Tannishblog

The American empire is expanding. The Neo-Con agenda is world dominance. Dahr Jamail comments on the likelihood of a permanent American colony in Iraq, a beach head for larger campaigns. It make sense.

Meanwhile the US Senate grills oil executives about their record profits of late. These news items are not unrelated. The specter of peak oil is haunting think tanks near capitol hill and desperate times call for desperate measures. As Republicans forge ahead with their version of a brave new world, the Democrats are making appropriate noises in the name of lip service, but are conveniently lacking the spine to redirect the American juggernaut that is current foreign policy. They’re afraid of running out of oil, too.

There is something frightening about this whole scenario, something that transcends the soul. As a Buddhist, I see a beginningless Karmic chain leading to the inevitability of the end of mankind on this planet. There is a chance the Karmic debt can be erased or eased, however unlikely unless a critical mass of people adopt new ways of relating to the world and to each other. As an ex-Christian, I see a self-fulfilling prophesy of Apocalypse spurred by fundamentalist belief that the end of times are near. It’s a chicken-and-egg puzzle: Which came first, the proximity to Judgment Day, or the actions that lead to Apocalypse, spurred by the belief in the imminence of Judgment Day?

At this point, does it matter?

This interesting clip came to me through the virtual grapeline. As it comes from a Muslim-American psychologist, and as it mentions Jews in a positive light, the wife’s family is spreading it about. Check it out. What I see is a woman daring to speak out against the misogynist and insular Muslim culture. It is interesting to note how the show’s format and mediator mimic Western news media. This underlines her message, which is “Get with the program.” Even the cleric is dressed in western clothes. What the American government is trying to force at gunpoint on the Muslim world – namely the spread of democratic ideals – is already happening at its own, slower pace. Good things are worth waiting for; some things cannot be rushed. Whatever gains made through this slow osmosis of Globalization have been twisted by our administration as a result of our war. This is not the case. The few gains would have occurred anyway, as is witnessed by this broadcast. The debate is on. What America needs to do is to back off and let it take its own shape. What we have accomplished by destroying Iraq is to give the anachronistic religious extremists fuel for their anger,  thereby slowing the debate: One cannot argue with a closed mind. Of course that is also true in Washington.

Our Warmongering president is again on the offensive. This time his battle is at home where public opinion, ever the fickle beast, is turning away from a protracted struggle in Iraq. Few people see any sign of gain after three years of combat. Fewer yet see any sign of an end.

Washington Post outlines his – for lack of a better word – strategy:

After previewing the upcoming speech in his radio address today, the president is scheduled to make remarks on the war at George Washington University on Monday. The appearance, which will be followed weekly by as many as four other speeches, marks the start of the White House’s latest effort to convince skeptical Americans that it has a coherent plan for victory as the war nears its third anniversary later this month.

The president hopes to give “better depth, understanding and context for how the strategy in Iraq is unfolding,” a senior White House official said of the planned speeches. Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Cabinet members will be making speeches on Iraq in advance of the anniversary of the U.S. invasion.

The three big hitters in our administration are going out to proselytize the people, shoring up the levees of blind patriotism in the face of malcontent. Perhaps that’s a poor metaphor to use…

If our leaders had taken into consideration an old text military leaders the world over refer to as the definitive treatise on warfare, we might not be in such a terrible position: Sun Tsu’s The Art of War.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

[…]

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.

Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.

What more can be said?

A good friend of mine - and a fellow blogger - drops subtle hints in her writings about people like me who, in her mind, spend too much time complaining about our great nation. She sometimes gets disgusted reading this blog. I’m unsure of her motivations, but I detect a love-it-or-leave-it mentality hovering beneath the surface of her thoughts. A less rational person would express this loudly; misunderstanding how doing so is only the sound of one mind closing. However, such is the respect I have for my blogger friend, that I ponder her words and my motivations for vociferous dissent.

On these virtual blog pages, I whine a lot about America and its citizens. Some may agree some may tire of the rant; others will leave as fast as they can click their mouse. Some few may read my offerings and wish me a healthy recovery.

Some readers may infer that I hate our country and all that is stands for. I don’t; neither do I love it. To view a complicated relationship from either extreme, as if one word can express it, is futile. Human feelings and beliefs, especially their relationships, are convoluted structures not easily summated. So, too, is my relationship with America.

Some claim ours is the best and greatest nation on earth; indeed, that is just the message I grew up on. For years, the flag-waving cheerleaders were quietly living their lives teaching this to their progeny. Then came 9/11, and the time came for unity and solidarity, and the cheerleaders took the stage.

There’s nothing wrong with that. America is a nice place to live. I’m happy enough to be here. Yet to believe that our nation cannot improve is a disservice to the memories of those who got us where we are today.

