From The Guardian (October 12, 2024),

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world’s leading medical journals.

The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by The Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.

The findings provoked an immediate political storm. Within hours of its release, George Bush had dismissed the figures. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” he told reporters at the White House.

Tonight Katie Couric led with a rehash of the unfortunate Lacrosse team rape charges at Duke stemming from a party last spring. She was ginning up interest in a weekend show her company produces called Sixty Minutes where the plight of the Lacrosse team and the possibilities that these are false charges will be examined in prurient detail, the better to take our minds off national and international issues that should now be getting the air time.

The Couric broadcast continued with other items of interest and concern… evidently the Amish community that suffered the recent school shooting has pulled down the schoolhouse and no memorial is planned. There’s a lot of that kind of news. And there is happy news, ice cream cones and puppies, but there is no solid news, no important news, NO NATIONAL NEWS that could save our way of life were it only broadcast with clarity in time. The only news that the American public hears is local news. A school shooting here, a rape case there, all the fits that’s news to print. It can’t be collusion, it’s simply cowardice, fear, unwillingness to encounter an administration that would send anthrax to your newsroom. It doesn’t matter if they actually did that. No thinking person today can deny that they, the Bush administration and its corporate clients WOULD do that to save the billions they might otherwise lose with a sea change in governance in the United States of America.

650,000 dead, and it’s our fault. We elected the monster. Then we re-elected him. Do you believe the Lancet or do you believe George W. Bush?

“We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2024, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.”
– The Lancet

When I hear someone say, “Oh yeah, I’m spiritual, but not — you know — religious,” I am reminded of Father Rageboy’s first commandment, to wit:

Vapid and narcissistic are they who repeat the mantra “I’m spiritual but not religious.”

Kneeling for communion at the temple of rage I heard the priest intone, “Take, eat this you whitebread muthahfuckah… it’s nobody’s body, we’re spiritual here but not religious, it’s just a metaphor… whitebread, get it? Do you get it!? Whitebread schmuck.”

I could see why they called it the temple of rage. The temple of rage, of course was but one stop on my metaphysical journey. I also spent a great deal of time at Starbucks seeking the clarity of an open wireless connection. And the Crate and Barrel outlet store down on 4th Street in Berkeley. Williams of Sonoma on Union Square. Pottery Barn at better malls across America. Nordstroms. The Nature Company in its original location just outside the tunnel on the Alameda. Smith and Hawken in Mill Valley… Ahhh, hippie capitalism at its best. Plant materials from Berkeley Hort. Sensual massage at Esalen down in Big Sur. A house in Marin, good dope, identical twins… little scorpios in their tandem stroller and identical maple cribs.

Spiritual was I, and bourgeois to the max. Dining out in the gourmet ghetto, riding BART with a New York Times done up in a commuter’s fold. The Larkspur ferry before that. Double vodka martinis and rubber bridge all the way home. My partner had some kind of three way going with Kaiser and Bechtel… Libyan bauxite, French refractories, and the best Bechtel built nuclear reactors available for offshore construction. We kicked ass. I was way spiritual on the commute home in those days.

I could balance the bindle and the straw and horn in copious quantities of Bolivia’s best in rough seas off Angel Island and never drop a crumb on the floor of the head. “Head.” That’s ferry boat nautical for toilet.

Was I spiritual but not religious?

When Locke writes these condemnatory tracts linking Emerson through Nietzsche to Hitler and Corporatist emergent fascism founded in post-war Allied fervid religious gratitude and shit, I pale. Is it me? All these people I hung out with were heavy into the Urantia Book and all that crap. Is it mean spirited and hypocritical of me to admit that I was only there then for the dope and the music.

All I can say right now is that I was NEVER that spiritual. And by the time I got religious I was well on my way to informed atheism, so screw the guilt. I can sit back free of guilt and enjoy his explication of the spiritual left and the spiritual right and the undercurrents that unite them, informed and aware and in concert with the idea that there is a lot of denial present whenever spiritual fundamentals overtake reason, common-sense, and altruism, whether that spirituality is founded in religion or the bourgeois mysticism that is vapid narcissism.

Something is happening here and I know what it is, I’m jonesing for more truth.

