NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(December '01)
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12/1/2001
Hailing frequencies open.....
Like most elegant solutions, Trevor James Constable's spacecraft expansion formula had one fatal flaw. It seems his M-Ray treatment was time-sensitive. And though he may have mentioned that fact before we gave him the nod to proceed, he didn't exactly stamp the ship's hull with an expiration date, now did he? DID HE?!!
Sorry....just a bit on edge right now. Must compose myself. You just don't know what it's like to be bottled up inside the incredible shrinking spaceship.
That's
right -- our groovy new split-level space pad gradually reverted to its original
size -- 16 inches long -- and it took us with it. So now we're all shmeensy,
even sFshzenKlyrn, who was fifty feet high
only a few months ago. Of course, here in the icy void of interplanetary space
with no conventional points of reference in the vicinity, we had now way of
knowing that we had shrunken down to a tiny fraction of our original size.
Imagine my surprise when I stepped out onto the tarmac on Uranus and found
myself face-to-face with a spaceport security guard's toenail. I mean, what do
you do in a spot like that....go up and knock?
This really seemed like it would be a problem. A hall full of Uranians, forming a mosh pit in front of a band that stands three inches tall. And the fact that they're crustaceans makes matters worse (very spastic dancers, those Uranians. All elbows.) One misstep and there goes a $425 stage set. Damn it, Trevor James! Where are your skills? What have you done to us!
It
took the inestimable Dr. Hump to come up with a workable solution. From his
electrified basin of spirit, the good doctor cunningly negotiated with the
planet-based tour promoter to place a glass magnifying panel between us and the
audience -- so they could see us better and we could live to see Neptune again.
We played reasonably well as the band in the bubble, though it might have gone
over better if the promoters had listened to Matt and etched "OBJECTS IN
BAND ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" at the base of the fish-eye lens.
Also,
Tiny Montgomery stayed in the ship. The shrinkage thing really affected his
mood, I guess. Besides, the one thing on board that didn't shrink was
Tiny's favorite tie. He insisted on wearing it, though, even long after it had
grown to the size of a table cloth. Troubled man, that Tiny. Truth be known, he
could use a good shrink.
Anyway, we gave our Uranus performance and made it to Neptune alive, where we played another magna-shield review before an enormous audience. I only hope our shipboard brain trust can find a solution to our shrimpy size before we make it to Kaztropharius 137b, where I'm told the fans are seven stories tall. Yikes! (Oh...John says he's buying lifts and Matt's having his hat re-blocked, just in case.)
Mr. Personality. If you take a long whiff of the late autumn air, you'll detect the pungent aroma of a personality cult being concocted by the corporate media. The subject? A fantastically unlikely one in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of War, as Amy Goodman calls him.
Just
as they tried to do (with no small success) with the insufferable "Stormin'"
Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, the press is painting him as a
colorful, witty character who really knows how to handle...them(!) While they're
drooling over this sorry Nixon-era retread, they've managed to overlook flagrant
violations of the Geneva convention at the Mazar-i-Sharif prison, where during the recent uprising around 300 POW's
were killed, many with hands or feet bound, and many whose bodies were missing
as of this writing. Aside from our special forces/CIA boys lending a hand with
interrogations, we helped the Northern Alliance quell the uprising (if that's
what it was) by dropping ordinance on the section of the fortress where the
captured soldiers were being held, stopping the bombardment only "if the
Northern Alliance requested it," according to all-around-swell-guy
Rumsfeld.
War crime? Hah! A drop in the bucket, next to the thousands of wholly avoidable deaths that have and will occur from starvation and stray fire as we cheerfully roll over Afghanistan and its miserable inhabitants, making them pay for crimes they did not commit. Don't expect to see big Don in the dock too soon, though. No Nuremburgs for the victors...not yet, anyway.
Happy Holidays from the Maestro! Here's a little tidbit to warm the heart of every working person as the holidays draw near. Commenting on the dollar's relative strength versus the Euro, jolly old Alan Greenspan attributed the greenback's fortitude to America's "more flexible workplace," according to AP's Martin Crutsinger. (For this, read "job insecurity"). "Over the decades, Europe has sought to protect its workers from some of the presumed harsher aspects of free-market competition," said Greenspan. According to Crutsinger, Greenspan commented that "if a country's laws prohibit the easy hiring and firing of workers, that will limit the number of entrepreneurs willing to invest in new technologies."
