Haven't wrote a word about the ongoing cluster nightmare in the Middle East nor much of anything else for the past month. I've been tightening things up around here in preparation for taking my act back the Cali. Never gets boring out there. If nothing else, I plan to eat sushi every day for at least a month. Cleveland is not sushi country, not of the fresh kind anyway. You want fresh sushi around here, it's going to come from Lake Erie, and sure, marine biologists say the lake has cleaned up real nice, but memories linger from that lake's toxic flotsam days of my youth-- when signs were posted along the Lake Erie shoreline reminding us all that at no time should human flesh touch the water. You don't forget stuff like that. So, whenever I see some Lake Erie product on a local restaurant's menu, I avert the eyes and order steak.

I've also been ramping up to write something, well, long form. Blogging might bring more of a thrill at this stage if I had 50,000 loyal readers instead of 15, well prolly 5 given my latest bout of radio silence, but regarding geo-political stuff, there's a lot of opinions out there and some of them are good. Fact is, them issues are being covered in saturating fashion. More importantly, if the truth of things is too much for you, there's always some dingbat out there in the blogosphere who thinks exactly as you do. My friend Jay has suggested that the best hope for blogging going forward is for the bloggers to stick to one, maybe two topics that they really know about. Like Chomsky: He should perhaps write about linguistics and leave the politics to folks who know what the hell they're talking about.

Jay is full of good ideas. He believes that we should all live modestly, no matter our earnings, so that when the revolution comes we won't be among the first against the wall. Sounds good to me. I'm not sure when 'the' or 'a' revolution is coming but I'm pretty sure lots of people will be shot or gassed, or maybe shot and gassed. Extreme violence has never been more acceptable and that mindset is percolating across a wide swath of humanity. That's what the eventual longform piece will focus on...postmodern violence. Set the story 20 or 30 years ahead of now and construct a narrative that suggests Kipling, Dick, and David Sedaris. Jay might say it's a good idea.

For the record, I retract my sunny Middle East predictions made throughout 2004. I was wrong. It's a 9.7 on the ugly scale over there right now, and where things are going, we'll need to redefine the scale itself. When Omar and Mohammed at Iraq The Model and the National Review crowd all say it's pretty much hopeless, you need to realize then it's probably worse than that. I can't even write any more about it, but I will, at some point...just to get it out of me. I'm sure plenty of folks felt the same way during the Spring of 1914, even though I'm not technically qualified to make such assertions.

I need to get back to packing. Twenty-four hundred miles of road separates me from where I am and where I need to be-- next week in fact. In the meantime, I'll make stops in Chicago and Ft. Collins, and when I see the SF skyline from the Bay Bridge again...well, it'll be a lot of things. LadyK will follow in due time, dragging the household with her, or more reasonably setting it up that some shady-assed moving company (and they are all shady) drags our furniture and paintings out with us. I'm going to get a place near the beach-- small and quiet. A couple of friends have questioned that, living in the fog zone and all, but it's for the best. I want to meet the distractions at the times and places of my choosing. Living far out on the Outer Sunset will give me that opportunity.

- k

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Blow and McCarthy

Danberry wasn't a prison, it was a crime school. I entered with a Bachelor's in Marijuana and left with Doctorate in Cocaine. - Johnny Depp channeling George Jung in Blow

For reasons that escape me, I watched Blow and Goodfellas and finished Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men on the same day. Bad for the optimism nerve for sure. Both tales deal with multiple angles of the drug trade, which is itself a tangent of the thug trade. That is so because drug-dealing is very profitable yet illegal.

If you've not had the opportunity to run drugs across the Mexican border or preside over your very own criminal enterprise or even specialize in ripping off drug lords, by all means, watch Blow, and read McCarthy's latest opus-- albiet quite compact and Hemingway-esque for an opus-- and you shall learn maybe the most important thing there is to learn about shady dealings:

You can't run a successful criminal enterprise if you're a pussy.

Everything else is about the lawyers.

Warrents mentioning.

