THAT, you...

(the following post is based on the text of a letter to the editor of the Weekly Standard regarding the Canadian Prime Minister's paranoid rant about US military forces using Canadian airspace to intercept inbound enemy missiles. It remains in the form of that letter for readability's sake but has been edited somewhat from the version sent to the Weekly Standard) Editor, the Weekly Standard Dear Editor, Jonathan Karl, in his excellent "Condiplomacy," brings up Canadian prime minister Paul Martin's contentious statement regarding our return to an active missile defense strategy without asking permission from Ottawa first -- "This is our space, our airspace. We're a sovereign nation and you don't intrude on a sovereign nation's airspace without seeking permission." The sudden procedural issues which soon afterward prevented a scheduled meeting in Ottawa between the Secretary of State and the Canadian government might have given Prime Minister Martin some time to consult the treaties under which the air defense issues common to both Canada and the United States have been managed for the past forty-seven years. What is now formally called "the North American Aerospace Defense Command" was formed on May 12, 1958 under the name "North American Air Defense Command," which most Americans and Canadians recognize under its popular acronym "NORAD." According to the article on NORAD in wikipedia, the US and Canada already know who's flying in whose airspace - "Aerospace warning or integrated tactical warning and attack assessment (ITW/AA) covers the monitoring of man-made objects in space, and the detection, validation, and warning of attack against North America by aircraft, missiles, or space vehicles. Aerospace control includes providing surveillance and control of Canadian and United States airspace."

This function of NORAD implies that Canada and the United States are continually aware of all military and commercial traffic (regardless of nationality) in their respective airspaces and in space. Mr. Martin may simply have been ignorant of this - or when he made his intemperate remarks, he may have intended to mislead his audience into believing that there was a significant danger of US aircraft or spacecraft entering Canadian airspace uninvited. Canadian representatives in NORAD (which has command and control facilities in Colorado, Alaska, Winnipeg and Manitoba) are presumably as aware of aerospace traffic as the agency's American contingent. They would be well-positioned to detect and report to their own government the supposed violations of Canadian airspace that their head of government tried to imply were a significant problem between our two countries in his petulant outburst.

The issue Prime Minister Martin raised is a bogus one - Canada doesn't own the space (defined at various heights above ground for various uses) above her territory and has no standing to ban us from destroying inbound enemy missiles in that space. Even if the World Court were to rule that, for the purposes of American missile defense, the galaxy was divided into nationally-controlled cones of space projecting from Earth infinitely outward, shaped in cross-section like the geographic borders of the Earth's nations, the United States would have an excellent defense from charges of trespassing into Canadian - what should we call it, "space" space? - in that millions of human lives were at risk and exigent measures - even smacking an inbound nuclear weapon into pieces 108 miles over Canada's sacred soil - were in order to save them.

NORAD's existence dates back to a time before the ABM Treaty, when the United States did, in fact, own a multi-layered, complex and potentially very effective active missile defense system (if it had been fully implemented and not traded away in a fit of Kissingerian realpolitik that gave us nothing in return). The ABM Treaty adopted in the early 1970s was one of the most tangible features of the "Mutual Assured Destruction" (MAD) rubric under which US and Soviet nuclear defense policy was supposed to work - in which protection of the national populaces was deliberately neglected and only a limited attempt made to destroy enemy missiles aimed at a few specially-designated sites in both countries. To suggest the cooperation between Canada and the United States in NORAD is somehow affected by our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty is disingenuous. The ABM Treaty did not exist for fifteen years when NORAD came to be, so NORAD could not in any way have been predicated on American participation in the ABM treaty.