Well, we've certainly avoided that pratfall over here, thanks in no small part to the policy mapped out by uncle Greenspan. Half a million or more out of work since the beginning of the year, recession coming on...Merry Christmas, folks! All the best, from Bob Woodward's "Maestro" and all your friends at the Federal Reserve!
luv u,
jp
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12/9/2001
Land'o Goshen.....
Greetings from Kaztropharius 137b! (Doesn't quite have the same ring as "Asbury Park," but...oh well.)
After nearly 36 hours running at top
whack, this mad little saucer has carried us beyond the reaches of our solar
system to that recondite corner of the universe where Big
Green CD's sell like hotcakes. Sure,
those engines may be the size of walnuts, but they've got enough kick in them to
drive us clear
to Andromeda, so long as our trusty Zenite guitarist sFshzenKlyrn
is at the controls. (We gave our previous engine room staff -- the "young Turks"
-- their cards after they...well, after they destroyed our last engine
room.)
Anyway, sFshzenKlyrn's gentle coaxing of the turbines -- combined with his liberal plyings of Zenite snuff -- got us all to the frozen wastes of Pluto, where we delivered a passable performance of our "Quality Lincoln" trilogy, as well as an impromptu medley in tribute to the late George Harrison, as per Trevor James Constable's emphatic request. He and Mitch Macaphee wanted to hear "Piggies" over and over again. Matt ended up having to get a little ugly with them. Pity.
Because of the enormous interstellar
distances involved in the journey, we had to bug out of that Pluto gig a little
early so that we might make it to Kaztropharius 137b in time. That meant
giving the traditional Plutonian post-performance par-tay a miss (though Dr.
Hump elected to remain 
behind
and enjoy their hospitality for a few days, as well as complete his survey of
Plutonian biology...hedonist that he is!) We didn't even have time to wash up
and grab a meal before our departure.
It's a good thing our split-level space craft has a fully-equipped galley, including a hefty garbage dispos-all that would make any 1954 nuclear family glow green with envy. And of course, sFshzenKlyrn brought his blintz fridge along to complete our joy. How selfless of him to bring that fridge -- of all his fridges -- on this perilous journey through the trackless void.
So here we are on the remote and
mysterious planet known as Kaztropharius 137b -- home of Big
Green's biggest fans. And when I say big, I mean that pillars-of-Hercules,
block-out-the-sun kinda big. Scary enough when you're actual size, but in our
newly diminutive condition, these Kaztropharian fuckers are almost
too big to see. And oddly enough, there appears to be some kind of urban cowboy
fad going on out here, so everybody we've seen is wearing these big old hobnail
boots and cheesy ten-gallon hats. I took one look at that and told Trevor James
that 
he's got
to try the old reverse polarity orgone energy barrage one more time -- just so
that we'll be visible to our audience without an electron microscope. He said
he'd see what he could do for the next two nights, but that he wasn't making any
promises. (Scientists!)
I'll let you know how these K-137b gigs go. That is, if one of our patrons doesn't accidentally mistake us for bridge mix.
Nothing Sucks Like Success. As the last major Afghan city falls to the forces allied with the U.S., a chorus of triumphant bleating may be heard throughout the land. This includes many on the left who also supported Clinton's Kosovo bomb-fest -- another lopsided "war" that left penury and unexploded ordinance in its cowardly wake. It's as if the success of such violent means somehow sanctifies the decision to apply force, even though we've killed hundreds (perhaps thousands -- who's counting?) of non-combatants and put many hundreds of thousands more at risk of starvation and disease. Still...it's worth it if it provides some sort of bizarro catharsis for baby boomers whose tiny egos are frustrated by their non-participation in previous conflicts. What's a little killing....next to feeling good about yourself?
Of course, they save their most venomous attacks for those of us who feel that killing a bunch of people who had nothing to do with September 11th is, well, not an appropriate response to September 11th. They accuse us of everything from rationalizing the WTC bombings to supporting the Taliban. They characterize us as immobilized by some irrational knee-jerk rejection of any use of force under any circumstances. It's a sorry spectacle.
I guess it's hard for most people to come
to terms with the fact that the men who killed 3,900 people on 9-11 are dead.
Sure, there are people at large who supported them, but the actual killers
will never provide those who seek 
revenge
the satisfaction of seeing them punished. That's the frustrating part about this
kind of retail terrorism -- victims and survivors end up ranging around for
someone to blame, and when you have an instrument of "justice" as big
and as blunt as the U.S. Military, that means a lot of innocent people are going
to be killed...as we have seen.