Our founding fathers, as we like to label them, called their efforts the Great Experiment. To them, their fledgling nation was a work in progress. It still is; the experiment continues. It can still fail. A representative government, guided by the people, is one of the hallmarks of our civilization. Humanity has embraced Democracy as the best system we can devise to offer freedom, happiness, and prosperity to all. Nonetheless, the system is not foolproof.

The strength of a democracy lies in its attempts at letting citizens guide the state; the weakness of this system is that it is inherently cumbersome. Likewise, the strength of a republic is to minimize the unwieldiness of the body politick while maintaining the representation of the people. The weakness of a republic is a tendency to create a political class subject to human failings of greed and self-interest, thereby undermining their effectiveness as representatives of the citizens. This balancing of forces makes up our Great Experiment, and it makes the whole structure tenuous and fragile. I try to underline this in my writings. I believe more Americans should be aware how weak is our grasp on civilization. We might treat it with the respect it deserves.

America gives me freedom to think and express myself to the extent that it harms no one. It would be unpatriotic to ignore this freedom. By refusing to accept political status quo, I keep the dialogue alive to the degree I’m capable, refreshing the debate and perhaps forcing others not to take our great nation for granted. By exercising my political freedoms through disagreement, I show respect for our country. Our experiment has come a long way in a short time, but only because the discussion continues. If either political party manages to silence the opposition, democracy will fall. I’m going to do my very best to avoid that.

Who would think that computer technologies – specifically databases – could turn into a vital weapon in today’s political divide? That’s the scope of an insider feud between powerful democrats and the Democratic National Committee. The DNC, finally getting the message that they need to do something to win votes and to get like-minded people to the polls, have begun an effort to construct a database to discern where those left-thinking people are hiding.

Meanwhile George Soros, billionaire investor extraordinaire, is helping to bankroll an independent firm to do the same thing. Typical to the progressive mentality, neither trusts the other to get the job done. Why is this important? From Washington Post:

Traditional get-out-the-vote efforts operated crudely, such as by canvassing neighborhoods in which at least 65 percent of residents voted for a particular party. It was often deemed too inefficient to focus on neighborhoods where the partisan tilt was less decisive, and it ran the risk of doing more to turn out the opposition’s vote.

The advantage of data-based targeting is that political field operatives can home in on precisely the voters they wish to reach — the antiabortion parishioners of a traditionally Democratic African American church congregation, for instance.

Consultants working for the Republican National Committee developed strategies to design messages targeting individual voters’ “anger points” in the belief that grievance is one of the strongest motivations to get people to turn out on Election Day.

Anger Points: just the kind of thinking indicative of Republicans. But I digress…

That the Democratic Party must get with the times is a given. That they also need some sort of plan is likewise obvious. What the DNC, DSCC, and state and local lefties need more than anything, however, is cohesion. All the data mining in the world, cannot accomplish what a unified front has done for the Republican Party. Perhaps, by collecting information on them selves, the Democratic Party will begin to understand its won weaknesses and learn to adjust. After all, survival doesn’t necessarily happen to the strongest, but to the most adaptable.

Via Brother Kenya - his friend (and now mine, too. Ain’t the Internet great?) Ramblin’ Jack Allen is blogging his folk songs. I hope he posts some MP3’s soon.

Today’s offering at Folkwise goes with my earlier post on the whole abortion… um, abortion. Sing it loud!

In Buddhist teachings on learns that we only have the present moment. this eternal dot in time, as it were, is always with us. The future is but a dream, the past is gone. All there is, is now. In light of this thought, it seems that now is the correct time to widen the ideological devide in this country by pressing on with fudamentalist views on one of our nations hottest topics: abortion. Indeed, now is all we have.

Now, South Dakota throws the gauntlet down and attempts to wrest state control of women’s wombs from the women themselves. Now, we get to test the mettle of the right-leaning supreme court as politics get up close and personal.

The whole abortion debate reminds me of a quote from Galileo. My best recollection goes like this:

I find it hard to believe the same God that bestowed intelligence and reason upon us intends us to forego their use.

These type of arguments with fundamentalism have been around for a while, it seems. So, now we get to see how the Bush legacy will change America. It’s too late to recant our disinterest in politics, politics is coming into our homes - like it or not. The hand is dealt, the dice are tossed, now we see exactly what mess we’re in.

I, for one, fear for my daughter’s rights as a modern woman in trying times. We humans have been expanding without control, gobbling up resources, turning air and water into waste products. We have the foresight, courage and intelligence to change that trend. We have the technology. But we’re caught in a medieval mindset of outmoded beliefs that undermine our capacity to control ourselved on a global level. Why hasn’t any believer in God stood up to say: “God has given us the tools to solve modern problems, so we can reach our potential; if God didn’t want us to use the science we invent, he would have made us no more than animals.” Perhaps God wants us to limit our population to coincide with dwindling resources. Perhaps God wants us to manage our planet better.