Thanks to Cowtown Pattie for this link that got me all riled up.

It’s back to this. In the late sixties I did a quick real estate survey of downtown Madison, Wisconsin and in addition to all the land tied up by governmental and educational institutions, an appalling amount of the best locations and the fanciest architecture was in the hands of religion. The most valuable land was - and remains - off the tax rolls. Now huge evangelical republican shrines are being built across the country and generally they too are separated from this community obligation by the very laws they’re trying to neutralize when they meddle in civil marriage concerns, sexual health issues, scientific advances in medicine, and the public school curriculum. I say give them a shot at banning all the books they want. Let them bring it to a vote, book by book. But if they’re flushing their turds down my sewer and drinking my municipal water and increasing traffic on the public streets every Sunday when their flag decaled and magnetic ribboned SUVs caravan to their tax sheltered places of worship, then let them pay the taxes and be governed by the same rules that the rest of us follow.

In god’s name, can’t we tax and regulate the poor benighted ignoramuses before they swallow up the country like some plague of locusts? Roughly one third of Americans are stupid enough or twisted enough or suffered enough abuse that they believe that evangelical crap. Why should two thirds of us have to suffer under their oppressive nonsense? Tax them. Let them render a little unto Caesar for a change. The freeloaders have been sucking our communities dry long enough.

Bill Van Auken writes,

The fixation of both official Washington and the mainstream media on the emails of Congressman Mark Foley (Republican of Florida) and the Republican House leadership’s cover-up of his pursuit of teenage male pages has served to divert public attention from a far more significant cover-up of a far greater crime.

The Foley story has highlighted the official corruption and hypocrisy that characterize the political establishment as a whole in America. The spectacle of a party that has made “family values” its battle cry and sought to exploit homophobia and religious backwardness for political ends being caught up in such a scandal has undoubted popular appeal.

For the Democrats, it provides a useful political club, without compelling this second party of corporate America to advance a single substantive difference with the Republicans on domestic or foreign policy.

But the time and resources—not to mention prurient interest—that the media has devoted to the exposure of Foley’s emails and instant messages stand in sharp contrast to its virtual silence on the revelations—first reported September 28, the same day that the emails from Foley surfaced on ABC News—in the new book by Bob Woodward, State of Denial.

… read the rest of Van Auken’s piece here.

Glenn Reynolds, adept right wing propagandist, says today that “the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives….” He says he’s quoting Drudge then goes on to fatuously observe that whether or not this is true, “it certainly complicates things.”

heh

A friend emailed with a pointer to an article in the Washington Post by Terence O’Hara that includes the line:

“If Murry Gunty didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him,” one liberal blogger, Frank Paynter, wrote.

Consider the nano-Warhol juice this sucks out of my allotment. Every blogger will be famous for 15 nano-seconds and this article uses up at least one.

The article offers a lot of room for quibbling. Mark Pincus’ blog post about Mr. Gunty was pretty straight forward. The fall-out when SixApart tried to influence Mark to anonymize Gunty was worth a few comments. But all in all, there were very few people engaged in the discussion, and O’Hara’s assertion that “several” bloggers started their own discussion strings about the long ago incident is off center. A few bloggers (as many as four or five, hardly a ground swell) remarked on SixApart’s efforts to censor Pincus, but the long ago incident stands by itself, well covered on the net and in the press during the nineties and not worth re-hashing except in the context of true or false.

O’Hara suggests that “dozens of posters” were attracted to the matter. I hope he can forgive the quibble that there is in web publishing a distinction between a “commenter” and a “poster.” A poster originates a discussion. A commenter engages in a discussion of a post. These little things matter. They help us establish a common ground. There were by my recollection probably less than a half dozen posters, originating material in their blogs that related to Murry Gunty’s poor choices as a student and the attempt to blot out memory of these misdeeds by censoring Mark Pinkus. I would be surprised if as many as twenty-four people offered comments — twenty-four being the number necessary to lend accuracy to O’Hara’s use of the word “dozens.” I’m sure that between January and August at least twenty-four comments relevant to those few blog posts were made, but many were made by the same person.