As Dubya and the boys piece together their thousand year Reich, I'm sure they'll find candidates for their military tribunal firing squads -- such pageantry is necessary to help quench (or feed) the bloodlust of the populace whose anger and fear they have exploited and will continue to exploit. But no matter how many summary executions they carry out, they'll never get to the 9-11 hijackers....because the hijackers beat them to it.
luv u,
jp
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12/16/2001
Wuzzappenin?
They said we'd be making big money on this job. And they wuz right.
Our perilous engagements on Kaztropharius 137b went off without any major injuries, in spite of the tremendous size differential between ourselves and our gargantuan fans -- a gap that was only exacerbated by the recent shrinking of our split-level space pad. No matter. We played a dozen sets over the course of four nights and managed to stay out from under foot. (Though one of Tiny Montgomery's Leslie cabinets did get flattened by one over-zealous Kaztropharian who was attempting to do the "Steamboat Dan." Like his cabinet, Tiny was a little bent out of shape.)
When
it came time for the K-137b bursar to drop some cash on us, we had to
scurry for cover. The Kaztropharians pay in cash, it seems -- their notes
are the size of carpet rolls, their coins manhole covers. Advanced as they
obviously are, they somehow have never encountered the concept of electronic
funds transfer. Hell, even a colossal check would have been better than the
king-size cash they piled next to our space-craft (nearly microscopic, from
their perspective).
This presented a problem. How were we
going to pay the thugs at our label the protection mon...I mean, the commission
we owed them for our 
performances when we couldn't even get one of the Kaztropharian
ha-pennies (value: $0.125) through the main hatch of our transport? We asked the
Kaztropharians to consolidate our earnings, but the only response we got
was the appearance of a rather evil-looking mechanical man from their port
authority; apparently a subtle reminder that our visas had expired. Check-out
time!
Now, they say there are hustlers and fixers on every planet in the known universe, but even with 17,000 giant Kaztropharian dollars burning a hole through our pockets and one fast-talking Zenite guitarist, do you think we could find one man enough to go up against their equivalent of the INS? Not a chance! And it was only when we had quite nearly resolved to abandon the booking's purse that Trevor James Constable, in his infinite resourcefulness, remembered the arcane sequence of voice commands that would throw his Orgone Generating Device into auto-expansion mode. Wasting little time on ceremony, he barked the coded directions into the machine and pointed it at our spacecraft. We scurried inside the hatch just as the thing began to expand in all directions like blown glass. Once safely super-sized, I went outside and grabbed our earnings, then gave sFshzenKlyrn the nod to start those engines.
Now
everybody's happy. John's happy because he doesn't have to play a wind-up
monkey's drumset anymore. Matt's happy because he knows those goons from Hegemonic
Records & Worm Farm, Inc., won't re-block his hat for him, so to speak.
Tiny Montgomery is happy because his tie is back to normal size and he can go on
entertaining his make-believe friends without embarrassment. I'm happy over my
fistful of dollars, predictably enough. And sFshzenKlyrn
is overjoyed at the prospect of knocking over the 12-story delicatessen back
home and absorbing all the blintzes like a bloody great sponge.
And as we head out to Zenon (where our engagements have been backed off a few days because of bad weather), Trevor James can take heart in the knowledge that his patented device truly saved our bacon. He and Mitch Macaphee are sitting in the galley as I write, comparing notes on selective gravitational force negation formulae. We're hoping that when we return home and proceed with the reconstruction of our lean-to, these boys will be able to design a "float" chamber for relaxing between takes. Something to look forward to!
Keeping Count. Not that anyone is paying attention, but the civilian death toll in Afghanistan has almost certainly exceeded that of the 9/11 attacks -- this according to a study by University of New Hampshire professor Marc Herrold, accessible though the Democracy Now! web site.
This report (and the 3,700 number) refers to deaths directly resulting from our military attacks, mind you...not the 100's per day dying as a result of food shipments having been interrupted by our glorious Afghan campaign. It hardly matters, right? Neither statistic is deemed worthy of discussion in the corporate media, lest one wishes to raise the ire of every talking head from New York to Los Angeles. Heavens, no!
What
else are we too busy saluting to talk about? Well, there's the matter of some
very questionable combatant deaths, as well. Executed POW's, that sort of thing.
Also, the insistence on unconditional surrender for the holdouts in Kandahar and
Tora Bora -- Secretary Rumsfeld would be very displeased if he heard us
talking about how that might constitute a war crime. He might just send us to
bed without our press releases. And then where would we be?