- k

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Nothing To See Here

I'm supposed to be working on a marketing application, a Personal Relevance Marketing app, which is bells, whistles, and bullshit. Though an intellectual black hole, this app, and its tangents have, and will continue to, enrich my bank account and my portfolio, so what the hey, eh?

There are two versions of the app. One uses video for it's main content, and the other version, the one I like better, uses animation. For the time being, the animation is flash-based, as a movie clip that is attached to each app-section's main file. The problem is that when I test the vector animated versions, transitions from one section to another look like poo I'd built a transition device from app-section to app-section that fades content in and out from section to section. With bitmap images and video, this is not problem, because bitmaps are flattened in flash, meaning that there can be no alpha differentions between layers. Not so with vector animations.

The main character in my app-section animations has 60 something symbols for 60 something bodyparts and clothing accouterments-- though I'm real tempted to put an easter egg somewhere in this app that will magically make the animated spite strip down to the all-naturals then drag out an adult toy box onto the stage, and, well, just know that there's a 50/50 chance that I'm going to do this.

Anyway, there is symbol overlap with these animated characters. For example, where the upper arm and shoulder meet, there are three symbols overlapping at times, and this is because when you set a character in motion, you have to have overlapping shapes to make the movements both realistic and also enough separate moving parts so that the animation work is modular. This saves tons of time that would otherwise be spent on redrawing the character for every motion, and I don't that the patience nor the proper appreciation for the tedious.

When I use the aforementioned transition fade to indicate the app is going from one section to another, the overlapping vector symbols on the character appear more opaque, because is something has been faded to 30% alpha, nearly transparent, three overlapping symbols of that something-- say an upper arm, shoulder, and torso part - - it appears at 90% alpha, which is almost opaque.

So, I'll probably change the transition code so that the content for app-section A exits stage left or something and content for app-section B enters stage right, or stage south, or out from the mouth of satan. Whatever, it'll look pretty cool...for a marketing app. This is what will occupy most of my time for the next few weeks, and then, well then, there are even more fish to fry.

Indeed, I'll get back to that rotten crap in a bit, but recently, as in 15 minutes ago, I took a break from my coding and drawing-- not that I was Dr. Artsy Gangbusters --to check out Greg Djerejian's latest post on The Belgravia Dispatch. Greg is smart mostly conservative foreign policy geek who's okay with many neo-conservative ideals but is aghast at how Donald Rumsfeld has botched the show. Botched is too soft a word. Rumsfeld will go down in history as a bumbling asshole incapable of separating reality from decree or intent from consequence. History books will use him to caricature how exactly not to run a cabinet-level department. I usually try to refrain from harshing on the elderly, but Rummy has directly and indirectly caused enough grief to bring a 100-year karma deficit upon our nation.

Christ, why do I even care any more about our foreign policy entanglements? I think most reasonable people agree that marco society is going to get much uglier before it gets better. Nothing we earthlings haven't seen before, but frustrating nonetheless. This must be how peace loving folks felt during the lead-up to WWI. With The Boy Emperor and Kato Rumsfeld's vacant messianic, the 2.5 years they have left at the helm is plenty to finish the job.

Baghdad, the capital city of the country we invaded to save, is in a state of mob rules. I won't say anarchy because there is some organization to the death squads and the daylight massacre's they commit. US policy has been reduced to telling Iraqis to secure Baghdad when that was supposed to be our first order of business. I'm not going to dive again into the specifics of this fantastic geopolitical f**kup. Enough has been written by all sides, and we'll prolly all be dead when the final chapter is published...at least the martians will get a nice coffee-table book out of it.

But hey, at least the Defense Department has decided today to follow the Geneva Convention after 5 years of ignoring it. Nice. Things are looking up.

Maybe I should load up on mojitos and Steely Dan until this all passes.

- k

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03jul06

High Courts and 80s Cheese Whiz

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld - Always comforting to see two war criminals on the dock of our highest court.