Thus Paul Martin is either misleading his people on purpose about the significance of the US's missile defense program or he is massively ignorant of the issues at stake there - while we were a signatory to the ABM Treaty, we and our allies were the only signatories to the treaty committed to adhering to its terms. Martin's friends in Russia cheated on the ABM Treaty in a way that effectively invalidated the treaty and would have tilted the strategic table in Russia's favor had a nuclear war actually happenned. All signatories to the ABM Treaty have the right to withdraw from that treaty after giving 90 days' notice if they consider that their overriding national interests were harmed by the treaty. Our formal withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in order to legally pursue active missile defense only incidentally redressed a major imbalance in Russia's favor while protecting our own national interests. As I have explained earlier in this letter, Paul Martin's bellicose admonition to the United States to avoid infringing on Canadian airspace is either - deliberate buncombe intended to pander to the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping Canada or - a signal of the Canadian government's desire to withdraw from collective efforts to defend North America from missile attack or significantly modify its participation in those activities. Perhaps the United States of America should re-examine our current level of comfort with having Mr. Martin's sworn subordinates in Canadian Forces walking around our high-value defense installations. Since the Prime Minister of Canada routinely deprecates the defense policy of the United States of America and has indicated a willingness to seek military cooperation with China - a government which has threatened to use nuclear weapons on American cities over the Taiwan issue - it may be prudent to reconsider Canada's place in our strategic defense.

Suddenly, PM Martin's reluctance to have intercepts of incoming nuclear missiles happen anywhere near Canada makes sense - if one takes Canada's announced support for the "one China" policy under which China has stated they will take Taiwan over one way or another, then it would be impolitic for Canada to help us defend ourselves from a Chinese missile attack launched because our government obeyed the US-Taiwan Relations Act and defended Taiwan from Communist invasion. Nothing else really accounts for the strength of Prime Minister Martin's reaction to our work in missile defense as well as an awareness that such defense may have near-term consequences and may (from the Chinese perspective) involve Canada whether she actively participates in our missile defense or not.

The Chinese may be placing strong behind-the-scenes pressure on Canada to participate in the international campaign against the US missile defense program and to use territorial considerations (valid or not) to further impair our missile defense, making an American defense of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion more likely. This would fit the recent Chinese pattern of bullying or pressuring potential allies of countries they intend to attack. Relying on a sycophantic courtier of the country launching nuclear missiles at Los Angeles or Seattle (in the event that the Chinese are as good as their word in the event of a conflict over Taiwan) for crucial data and analysis regarding those inbound missiles may not be the most intelligent thing for us to do. It may well be that the Canadians have also been quietly "counselled" by China that fulfilling their obligations under NORAD in the event of a Taiwan War would pull Canada into war with China. It may be the sad duty of the United States' government to regard Canada as an untrustworthy ally - owing to its Prime Minister's recent statements - which should not have access to information regarding the defense of the United States from air and space-borne attack - and act accordingly. We should be developing intelligence resources independent of our NORAD assets in Canada to inform us of indications of space or air attack by nations toward which Canada has made strong political overtures. Our participation in UKUSA and other intelligence-sharing activities involving Canada may also have to be re-evaluated, given Prime Minister Martin's attitude toward the United States.

For example, the US and Canada have been "guests" in Chinese signal intelligence (SIGINT) facilities during the Cold War (when the UKUSA countries and China shared a requirement for SIGINT on the Soviet Union), but tension resulting from Chinese military moves against our allies Taiwan and Japan (both of whom we are required by treaty to defend from the sorts of attacks China seems to be preparing to make) will certainly result in modifications to those arrangements as far as the US is concerned. Where will Canada stand on issues like these under Paul Martin's leadership? Will they feel compelled to continue sharing SIGINT with China under memorandums of understanding to which the US no longer subscribes? It may be that NORAD and UKUSA may have both been overtaken by political events, at least where Canada and her Prime Minister are concerned.

New Democrat Power Blocs/Bumper Snickerz
The Democrats only did as well as they did (they took the State Assembly back here in Colorado for the first time in many years) because they've discovered new blocs of voters previously unavailable before it became possible to vote without photo I.D. if someone "vouches" for you:

The bumper stickers shown above aren't my work - they can be purchased at www.bumpersnickerz.com.

Just in case you thought we didn't need nuclear bunker busters...
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: No Truce with Terror!
Instant gratification is not something I'm used to, but

- just last night I posted a blog entry castigating Rep. David Hobson's (R, Ohio) choice to withhold funding for development of advanced design nuclear weapons, some of them known colloquially as "nuclear bunker busters," potentially capable of digging through even deep and well-armored bunkers to destroy enemy leadership targets or special weapons by bottling it up in his House subcommittee.