With the major media news organizations now having abandoned any pretense of objectivity, one wonders why the administration would bother releasing the edited Bin Laden video. Do they really think establishing his guilt is a problem for them at this point? It always amazes me how hard they try to control public perception, even when everything is going their way. An almost Nixonian paranoia. Couple that with a re-energized, newly-glorified intelligence community, and you've got the fixin's for another Cointelpro. Not that there's a problem with that.
Christ, look at us. After less than a year of Dubya,
there's been such an incredible unraveling the world over. Sharon is
demonstrating his long-established credentials as the Middle East's most
dangerous terrorist, 
now
with Dubya's unbridled blessing. Afghanistan is a deepening grave. India and
Pakistan are on the brink of (nuclear?) war. America has become a garrison
state, blooded with victory, trashing international institutions and arms
control agreements and threatening other crippled states (or ex-states) with
attack, like Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, North Korea...the list goes on.
And all the while, those press boys keep blowing on their little tin horns. Nothing to report again tonight, folks.
luv u,
jp
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12/23/2001
Hi-de-ho, neighbor!
May the blessings of the season be upon you! (Whatever the hell that means.) For those of you who do not subscribe to the secular consumerist religion that celebrates a shop-til-you-drop pagan holiday, well...hey, howareyuh? Any news from home? Hope the bladder trouble is better.
We
spent the better part of last week hurtling through the inky void of intergalactic
space towards the growing point of light that has since become
apparent as the planet Zenon, home of our semi-solid alien guitarist sFshzenKlyrn.
This is kind of a
courtesy trip, really. The planetary trust on Zenon was kind enough to lend us
sFshzenKlyrn
for our last couple of tours -- we
could hardly turn down their invitation to perform. sFshzenKlyrn
is a pretty popular guy on his
home planet...Big Green, however, has yet to sell even a dozen CD's there. Could
be because there are no bookshelf stereo systems on Zenon. Or maybe they just
don't like us. Either way, this promises to be an interesting engagement.
We have all been straining
to dream up some kind of gift we could offer the Zenites as a token of our good
will. But in as much as their bodies emit the 
equivalent
in particulate radiation as a string of leaky microwaves, such a task isn't
simple. Tiny Montgomery suggested something practical, like a pair of safety
gloves -- the kind commonly used for handling hazardous materials. Of course, we
needed to explain to Tiny that Zenites -- like sFshzenKlyrn
-- don't have "hands"
per se, and that hazardous materials make up a substantial portion of their
diet.
Trevor James Constable and
Mitch Macaphee remain fully absorbed in their research -- too much so to pay
serious attention to the matter of gifting the Zenites. The two men of science
are still parked in the ship's galley, drinking cheap espresso and
sketching out ideas on a
roll of baker's parchment for a selective gravitational force negation device. (I can hear their squeaky grease pencils from my
cabin even now.) When I tapped Trevor James' shoulder and asked him what would
be an appropriate gift, 
he
absent-mindedly slid a box of "twist-ems" towards me. Mitch Macaphee
wouldn't even acknowledge my presence. Talk about dedication!
Why not ask sFshzenKlyrn? Because the guy just can't make up his mind. I think he's just too close to it all. Besides, he always resorts to food gifts, like bundt cakes and pickled herring. Sure -- he wants us to make a good first impression, but the onus is on us (hmmmm...."onus" "on us" "onus" "on us"). After all, he's the known quantity on that hideous little globe, practically a household name (except that the Zenites don't have households). And when he gets together with his family for a reunion concert, and they sing Greg's new song about sFshzenKlyrn's voice beginning to change, it'll be standing room only. How the hell are we supposed to compete with that, huh?
So
my friends, though we won't be home for Christmas this year, we will be doing
what many of you consider to be your patriotic duty -- shopping frantically for
that un-namable something that will make us beloved in direct proportion to the
item's monetary value. Next stop, the Orion Beltway Bargain Center. Happy
Holidays. Terran friends!
Big Sucking Sound. Hear it? That big sucking sound? That's your House of Representatives plugging their legislative turbo-enema into our collective ass and throwing the switch. Draconian anti-terror bill...let 'er rip! Massive tax rebate for corporations...let 'er rip! Freakish bail-outs for an overvalued (and newly hyper-patriotic) travel industry...let 'er rip!
One particular high point
of this legislative session was the passage of "Fast Track" trade
negotiating authority by a single vote in the House. If nothing else, so close a
vote proves the importance of pushing your Representative hard on votes that
matter -- any one of those fuckers who voted yes could have made a difference!