If anything about the article annoys me, it is not so much the cluelessness regarding web publishing contextual matters, terms of art and so forth, but rather O’Hara’s selection of my header as the pull quote from my post. I thought my post was carefully wrought. I tried to avoid inflammatory rhetoric, and qualified what I wrote. Over the last few months I have moderated and discarded a couple of comments that came my way because I couldn’t verify their substance and they seemed unfair to Mr. Gunty. The fact that I used an attention grabbing headline has come back to bite me. It’s all that O’Hara found interesting in my blog post!

O’Hara’s gratuitous observation that Pincus’ blog post had a higher Google rank than Gunty’s corporate bio is also worth a quibble. The static nature of Milestone Capital’s corporate flackery will obviously pull fewer readers than dynamic content in a well read blog. The Post article is rife with that kind of nonsense, the stuff that obscures the perfectly valid point that attempting to squelch free speech, freedom of expression and freedom of the press as it might apply in a web publishing context is a foolish thing to do and perhaps Mr. Gunty would have been better off practicing a little detachment.

And, as Scott Johnson said then,

I can understand that Murry Gunty doesn’t want this information to show up in Google — and a blog does that well — but he did cheat. Now you can argue that everyone deserves a second chance but this wasn’t cheating by a Harvard undergrad. It was cheating by someone at Harvard Business School (HBS). Given all the problems with ethics in corporate america and the prevalence of HBS grads in corporate management personally I think calling someone out with a history of cheating and making them visible in Google is a fine thing.

There is no immunity for war crimes. Read what Dana Blankenhorn has to say about this.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

Here’s a hypothesis based on two data points. I left it as a comment at Loose Poodle and I re-present it here:

During drive time I had an insight that I’d like to share. I think those of us who don’t believe in god have a higher likelihood of believing in conspiracy theories. It would be interesting to rake together the data around this theory, to prove it or disprove it. I know I am quite likely to identify connections here in this life, and I think it might have something to do with not having that metaphysical stuff tying things together in a different way.

The data:

1. In one brief conversation a brilliant friend revealed both that he is “born again,” which is to say he experienced a life changing conversion experience; and, that he doesn’t have much time for conspiracy theories.
2. I have never had a conversion experience nor do I expect to have one; and, my world view is framed by a sensitivity to the dynamics of power relationships in society and how those relationships support a structure of social classes.

My friend is carefree, neither seeing nor crediting “the doomsday stuff,” as tristero calls it.

…the very thought that the US government is seriously broken - that the Executive is beyond the control of anyone and everyone in the world - is such a truly awesome and terrifying thought that it can never be publicly acknowledged. If ever it is, if the American crisis gets outed and Congress and the Supremes openly assert that the Executive has run completely amok and is beyond control, the world consequences are staggering. It is the stuff of doomsday novels.

Juke Moran says, “Moral centers, in a Velikovskian geometric, have Onanist characteristics.” I wouldn’t know about that of course, because my nose is stuck so deep in my own navel that I’m suffocating. But I like my little social science thought experiment:

Answer these two questions, and please don’t mess with me, just tell the truth…

1. Do you believe in god and how would you qualify that belief?
2. Do you see conspiracies where the media and others around you see none, and give an example please?

I’m old. Most of my exercise comes from bending over to pull my socks on in the morning and off at night. Of course, you could say I have to be strong to carry that fifty pound bag of excess fat around with me wherever I go. Yet, for all the physical deterioration, buried somewhere beneath the crust of my dimming consciousness there remain the good intentions. Someday I could get in shape. Someday I could break free of my bad habits.

I’m gullible. Maybe short-sighted is a better word. In early August, when Beth suggested we sign up for the partner yoga class, it seemed far enough away that I could hope maybe I’d die before the first class. I’m averse to conflict. I agreed to go because it was easier to assent than to fight it out.

Last week was the first class. Beth bought us matching yoga mats, smelly rolls of soft foam outgassing carcinogens. No way could it be healthy to lie about on these mats. I had a conflict. We missed the first class. All week the mats have been in my office, sort of a stealth oncology marketing gimmick if you ask me.

Last night was the second class. I couldn’t come up with a good enough excuse to avoid it. There we were, with half a dozen other couples. Guess who was the oldest fat guy in the room. Hint: me.

This morning I feel surprisingly good.