I agree with the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision to put checks on President Bush's wartime powers since Dubbya's abuse of said power has been often gross and sometimes extraordinary so. The National Review, however, is frothing. True, the Hamdan decision relies on a cushy interpretation of the Geneva Convention's rules for warfare, and actually, I don't think they needed to cite the Geneva Convention in the first place since our beef with Al Queda specifically and radical Islam in general is outside the scope of what the Geneva Convention had intended to regulate. That implies that our Nation and Congress need to have a serious talk about codifing this new dark age we've entered, but we'll of course all die if we hold our breath for it.

The right wing is upset that the majority of SCOTUS are not yet constitutional literalists. Why should they be? Like some articles of the Geneva Convention, the Framers of the Constitution could not see centuries into the future. The Enlightenment was many things, but it never conveyed clairvoyancy to its torchbearers. Debate over these things is healthy, and cases like Hamdan would have never been heard in the first place if Congress had the cojones to do the right thing and legistlate the conduct of new age warfare, but as we know by now is that the only things that result from gatherings of politicians are new twists on the old dark lodestones of greed and depravity.

Locking up enemy combatants forever without trial is wrong. Either shoot the bastards on the field or give them due process upon capture. I don't see what the problem is. When Bush says that he can confine these jerks without trial for 'the duration of hostilities' he means for the rest of that prisoner's life, because you, me, and my cat all know that the War on Terror is going to go on for another 2 or 3 generations, and if this administration was left in charge for the duration, we would lose.

So, making the soft-minded decision to throw a good deal of precedent out the window-- and hey bro, the world changes, and with change comes obsolete ideas, overtaken by fresh and proper ones not yet codified-- takes balls. In the abstract, I like the idea of constitutional literalism, and even using the Geneva Convention's lack of clarity and foresight regarding the Age of Terror to treat Al Queda and their offshoots like vermin, but alas they are human, and we have a responsibility as advanced and moral westerners to treat them as such. If you really need to see animals in cages without access to rights or representation, please visit your neighborhood humane society...Gitmo is not the place for it.

Wait a second, my brain is rejecting again the truths of our macro-reality, and thus tangents approach....

****
Viva la 80s cheese, part 7.

If I were to compile a list of the gayest videos of the Reagan decade, the aforelinked would be up there, along with such groundbreakers as Duran Duran's Hungry Like The Wolf and Adam Ant's Desperate But Not Serious. Gotta love the boxing metaphore. Image Adam and his boys rolling three deep into Kronk...good times.
****
Blog during the day...bloggin' during the night. I can't say whether bloggin' is healthy or right, and I just a bloggin' to give the devil his do. I'm bloggin' I'm bloggin' I'm bloggin' for you.

I know. I need help, and meds...a freaking massive pile of gourmet meds.

The early MTV-era 80s was the gayest ever in terms of the music. Watch the videos. Peep the dress code. Think about it: AIDS was tearing into the fabric of the artistic community, which as always is heavily queer, and the response was making new wave pastel. Think the transition from Joy Division to New Order. Think of it as the immediate karmic response to Reagan's dopey ass. As for the long-term karmic response to Reagan, well, that's playing out right now.

****

I'm implementing a new rigging scheme for my 2D animation thingys. The cool thing is that I've figured out how to make multi-part characters move about in faux 3d so that they, as the term implies, give an illusion of depth. The not-so-cool-thing is that I had to figure this crap out on my own because it's not listed in so-called animation books, not for 2d anyway. This particular rigging technique is used by 3d artists all the time-- every movable part, like every knuckle on every digit, is it's own symbol and in 3d programs like Maya you can define the dependencies between said knuckle and the upper and lower portions of the finger or toe that the knuckle connects. In Flash, you have to construct dependencies with code, and it's a tedious process. It's remains bearable for me because the end result vis a vis character movement is worth it, and I get a change to listen to killer music while doing the tedious coding since I'm not engaging the full of my brain, not that I'd assume the full of my brain is even in shape for any kind of lifting anyhow.