Now, I think, is the time for someone to take up that call.

Aside from my usual fare of left-handed political leftovers, todays postings come to you courtesy of Ubuntu linux. Being the geekiest person in my immediate surroundings has the benefit of my acruing old computer hardware from the family. Bits an pieces have accumulated over the years to where I can upgrade a box handed down from my mother in-law into a fairly useful workhorse. WIN98 is passe, so I investigated “the OTHER operating system,” you know, the one that is based on democratic ideals and not on capitalism.

As a newbie choosing the endless variants of linux (like the supermarket and its 100 brands of chocolate chip cookies), I leaned upon an article from my favorite geek publication - aside from the cyberguys catalog - MaximumPC, which featured an article about “making the switch” to linux. Ubuntu was their choice of distributions, so I took their recommendation.

Tonight, as I got home, I didn’t bother to turn on my WINXP rig. I started the new/old linux box and started doing my thing. As for first impressions - outside of gaming (which I love), there’s no reason not to give linux a try except for one caveat: some tinkering is still needed by the user. This is not an OPsys for my mother in-law quite yet. Due to resistance from the capitalistic software community, ready integration on such offerings as Real Player and other tools has yet to be smoothed out. Soon, though.

Meanwhile I bask in geekish glory while forgetting that I am yet a newbie. Great Fun!

A lot of talk in my political emails today about torture. Dahr Jamail’s Iraqi Dispatches points to TomDispatch refering to our great nation’s policy on un-torturing “detainees” and are not actually prisoners, but are held offshore in areas, delineated by chain link and barbed wire, that are not prisons. The NY Times joins the fray with a long article detailing images of the not-conflict of the un-prisoners at Gitmo.

All this denial make my head hurt, given that we speak in context of a war (its OK to use that word: its macho) that is not a police action or (gasp) nation-building. Our administration is so busy masking its actions, spinning its tales, that it cannot and has not functioned as a govorning body. Name one piece of new legislation in the last three years that didn’t cut taxes, fund the war, or take away money from long-standing government programs designed to aid people. At this writing I can’t think of any…

But I can recall a dozen time our un-leaders have passed the buck, stood “reso-loot,” or lied to the press and to the POTUS. I can recall a score of issues that our leaders have acted upon without due process, underhanded and secretive, that we learn about after the fact. And I can clearly see the billions of dollars of taxpayers money wasted in uncoordinated and unmanaged attempts to “rebuild Iraq.”

It makes my un-happy!

The Law of Unintended Consequences has raised its laughing head once again. The NY Times notes that our Terrible War on Terror has effectively strengthened Tehran’s hold on the Middle East:

Washington has now become dangerously dependent on the good will and constructive behavior of Shiite fundamentalist parties that Iran sheltered, aided and armed during the years that Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq. In recent weeks, neither good will nor constructive behavior has been particularly evident, and if Iran chooses to stir up further trouble to deflect diplomatic pressures on its nuclear program, it could easily do so.

There is now a real risk that Iraq, instead of being turned into an outpost of secular democracy challenging the fanatical rulers of the Islamic republic to its east, could become an Iranian-aligned fundamentalist theocracy, challenging the secular Arab regimes to its west.

Of further note is the connection to our new “Noocular” Pact with India.

Fast-forward to Thursday’s nuclear deal with India, in which President Bush agreed to share civilian nuclear technology with India despite its nuclear weapons programs and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

This would be a bad idea at any time, rewarding India for flouting the basic international understanding that has successfully discouraged other countries from South Korea to Saudi Arabia from embarking on their own efforts to build nuclear weapons. But it also undermines attempts to rein in Iran, whose nuclear program is progressing fast and unnerving both its neighbors and the West.

The India deal is exactly the wrong message to send right now, just days before Washington and its European allies will be asking the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran’s case to the United Nations Security Council for further action. Iran’s hopes of preventing this depend on convincing the rest of the world that the West is guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues. Mr. Bush might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran.

This seems to me a new twist on the game of “Cowboys and Indians” with meaner weapons. Now that we have a partner in potential nulear hijinks, we can get serious. The Texas Bad-boy and his cronies have already done their homework and created a long list of enemies to play against. With the technology of warfare outstripping humanity’s capacity for diplomacy, the whole world should tremble as the Warmonger Party starts playing with nukes. It seems that white phosphorus is trite already; one can only burn the faces of so many children before boredom sets in. Now that the end of the presidency of George the Unready is in view, its time to dust off our aging nukes and see what we can do with them. Either we “upgrade” or we use them. Time will tell.

Yee-haw!