- this morning, this article appears in the Yahoo osint ("Open Source Intelligence") group mail digest:

"The Associated Press - Vienna, Friday, March 4, 2005. "Facility would be resistant to an attack":

"Iran is using reinforced materials and tunneling deep underground to store nuclear components - measures meant to make the facility resistant to "bunker busters" and other special weaponry in case of an attack, diplomats said Thursday.

The diplomats spoke as a 35-country meeting of the UN atomic agency ended more than three days of deliberations focusing on Iran and North Korea, another nation of nuclear concern.

An agency review read at the meeting faulted Tehran for starting work on the tunnel at Isfahan without informing the International Atomic Energy Agency
beforehand.

The review said Iran, following prodding by the IAEA, has over the past few months provided "preliminary design information" on the tunnel in the central city that is home to the country's uranium enrichment program, and said construction began in September "to increase capacity, safety and security of nuclear material."

The IAEA also said Iran was ignoring calls to scrap plans for a heavy water reactor and continuing construction. Commenting on that Thursday, a diplomat
said satellite imagery had revealed that work in the city of Arak had progressed to the point where crews "were pouring the foundations."

Spent fuel from heavy water reactors can yield significant amounts of bomb-grade plutonium.

Asked for details on the tunnel, a diplomat familiar with Iran's dossier said parts of it would run as deep as nearly one kilometer, or about half a mile, below ground and would be constructed of hardened concrete and other special materials meant to withstand severe air attacks.

Other diplomats said such moves were motivated by Iranian concerns of a strike by the United States or Israel; both countries accuse Iran of trying to secretly build nuclear weapons. All of the envoys spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Hundreds of bunker busters were used in U.S. airstrikes on hostile fortified underground command centers, living quarters and storage areas in Afghanistan and Iran.

Last year Israel said it was buying about 5,000 smart bombs from Washington, including 500 1-ton bunker busters capable of destroying concrete walls as thick as two meters, or six feet, fueling speculation of possible preparation for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

While not ruling out the possibility of a U.S. attack, Washington has toned down its rhetoric against Iran. Washington is awaiting the results of
European negotiations aimed at getting Tehran to renounce all plans to enrich uranium in exchange for economic concessions and other forms of support - and is even considering backing such incentives.

Uranium enrichment is "dual use," which means it can generate fuel for nuclear power as well as form the core of warheads."

(BLOGGER NOTE: However, there are plenty of enrichment facilities that would sell Iran fuel rods which are not easy to re-manufacture into primary fissile elements for nuclear weapons.

Once upon a time, Iranian power plants were going to get their fuel rods made in Russia, but we're not hearing that story lately. Now the Iranians are enriching their own uranium - supposedly to make fuel rods, probably to make nukes. What a surprise. - Dr. Truth)

"President George W. Bush said fears that Washington was preparing an attack were "ridiculous," but he also said last week that "all options are on the
table."

Iran links its fear of an attack to a decision, made during a debate at the Vienna meeting, a gathering of the board of governors of the IAEA, to bar UN
nuclear inspectors from some sensitive sites.

Suggesting that leaks could be exploited by Iran's enemies, a senior Iranian envoy, Sirous Nasseri, said Tehran's worries about "confidentiality of
information" gathered on such visits "are more intense in view of potential threats of military strikes" against facilities visited by the agency.

Earlier, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, said outside the meeting that the "ball is very much in Iran's court to come clean" by cooperating to clear lingering suspicions about possible nuclear weapons ambitions. Still, the agency has not been able to support U.S. assertions
that Iran's programs are aimed at making nuclear weapons."

(BLOGGER NOTE: Iran's just spending a lot of money for special plants to do reprocessing they'd get done for much less money by shipping their fuel rods to reprocessing facilities in Russia or France or Britain or Japan or the US.

The only difference is that by doing their own re-processing, they get to keep the plutonium produced in the fuel rods, which is useful mainly in... nuclear weapons.