- k

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27jun06

Overcrowding On the YouTube Bandwagon

Was going to throw down another foreign policy diatribe, but an administration official came through around 3:30 last night, slapped a sack over my head, and told me that his boss was real hurt and sad about my rhetorical treatments towards his intelligence and war management skills. The man asked if I'd kindly take a break for a week or two while his boss recovered his confidence. What could I do? I don't wanna kick a man when he's down, and besides, I all-of-the-sudden don't feel like criticizing the government anymore. Not only that, but tracking down Kenny G albums and roller-blading slowly on level pavements seem very worthwhile, nay mandatory, pursuits. No rattle thee cage any more. No sir, not again. Where is my golf shirt? Where are my jorts?

Yeah. I've seen what mind control does to folks.

I'm always up to push a bandwagon past it's legal weight limit for a good cause, and I've noticed, in my cursory websurfing adventures, that YouTube lists and recommendations are flooding the freaking net like a million pounds of liquefied spam, but not with the style that such an awesome tool should reflect. Style of course is in the mind of the beholder, and his minions....I spent the better part of my 20s blowin' up parties and making sure the cops stayed busy. With that in mind, some YouTube goodness you may or may not have already seen:

MF Doom - I Hear Voices   Most excellent video from Doom's first post-KMD album. Check out the Heineken bottles next to the cereal box, the name-checking of Son of Sam, Black Tail magazine and Slobodan Milosivic, not to mention Doom's declaration that he's hip hop's Benny Hill...with weapons. Brilliant.

Richard Pryor - 'I'm Rich Now, So F**K You'   The Godfather of Comedy sweats, smokes, rants, plays with himself, and calls Gene Wilder 'queer like a three-doller bill' during this hilarious 1980 interview, ostensibly for a Stir Crazy promo. As always with great Pryor moments you can't decide whether to laugh or cry so you do a little of both and play the video again.... And yes, the man is geeeeeked on some head-numbin' yayo.

Bill Hicks :: Prophet    Sent this awesome clip to my friend Matty a few days back. It needs to be seen by a wider audience. The Comedy Christ eerily sees our future from back in 1991. Oh, and he's funny, like - damnit why did he have to go and die at 31!!! - funny.

The Spirit of Truth    This clip has been floating around for several months, and the links change, but I had to stick it up here since, for me, it's THE clip that epitomizes what's go great about YouTube. Take a crackhead minister, Ice Cube's BopGun, and the low barrier to entry offered by L.A. Public Access tv in the early 90s and you get magic, pure magic. That someone had the foresight to record this amazing display of insanity reignites my faith in humanity.

Rush - YYZ    Shot in Brazil, I have never seen this kind of a crowd reaction to prog rock. Absolutely crazy. The Brazilians are wooping and bouncing up and down like what you would find at Ibiza circa 1997. It's Rush circa 2002 and these guys can still rock pretty damn good for old people. btw: old-school Rush plays YYZ here.

And that's all I gotta say about that.

- k

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Rules of War?

Say it aloud or in your head: Rules Of War. I kill your people and you kill mine, but only in certain and accepted ways. No direct napalm attacks, cause naplam sticks to kids. No nerve gas or nukes, even though us Merkins are right now wargaming with low-yield tactical nukes for a possible strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, and if you read a good sampling of the conservative weeklies out there, we need to get to that Iran-bombing business straight away. Best way to make the world forget a huge mess (Iraq) is to create a mind-boggling massive one somewhere else. We're on the way to that for sure, but I digress. Oh, and damnit, no suicide bombing, cause that shit creeps us out. Besides, the Japanese did it with more style and at least had the common courtesy to suicide bomb military targets. Yeah, Rules of War...makes as much sense as Rules of Anarchy.

When you reach a point in a dispute where you accept that resolving the conflict with your adversary requires that you eliminate your adversary, then rules are out the window, especially in wars of extermination, which neatly defines our official posture vis a vis radical Islam, and a little less neatly describes our war last century with Japan and the Soviet Union's dust-up with Germany. A war of extermination also describes what we're seeing in Darfur, what we heard about in Cambodia, and the accounts we've read about where the ancient Romans snuffed out them pesky Carthaginians and salted their fields. War is not chess or football. In real life, armed antagonists play by different rules, tactics, as it were, and the refs, lets say in this case played by the U.N., can't do squat about it.