It seems likely that the old 9-11 ploy pushed this one over the top, with the
"unSpeaker" Dennis Hastert dutifully urging his colleagues not to tie
the President's hands at this crucial juncture by insisting on exercising their
constitutional duty to craft 
legislation,
not just rubber-stamp it. The cynicism of selling this odious bill on the bodies
of the WTC dead is remarkable even in the context of this bankrupt political
period. As part of the glorious crusade against (some people's) terrorism, this
act would allow Dubya to negotiate even broader rights for investors at the
expense of communities the world over, with only an up or down vote from
Congress.
Now, unless you want that collection of corporate hacks and energy company stooges known as the "Bush Administration" to have a free hand in deciding how much more power corporations should have, contact your U.S. Senators (as well as the Senate leadership) now and tell them to vote no on "Fast Track". For a thumbnail review of the trade issue, go to www.citizen.org.
World O' Satisfaction. How well does the International Monetary Fund's "Structural Adjustment" policy work? Take a look at Argentina, the latest meltdown in a worldwide string of disasters the corporate press has until recently referred to as "economic miracles." Argentineans hit the streets because their nation was being crushed under the weight of speculative foreign debt, and their government was implementing an IMF-approved austerity program that would, in essence, "socialize" the cost of debt service by making the poor and the middle class pay the tab. IMF bottom line: people should go without food to keep foreign (Western) bankers from going without profit on their bad investments. Not playing too well down in Argentina.
The corporate press could keep December's anti-corporate globalization protests out of the news (see www.democracynow.org for coverage) but they couldn't bury this story, which was completely off the media radar screen only days before. One wonders who will be next -- or how Dubya will relate the massive Argentine protests to Osama bin Laden.
Timor
Smoking Gun. A little Holiday gift from our friends at the National
Security Archive -- they've posted documents showing that the Ford
Administration (including Henry Kissinger) gave Indonesia the nod to invade East
Timor more than 25 years ago, as activists have long insisted. Good reading at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
.
Have a happy hippie holiday. Get toe-down, you dawg.
luv u,
jp
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12/30/2001
Ahem...testing? Testing?
Ah, there you are. Welcome to the well-oiled Big Green touring machine. Having burned a swath of glory from one end of the galaxy to the other, we're glad to have guests log on and pull up a virtual chair so that they might partake of our pithy interstellar anecdotes and juicy backstage insights. So, what news do we bring from that outlandish world known as Zenon? What rare nuggets can we offer to our info-starved cyberfans? What -- to put the point more finely -- is happening in the world of Big Green?
Eh. Not much. What's happening with you?
Okay, okay. The Zenon gig went pretty
well, though we ended up having a little extra help on stage...something we
hadn't bargained for. When we arrived, we were informed by the Zenites that they
have a tradition of mixing music with a kind of ritualized mime-theatre called pon-kar-a-don-ho,
which roughly translates to "dance of the robots." This peculiar art
form springs from arcane sources deep in Zenite pre-history, our promo rep told
us, and incorporates elements of metaphysics, musical comedy, and cajun cooking.
Whatever the particulars may be, we were informed that our stage would be shared
with two of Zenon's most celebrated practitioners of pon-kar-a-don-ho,
the "amazing robotron" and "ponkarnac the
magnificent"...both robots. Wind-up toy robots. Part of the
tradition, we were told.
So picture it. We're cranking out our usual Big Green repertoire -- with a little more gusto, perhaps, because this was the end of the tour -- and there are these two man-sized toy robots flanking us, making hand gestures like stilted hula dancers, offering a ceremonial interpretation of our songs to the Zenite audience below. Sometimes they would move in unison, even executing a twirl-and-clap like the freaking Temptations. It was one weird-ass show, big mister. But we tried to keep our minds on the music, Matt and John chewing gum to keep their jaws from dropping, Tiny and I trading lines and switching instruments so we wouldn't be distracted. The only one who wasn't affected was sFshzenKlyrn. Makes sense -- it's his goofy tradition, right?
Then after the show I saw sFshzenKlyrn
yukking it up with some of his fellow Zenites. I didn't think much of it at
first, but then one of them let slip a few words in English about what a bunch
of rubes we are, and I put 2 and 2 together. "Pon-kar-a-don-ho" my
ass! It was all a gag, so those Zenites could have a few cheap laughs at our
expense! When I confronted sFshzenKlyrn
with the truth, he cracked up all the way and admitted it had been his idea all
along. What a fucker!
