Listics

As I watch him pulling the chickens across the floor, I’m reminded of last night’s dominant dream… Turner was helping from England and we had charts of the currents in th elakes, not a Lake Ekalake thing exactly, but somehow a modeling for the Atlantic, and as I pulled the cord to drag that suitcase across the ocean floor it became obvious to all of us that the weight of the cord itself would cause it to fray and snap. So we patched in some canvas hose, strong material, much like the fire hoses you see coiled in hotel halls in the movies, the type of hose strong enough to hold an action hero as he bails out of the 13th floor window and drops a few floors to come crashing back into a room where a lady, carefully coiffed and wearing a white dress, is eating cake, and her eyes grow round and her mouth does too as she utters an “ohhhh,” expressing her surprise to see a stranger there.

Cathy Wilkes in a 1920’s get-up

So I pulled this suitcase across the ocean floor and naturally it got hung up on the mid-Atlantic ridge and the cord snapped anyway. Later, to continue the experiment, we dropped the suitcase west of the ridge, but as Turner pointed out there was no practical advantage to be gained by a method that required us to start past the middle. Still we experienced a feeling of success since we were able to beach that sodden suitcase on the shore of the lake here.

as if her work is coated in some slick substance that allows it to slip past the critical barrier, taking up residence in the thoughts of her audience unmediated

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Pope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no Pope. Benedict will be in DC on April 16!!! He’s the Pope they named the breakfast after, right?

Yummy, I think I’ll have a poached egg on an english muffin with ham and a little hollandaise.

(And dig, I got through an entire pope post without mentioning his connections to the Hitler Youth and his support of the decimation of liberation theology around the world, his betrayal of the weak and the poor in favor of the wealthy ruling classes, the landowners, and the aristocracy).

Meanwhile the 20th century martyrs cry shame on the whole college of cardinals who put the world in this unsavory position, elevating a pitilessly proud and morally compromised man like Ratzinger to leadership of the wealthiest, most powerful and widespread christian sect.

Of course, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

Technorati Tags: Oscar Romero, Rutilio Grande Garcia, Alfonso Navarro Oviedo, Ernesto Barrera, Octavio Ortiz Luna, Rafael Palacios, Alirio Napoleón Macías, welcome to America Benedict, you killer, you who subdue dissent, you who marginalize the poor the hungry the dispossessed, you who destroy the hope of democracy

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Part two:

Technorati Tags: Euripides, Eumenides, get it, Foucault, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Iraq, Afghanistan, Reuters

Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers had lost the fight for the Burma Road, and another plan was needed to keep the steady stream of war materials flowing from the British and Americans in India to Chiang Kai-shek in the southwest of China. In the Air Transport Command we would wake up in India, gnaw on a chunk of Nepalese hash the size of your fist, crank up the twin engines on the old C-47 at the refueling base in Dinjan, and seek enlightenment in the friendly skies beyond the rock pile. The turn-around in Kunming was remarkable only for the beautiful weather and the boring cuisine — dinner was usually a plate of fava beans and some warm and watery beer with an off taste. I think the chow was purposely bland and awful. If the food was good nobody would have gotten up the next morning and done the return flight to the sunny south shore of the lovely Brahmaputra, where the temperatures were so hot you got blistered if you touched the plane.

By the time I was driving that route it was well-marked by the sparkling aluminum below, wrecks from the boys who suffered hypoxia in heroic attempts to fly above the peaks, or wrecks from the boys who tried to break the laws of physics one way or another. My tactics were simply to fly low and slow all the way, and after I’d done it a few times I knew the passes to fly through, the peaks to skirt, and most importantly, how not to overload the kite with more munitions than Old Chiang ever intended to fire at the Japanese anyway. (Meanwhile, up in the northwest, a fellow named Mao was kicking ass and taking names — a lot of it Kuomintang ass, but some Japanese ass as well, but the strategery in Kunming was to lay in munitions and supplies for the ROC in hopes that after the war they’d take care of the commie menace. Worked out like that sort of strategery usually does, but that’s another story.)

We signed on for 650 hours of hell, flying across unforgiving terrain in equipment that wouldn’t be allowed off the ground these days. The Air Corps hype about the hump made it out to be the most unforgiving terrain anywhere, but those boys had never flown the Nazi Express out of Santiago, Chile via Aconcagua and on to western Paraguay like I did for a while in the new post-war era. Nor had they flown very far up river into Tibet.

The Tibetans didn’t exactly welcome tourism, but the day that the Army Air Corps told me I now had a 750 hour commitment or another year in service to the Chinese war machine (whichever came last), I pulled a Huck Finn: “I couldn’t stand it no longer and I lit out.” I had a C-47 full of K-rations and light weapons. Instead of heading for the eternal springtime of Kunming where the Camellias were always in bloom and the favas could choke a horse, I got in touch with my inner entrepreneur and I stole that plane and I stole that cargo. I hooked a left turn and followed the river up the Tsangpo Gorge, the deepest canyon on the planet. It looked like a whitewater rafting dream below me and a vertical tropical paradise on the left and on the right. But with just a little careful maneuvering and one hard left turn around a a mountain that almost brought me down it wasn’t too many hours before the river opened out into a braided turquoise fantasy meandering across the high plateau.

Some other time I’ll share the secrets I learned in Lhasa, and tell of my trek through Bhutan and Nepal, my encounter with the still living Drukpa Kunley and some of the wisdom he shared. Today, I must point you to the truth about Tibet, as far as the truth can be known or told. If you were curious enough to click on the picture above, you’d already know what I’m yakking about.

Five years have passed and and still no justice, peace, or understanding has emerged in Israel regarding the brutal death of Rachel Corrie at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces.

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Thanks to Norm for the reminder of the anniversary date and to the Rachel Corrie Foundation for keeping her activist quest for peace and justice alive.

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Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Read Phyllis Bennis’ “Institute for Policy Studies” report here.

Technorati Tags: With news like this we’ll have to sink Spitzer, statesmanlike megalomania, who’s watching Dick Cheney