One reason the Bush administration has botched the Iraq War, and larger parts of the War on Terror (which will prolly end up costing less in lives and funds than the War on Drugs-- and please go to 6th & Market or South Beach right now and let me know how we're doing in that conflict.) is because it is a game to these people. It's a game with rules and procedures, and especially boundaries. When the enemy fights in a way that is apart, and more dastardly, than the Geneva Convention proscribes, we take that as a free pass to sink to their level of behavior. Our government hates the fact that the opposition doesn't wear uniforms, hates the fact they want the western world destroyed, or in the case of Iraq's Baathist insurgency, a new Thugocracy in Baghdad, and we really get pissed that these jerks torture in the name of their perverted version of Allah, and oh man we hate that they make snuff films staring our contractors and soldiers.

As it's always been in modern times, if the opponent does something outside the bounds of decency then we cry foul, or in this war, barbarian! , then we feel much better about firebombing cities, dropping daisy cutters on villages, or waterboarding our captives so they'll say anything we want them to say (no wonder our national intel system is so hosed). Traditionally, antagonists had to slide a fair ways down a slippery slope to move a conflict from typical armed warfare one saw in Enlightenment-era Europe to dropping a nuke over a densely populated city. Many lines had to be crossed. For example, we did not reach the point of firebombing Tokyo and dropping nukes on Japan in a vacuum. Merkins were insanely pissed that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor without warning (because I'm guessing they didn't want us to be ready to blast all their planes from the sky), and they also did terrible things to captured prisoners, fewer than 40% of whom lived through the war.

When the enemy kicks up the dastardly deeds a notch or two, the last thing we want to do is take the high ground and preserve what's left of our soul and morality, so, we match their behavior. Essentially, the top of the chain-of-command let's it be known that emotionally charged retribution and various human abuses won't be prosecuted, and may even speed things along, and hell, now that we think about it, THEY ain't really even humans any more, so what the hell. Back to the Drug War for a second.

When Richard Nixon, who resigned about 32 years ago, launched the Great War on Drugs in 1972 to divert attention from the Vietnam War, middle America was sick and tired of hippies and their music, and so was Nixon, who never had great tastes in music. The Government changed many rules for the Drug War. Our legislative branch generated more pliable search and seizure laws, stiffer prison sentences (60 percent of all U.S. prison inmates are behind bars on drug charges), and encouraged a demonization campaign that has put illegal drug use on the same field as child molestation and serial arson-- unless said illegal drug use comes through forged prescriptions, or in general is done by wealthy people who don't have as much need to the escapism. Your punishment for smuggling a couple keys of blow from Mexico to Chicago will be the same as for smuggling a nuke.

Drug dealers and cartels want to make money, and drug users just want to get high. There is no potent ideology behind it, but there are some serious market forces at work, which goes some length to explain why we're further behind in the drug game then we were in the 1970's. People still want to get high, and cartels still want to make money off people who want to get high. Given where our current social fabric is and where it's heading (Guilded Age-level separation of rich and poor with nothing in between, but plenty of MTV Cribs and cheap video feeds so the left-behinds know exactly what they are missing) lots of people are gonna wanna be real high in the future, so don't expect this Drug War thing to end soon...just a heads up.

Global Jihadism doesn't care much for market forces, in fact, the Osama crowd finds such things depraved and an affront to their spooky visions. Their goal is to destroy the West and smite the Crusaders, and they get stronger all the time. The Taliban is stronger now than it's been since 2001. Home-grown terror cells have pulled off large attacks in Bali and London, and almost pulled one off in Toronto. Worse, the ideology is morphing into a kind of Islamic populism, promising better times for anyone feeling slighted in the current world order. A promise that a paradise can be found on Earth if we go back to a technological and intellectual Stone Age and leave it up to Allah. It's a bleak message, but a lot of people are listening.