And the clincher is that they're putting money into heavy water reactors, which traditionally, from the time of the Manhattan Project, have been used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons - Dr. Truth)

So there we have it - a short-term requirement for the nuclear bunker busters that Rep. David Hobson has bottled up in his House subcommittee for reasons not adequately explored either:
- in open House debate or
- open discussions with personnel from the nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos or Livermore, or
- even in news documentaries (where Rep. Hobson would likely find sympathetic ears for his assertion that we don't need advanced nuclear weapon designs).

The problem with conventional bunker busters is that they will break through two meters of concrete reliably. The Iranians know this, and can count up to three, and even beyond, and pour their concrete accordingly. If they pour thicker concrete walls around their special nuclear material storage rooms, we will have two choices:

- accept the fact that Iran, which quasi-openly supports Al-Qaeda and is the wellspring for terrorism from Hezbollah, will have nuclear weapons shortly.

Since the religious fanatics running Iran feel threatened not only by the US, but by their own democratic opposition and even from their traditional apologists in Europe, they may decide to, as Emeril LaGasse might say, "kick it up a notch" and give Al Qaeda nuclear weapons with which to finish the job they started on September 11th, 2001, or to flatten every major city in Israel and kill off the moderate, Western-inclined Arabs in Jordan and Iraq with nuclear fallout in the bargain, or

- bend every effort to destroy all Iranian special nuclear material and production facilities. If we were to do this effectively and with total assurance that nothing was left to threaten us with, we'd have to go with strategic nuclear weapons - 170 kiloton "silo busters" delivered by Peacekeeper ICBMs. We'd probably have to use several of them to get the job done, but that would probably only require the launch of a single ICBM, since the Peacekeeper has a MIRV bus and can hit several different targets with a single missile. We've got plenty of them, though.

And if we didn't do it, Israel would, out of a desperate impulse toward self-preservation. Remember that the fanatic present rulers of Iran and their rumored guest Osama bin Laden don't feel that Jerusalem absolutely must be preserved in any war to destroy the Jews in Israel. And remember that this apocalyptic rhetoric is backed up by many years of violence directed against the United States, Europe and Israel. We can't just roll over in bed and ignore this.

We might have been well on our way to a third option by now, except for Rep. David Hobson's determination for some time now to privately and personally dictate US nuclear policy by cutting off funding for the development of alternatives to the two options I've just mentioned. I don't remember electing him to do that.

Great work there, Einstein.

Davjd Hobson (R) Ohio, vs. Our Nuclear Arsenal
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Dumb Congressional Tricks
(NOTE: Please feel free to circulate the following essay. Especially, circulate it among your elected officials in Washington. The fate of the nation might one day depend on it.)


Back in what I think was the second Presidential debate of the 2004 election, John Kerry saved up what he thought might prove a "hot button" issue with voters until the end of the show - he accused Bush of wasting money on (and for the full effect, you have to imagine a motor oil-curdling sneer combined with liberal-grade hypocritical mock indignant nasal droning) "bunker-busting nukes," as though they were a particularly loathsome sexually transmitted disease contracted in singles bars outside Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Reflecting on the ploy in my blog (this one) later, I decided that Kerry and his brain (t)rust may have reasoned that this was a good way to reclaim the possible defectors to Ralph Nader in the looney-left spectrum while not doing much damage to the center-left and centrist base of Democratic voters. Of course, the Kerryistas probably had trouble conceiving anyone in their party who actually likes nuclear weapons or a Republican who doesn't.

Well, back in my younger days, I could have named you several Democrats who, if they didn't love nuclear weapons, thought they looked pretty spiffy on top of missiles aimed at the Communist Bloc. Usually, two of them represented me in the Senate and a good few of them were our state's delegation in the House of Representatives.

And there's apparently at least one Republican in the House of Representatives who just plain hates nukes - at least the new types of nukes we'll need to fight "asymmetric wars" against terrorists and rogue states who are apt to fight us from deeply buried mountain cave-and-tunnel complexes such as Tora Bora on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or specially-prepared deep underground bunkers favored by national leaders who expect to have to hide in them one day.