You know, I like a good joke as well as anybody, okay? And I wouldn't mind so much if it had just been that one performance. But goddammit, they taped the fucking show and plan on distributing it throughout the Great Magellanic Cloud...as a comedy video! sFshzenKlyrn says we'll be the Victor Borges of M32, but I have my doubts.
We kind of gave sFshzenKlyrn
the cold shoulder a good bit of the way home (except for Matt, who put gazpacho in his gym socks). I think our Zenite friend started feeling a little guilty, so
by way of a peace offering, he stopped off at a boutique on Pluto and picked us
up a little housewarming gift for our new (yet-to-be-built) lean-to. It's one of
those charming porch 
jockeys you see in front of all the better homes. You know
-- the kind once tackled by Dale "Factory Village" Haskell just before
he uttered these immortal words to the local police:
"I hate those fuckin' things."
Actually, I think the one sFshzenKlyrn picked out was, atypically, a caucasian figurine. Go figure. No tellin' who will be leading your horse to the barn these days. Could be someone from Al Qaida (or someone named Al Qaida).
With our native solar
system now plainly in view, beckoning us onward with a welcoming countenance, my
shipmates and I prepared to disembark. All of us had our tasks to perform. The
scientific contingent (Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable), now reunited
with the unredoubtable Dr. Hump, huddled even closer over diagrams of
gravitational negation devices hitherto undreamt of in anyone's philosophy. The
Steels, after having delivered their final weather report of the journey
("sunny"), folded themselves back into their monogrammed titanium
valise (light as aluminum and strong as steel). Matt practiced his Osama bin
Laden imitation in rehearsal for a series of gag videos to be dropped
anonymously at the Pakistan bureau of Al-Jazeera. John worked on the drum breaks
for the last number we played (nearly a week before). I spent 
my
final hours in space packing Tiny Montgomery's overnight bag full of
diatomaceous earth, while Tiny put sardines between the keys of my EMU Proteus
Plus. Heh heh....what fun we have!
Now, I can't speak for the rest of us, but I for one am looking forward to setting foot on good old Terra Firma once again. Seems like it's been a long time. (Hey -- what happened with that terrorism thing, anyway? Did they catch the one who done it?)
Letting It Slip. I found myself staring in amazement at my local newspaper the other day -- they had actually run an article on cluster bombs and unexploded ordinance in Afghanistan. I mean, it wasn't Pulitzer material, but just the fact that they talked at length about the number of "bomblets" we're leaving behind seems tantamount to treason in the current political climate.
No,
they didn't draw any conclusions about the use of such weapons by our military.
Nor did they explore the inherent contradiction in administration-driven
references to "surgical" bombing strikes using "daisy
cutters" and other large munitions. But the story did discuss the
likelihood of additional civilian deaths, including among children who mistake
cluster bombs for food packets. It even mentioned the fact that the food packets
remain the same color as the bomblets, despite the Pentagon's assurances that
they had "plans to distinguish rations from munitions." Sounds
like a plan.
The facts trickle out of the corporate media machine, but there never seems to be any attempt to establish responsibility for the "effects" of our splendid little war. Just as there has been no claim of responsibility for the 9/11 killings, the non-combatant dead in Afghanistan, now numbering in excess of 3,700, are in effect orphan casualties, the victims of a crime with no actor. If 238,000 people in Kandahar are going hungry, it's because of some authorless "chaos"...not because we've made a mess of the place. If refugees are getting their legs blown off by uxb's, well...heck. War is heck.
Meanwhile, Dubya is
displaying a level of chauvinism that would make Hermann Goering go green with
envy. When "confronted" with the fact that his military tribunals will
accept hearsay evidence, our great leader huffed that the accused will receive
better treatment than they accorded the victims of 9/11's terrorist attacks.
Aside from the nearly autonomic presumption of guilt, junior appears to be
advocating a standard of "justice" only marginally higher than that of
a random act of unspeakable 
violence.
Just the level of justice meted out on those 3,700+ Afghan civilians, as well as
on hundreds of POW's executed in shackles. As that great philosopher Pogo once
said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Follow the Money. As Rudy Giuliani prepares to leave office amid a torrent of cowardly drool from the press as well as a great many one-time critics, Michael Bloomberg's Money is steeling itself for the difficult job ahead. One wonders if Mayor Michael's Money will give Michael an important job in the new administration. After all...Michael is a knowledgeable financial advisor -- who better to give advise to a pile of simoleans?
Be free. Don't be mean.
luv u,
jp