There are many reasons why the War on Terror will be as fruitful as the War on Drugs. For one, you can't declare war on a thing and expect to be taken seriously. You declare war on other humans, or if the case arises, aliens. If killer bees start menacing the whole of Texas, you don't launch a Great War on Bees, you just huddle together a gang of exterminators and spray every suspicious nest you see. For another, our campaign against radical Islam is a battle for hearts and minds, which implies that the means are every bit as important as the ends. What with our secret prisons, dehumanization campaigns, and sanctioned torture policies, we are acting as though we are being guided by a very dark force, and thus we are making Osama's job a hell of a lot easier.

You never, ever, sanction torture. If law enforcement officers are grappling with a terrorist and a 'ticking timbomb scenario' then you do what you have to do and you answer for it later, but you do not sanction it ahead of time. 90 percent of the Senate understands that, but BushCo. does not, and we will pay for it for generations to come.

Al Queda and their offshoots were never going to fight this battle any other way. They want us not only dead, but also humiliated. Me, I don't care much about seeing the jihadists humiliated, but I would like to see them neutralized. They are not going to play by any so-called rules, but for the sake of our humanity, and I'm very concerned about our ability to retain our humanity while this tragic debacle drags on for another 50 years, we need to live by a set of rules. We need to prove, day in and day out, that we are better than these people.

When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes.     -Vladimir Bukovsky

Not for them, but for us.

- k

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19jun06

Greetings From C-Town

Considering its outside perception, you'd think that metro Cleveland is still mired in an epoch of decline, saddled with an appeal rating somewhere between Mogadishu and Detroit. When I told my coastal friends that I was going to spend some time here, the reaction I got basically came in form or another as a grimace.

"Cleveland?," One Cali friend said with her nose pointed skyward. "Isn't that place kinda, you know, ghetto?"

Not so, really. Though there are some seriously shady neighborhoods in the City of the Burning River, I have to say, based on pure aesthetics and forward potential, that Metro Cleveland is the best place to live between the Appalachians and the Rockies. Great parks, rolling hills, and excellent restaurants everywhere dot the landscape. A splendid hiking and biking trail runs to the side of my bucolic condo development. There are two very nice Thai joints within two miles. What more does one need?

Also, given the relationships between about four billion too many large hairless mammals, the methane they produce, plus the greenhouse gases their machines produce, well, within fifty years or so, this may be one of the best places to live on Earth, period. When New York, Miami, and coastal Cali are all flooded by warm ocean waters and mutant sharks, this region will be sunny, sub-tropical in fact, and flush with fresh water-- which will then be worth more than gold, oil, and porno put together, cause you know, humans are not going to get beyond our need for drinkable water. You heard it here first.

In the meantime, I've noticed that Cleveland's brainpower adds up to more than gout-riddled Rockefeller-era banking burghers surrounded by drunk-ass factory workers in a dull rage over the lack of good union work and influx of cheap Mexican labor. While unwittingly on the contractor-for-life program, I've seen the best and worst of metro Cleveland's business community, which very much like the physical surroundings, is surprisingly positive.

On one hand, there are scads of talented programmers and designers who would fit perfectly inside a San Francisco MarComm agency, save for the facts that half these folks love to hunt, fish, chew tobacco, and possess a half-dozen additional properties of the stereotype that's just congealed inside your heads. Wasn't aware that there was such a human subspecies-- the redneck programmer, but that's why I keep my eyes open. The locals tend to be insular, not in that they live alone in dank basements, nor even regarding ideas in the abstract, but in how they think of outsiders. Regionalism is strong. Many treat the rest of the world the way me and my SF crew used to treat Vegas a couple times a year. The redneck crowd will need to adjust since there are booming immigrant communities already, and more pour in every day, and like I said, when the coastal inundations happen for real....

A good business environment needs a good infrastructure, and though the brainpower is up to speed, thanks to this region's knack of maintaining excellent universities, the roads suck. There are not enough of them, and the ones in place are too narrow and chipped and frayed. You'd think that rush hour in a mid-market town like Cleveland would be a snap, but not when all your north-south connectors are either two or four lanes too narrow.