We may also want to expand our capability to decapitate enemy leadership targets without significant collateral damage to enemy civilians, something we might be able to do with greater precision with ultra-small nuclear warheads optimized for specific weapons effects such as percussive shock or either low or extremely high levels of hard radiation.

The fellow against all of this is Rep. David Hobson, a Republican from Ohio, who has used his position as Chairman of the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee to eliminate the US$27.5 million the Administration requested to continue to fund a study to determine whether those nuclear bunker busters John Kerry found so repulsive could actually be made to take out deeply-buried targets without hurting civilians.

Perspective: most of a US$2.75 trillion defense appropriations bill is apt to get through Congress without too much trouble. What the Department of Energy's research labs are asking for is 1/101000 of that budget.

If the guys who make military transports and bombers with on-board toilets just got their toilet seats from Home Depot, I'm sure we could make a good start on carving out the budget for new nuclear weapon designs. Give the DoD contract for hammers and such to Sears and we're almost out of the woods.

Of course, if the House and Senate would just stop using the Department of Defense as their private travel agency, we might pick up a quarter-billion in savings, just like that.

Let 'em use Expedia.com like the rest of us - and pay for "fact-finding missions" to the French Riviera (to salve the feelings the President hurt when he defended our national security and enforced a half-dozen UN resolutions without asking "Pardon me, but may we Poupon Saddam Hussein?") or Fiji (that famous hotbed of international tension) with their own Master Cards.

If Rep. Hobson thinks the defense budget needs trimming, his time could be better spent on other things besides limiting future Presidents' options for dealing with deeply-entrenched enemy installations or countering other threats which might be best countered with a burst of energy concentrated far beyond either the capabilities of conventional or present-technology nuclear weapons.

Bunker-busting nukes aren't the only avenues of research being blocked by David Hobson - he's also using the power of the Congressional purse to deny even preliminary funding for new warhead designs in a program called the Advanced Concepts Initiative.

Now, these might be defensible choices - but so far, Hobson's only defended them to his staff and to reporters - and, of course, to weapons labs researchers and Pentagon officials who came to him asking to be able to help defend the country 20 years from now.

I don't recall the whole House ever being surveyed on the matter of developing new nuclear weapons. I certainly don't recall bunker-busting nukes coming up in a national political debate before John Kerry used them as a cheap parting shot in a Presidential debate, and I follow that sort of thing in the news.

Since having bunker busting nukes or weapons like them may one day make the difference between national security and ruinous defeat not only for us Americans, but for Western civilization, I think it's wrong to bottle the funds to develop them up in Hobson's subcommittee on what amounts to his strong personal antipathy to nuclear weapons. The problem is the strong personal affinity that rogues, tyrants and less-than-stable democracies have for nuclear weapons - they are rapidly becoming the TEC-9 automatic of developing nations.

Our edge in the technology of destroying other nations' nuclear arsenals on the ground may one day be a major component of our total national security - if the money for even small-scale studies of new nuclear weapon technologies we need to reliably kill other countries subterranean installations ever gets out of David Hobson's House subcommittee. No one else, not even the President, has been able to overrule Rep. Hobson on this matter so far, not even to protect the country.

The rationale for Rep. Hobson's refusal to fund development of radically new types of nuclear weapons is that knowledgeable people in the field say they won't work - the sort of thing said about ICBMs in the 1940s by "Knowledgeable Men" such as FDR's science advisor Vannevar Bush, who once said he wished that people would leave the idea of hitting something on the other side of the Earth with a missile out of their thinking, because it couldn't possibly happen.

Despite this authoritative death blow to the concept of the ICBM by a Knowledgeable Man, we have purchased thousands of them over the years. During this time, we have fired one or two ICBMs from our stockpile at the Pacific Test Range on Kwajalein Island at regular intervals (with the nuclear warheads replaced by practice warheads), just to make sure that FDR's science advisor wasn't right after all. So far, Vannevar Bush has proven not only wrong, but wrong time after time after time.

This being the case, and Knowledgeable Men having been dead wrong on all sorts of things before and since Vannevar Bush and the ICBM, it might be nice if Rep. Hobson had to defend this choice he's repeatedly taken out of our hands to his colleagues in the House and the nation at large, preferably on C-SPAN where we folks in the cheap seats can watch.

We deserve better than Hobson's Choice for our tax dollars.

In Praise of Edgar Mevers....
Topic: the Denver media and me
The locally-produced public-service programs carried on the Public Broadcasting System's Boulder, Colorado affiliate (Boulder is where good liberals hope they go when they die) rarely fail to entertain, usually unintentionally. I'm reporting their latest comic coup while it is still fresh - the host only came out with it seven minutes ago (that would have been seven pm, March the second, but this account has been edited several times since then. Present tense references reflect passages written while I was watching the show).

One of the station's reliably left-wing panel discussion programs is even as I type this hosting three African-Americans, two professors and a student at the University of Colorado's home campus at Boulder, to talk about how there's STILL a civil rights problem in this country. I agree that there still is one, but I doubt that it is big and severe enough to justify the trillion-dollar governmental-industrial complex which has formed to address it. The professors on the panel probably owe the funding of their chairs to this complex, pervasive civil rights industry.

Anyway, the host of the program (an unadjectival American) was beginning it with a rapid-fire summation of the civil rights movement, when he started talking about the names of some of the pioneers of the movement and came out with "such as Edgar Mevers," stumbled, looked perplexed, then repeated "Edgar Mevers" before going on with his spiel and starting the show.

The program's host is STILL really, really uncomfortable - in fact, all four men around the table are really looking uncomfortable - and just threw out an observation about whether he was accurately reading other people's minds, and I hope for his sake that this was just a metaphor that crashed and burned.

Now one of the professors is relating the story of being hauled over for nudging over the speed limit, being caught with an expired out-of-state driver's license (we viewers didn't learn that little detail until the program's host called him on whether, as the professor tried to suggest, the arrest was racially-motivated), then arrested.

That story was intended to illustrate racial intolerance as it now exists, which goes to show that the professor leads a sheltered life.

Breakdown of the incident - A cop enforced the highway speed laws of Colorado and thus discovered a violation of the laws governing driver registration, and enforced those laws too. If the officer on the scene had decided to NOT enforce the law, THAT could have been taken as an act performed for racial motives by members of other ethnic groups.

Even I, a white conservative, have seen worse examples of intolerance than that - not much worse lately, thank God, not very many, not all against African Americans, but that the virus of intolerance exists at all is an unfortunate effect of free will. Freedom of action entails freedom to take reprehensible action, and attempts to prevent every possible reprehensible action usually result in governmental actions which are too often themselves reprehensible. That situation is called a "police state."

Now, one of my sons, who is tall, blond, blue-eyed and unquestionably European-American has also been hauled in for an expired driver's license, so the professor's premise (in that particular case) is pretty much invalid from the word go as far as I'm concerned.

Kudos to the program's host for being awake and sceptical even though he was clearly bubbling over with white liberal guilt. Despite my ribbing him over "Edgar Mevers," the guy manages to be sharp and focused, no mean feat when his show consists of, say, gender-indeterminate members of some Boulder-based political movement or another who manage to make the Daily Kos seem like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

If you're going nuts over who "Edgar Mevers" is, the program host was thinking of former Mississippi civil rights activist and later, mayor Medgar Evers. Rest in peace, Mr. Evers.

As a conservative (who acknowledges that civil rights wouldn't have happened as soon as it did unless a lot of gutsy liberals and just plain gutsy people had marched and demionstrated and gotten sprayed by fire hoses amd tear-gassed and bitten by German Shepherds and beaten and shot by cops and Klansmen - and after the South got the point, some of those folks had to go back home to the North and get hosed, gassed, dog-bitten, beaten and shot all over again over integration in the 1970s and 1980s) I like the idea that I knew Medgar Evers' name and the program host, a professional knee-jerk liberal, didn't.

Hah.

(And if anyone is really named Edgar Mevers, this does not refer to you. Any references to a real Edgar Mevers, living or dead, corporeal or incorporeal, actual or conjectural, tangible or spectral are purely coincidental.)

Dobson, Dobson Uber Alles....
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Taking back our Culture
Just why is Doctor James Dobson against tolerance?

We're not talking about recruitment here, not promoting anything that is forbidden in the early books of the Bible (although right next to the strictures against gay-ness, we are also commanded by Leviticus 19:19 to stone people to death for planting different crops in the same field - God help all genetic engineers if Dobson decides we've got to stop tolerating that, too, because bug-resistant soybeans and corn and relatively inexpensive, pure, mad cow-free genetically-engineered insulin and Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease-free human growth hormone clearly violate the spirit of that passage).

Tolerance, as I understand the word, simply means not expressing bigotry in word or deed. Why does Dr. Dobson oppose that so much? Is the answer to be found in the Bible... or in another book, something like Mein Kampf?

Christianity has no use for the creation of scapegoats - in which the intent is to take us back beyond Orthodox Judaism in one or two specific areas in order to bless bigotry. Scapegoats are useful, however, if you'd like to get people to stop taking responsibility for their actions and start blaming other people reflexively - in other words, to STOP being Christians.

Once people stop believing in cause and effect - "if our country overspends its income, it will destroy our economy," or "Jesus told us not to judge the people at the margins of our society, but here we are about to hurt some folks that we've been told that we don't have to tolerate - shouldn't we stop that NOW?" - then they can be sold any line of crap. Artificial stupidity reigns.

And when the super-preachers like Dr. Dobson arise with their followers to play power-broker in national elections, compelling Congress to start enacting laws aimed at punishing members of specific minority groups, when they start opposing tolerance for Arab-Americans, Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Jews (always a favorite with the anti-tolerance crowd), should we be surprised when the America that emerges has more than a little resemblance to Nazi Germany?

The moral is a simple one - unless the Republican Party scrapes James Dobson and the other TV pulpit hate-mongers off of the campaign soon, 2008 will be when Libertarians and others who supported Bush - because he wasn't a nasty little lying demagogue like Kerry - go home... or even go Democrat, if that's what it takes to wake the GOP up. One Big Tent works, One Tiny Teepee doesn't - and 2008 may be when we find that out again.

1992 and 1996 are examples of what happens to a Republican Party that lets people like James Dobson control the party platform. It loses.

In the next election, I'm not going to speak out for the Presidential candidate of a party dominated by people who may decide that Cajuns are the next group our nation shouldn't tolerate. You see, most of us violate Leviticus 11:10 as often as we can by eating crawfish, crabs, shrimp, catfish and other seafood which are not on the Bible's list of approved delicacies (the catfish has no scales, and thus misses being an Biblically authorized seafood by that much, as Maxwell Smart might put it).

Has Christ given us a new dispensation (Hebrews 10:1 - "For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect," Hebrews 10:16 - "This is the Covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them" ), or is anyone free to reach back into the books of the Old Testament for a hammer to hit people he just doesn't like? And where does the process stop?

Should the Federal Government be in the business of banning pork roast and crawdads from the nation's supermarkets? That would win the Jewish and Muslim votes, for sure, but it might just hurt them in the Deep South, where the Democratic Party would jump on the opportunity to educate the voters on why we don't want to open the door to theocracy - especially theocracy which is opposed to tolerance - in this country. No more "Solid South."

Do racists get to call African-Americans "the sons of Ham" again, going to the Bible to justify that form of prejudice? The use of the Bible to prop up discrimination and prejudice is not just dangerous, it is condemned by God Himself.

Hate by any other name - apparently a name like "Focus on the Family," if the organization has to be pried off the ceiling when someone says "tolerance" a little too loudly - is just as bad as the hate my Dad (in World War II) and one of my sons (in the War Against Terror) went overseas to fight - the hate my son died defending our country from this January.

Using the Holy Bible as a pretext to spread hate around is an especially vile blasphemy, and one that intuitively one feels Christ would have opposed.

Americans shouldn't have to choose between tyranny from Wah'habi fanatic preachers overseas or tyranny from TV preachers here at home. We have other choices, and it behooves the Republican Party to give us one before 2008.