For several weeks in April and May, I had to drive from the southeast burbs to the northwest, actually, due west of Cleveland itself. If you live in the Bay Area, it's akin to driving from Berkeley to Palo Alto, except, there's no large body of water in the way here. I-77, the main north-south connecter between downtown Cleveland and the southern and eastern burbs is, in most stretches, two lanes each way. Perpetual gridlock, how does that happen to a major downtown connector? After leaving my house at 6:15 in the morning only to stand and fume for 45 minutes on along a three-mile stretch of interstate, I found another route. This one involved 20 miles on the Ohio Turnpike, and 6 miles up I-71, the other downtown connecter, that thankfully, is either 3 or 4 lanes each way.

Thing is I-71 alone didn't get me where I wanted to go, a place called Westlake, 4 miles or so east of Downtown Cleveland. I had to go from I-71 to I-480, then get off on Clague Road, which is one lane each way AND under construction, take a detour over a mile to Columbia Road (another narrow-ass thoroughfare), and crawl along at 0 to 15 mph, till I got where I needed to go. It was a commute fit for New York or L.A., yet this is f***ing Cleveland, and I could not see why regional planners would tax folks here with a dastardly commute. I asked a coworker what the deal was.

"Damn environmentalists," he said. "Shit, go down to Charlotte or Nashville (two comparably sized metro areas in the steamy south) and the damn sideroads are six lanes. Anyhoo, these wacko greenies are all bent up tryin' to save the chipmunk or somethin'. "

Environmental types protest even the whiff of new road construction or road-widening, and apparently think that commuters ought to purchase a personal airplane and take the problem to a different altitude. I can understand in part where they come from, though. When your home town is famous for industrial decay and its manifestations, it turns you, maybe, too far the other way. Maybe the lack of suburban roads is part of a larger plan to get folks to move back into Cleveland proper, but that's eventually going to happen no matter what, and this area is still going to need more and wider roads, cause like I said, both coasts are going to be under a lot of water, none of it potable. Folks will need a place to relocate and to hide.

Welcome to Cleveland.

- k

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Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a brutish thug and terrorist dickhead whose worldview and beheading orgies made Osama look refined, heck, downright artsy, has been blown to pieces by a U.S. airstrike. I can't remember ever feeling this gleeful upon hearing or seeing the death of another living thing. Not even when I was up in Alaska and heard Ted Bundy was fried atop ol' Sparky in Florida did the news of a jackal's demise feel like...this. Ah, the dehumanizing effects of war. It ain't just fiction.

What does this mean for our adventure in Iraq? Prolly not much. The death of Zarqawi is a morale booster for Iraqis and Americans alike, but civil war and anarchy have both acquired so much momentum over the past three years, that removing a nihilist figurehead won't much change current courses. Zarqawi's jihadists were always a different part of the insurgency than the domestic Sunni's who started it this mess, and now that the Shia militias have been out-killing the Sunni militias suffice to say that the American-support / constructed Iraqi government is a long way from having the much-needed monopoly on violence that is the cornerstone of any successful government. In Iraq, there are three primary very large and well-armed factions, and several derivative splinters of the whole: The Sunni and Shia militias, and the 40,000-strong Kurdish Peshmerga.

Where weapons and anger co-mingle, weapons will be used. We are seeing that, whether is be sectarian killings by Iraqi militias or abuses by our over-taxed soldiers. War is an angry business. It remains beyond my comprehension why BushCo's first priority after Saddam was toppled was not to establish security. I know, I know, every freaking time I say two words about Iraq, no matter the tangent, I slide back into that biggest of 'what ifs', well, second biggest 'what if', the biggest 'what if' presumes Saddam is still in power. At least he was the devil we knew-- not to sound like Kissinger or anything, and it's not like I think Saddam should still be in power, nor even still alive. Yet is it better to have civil war? This kind of civil war? A civil war where masked men of one sect go from house to house at night, pull the half-asleep menfolk of another sect into the street at 4am and blow their brains out?

The Baghdad morgue has counted up over 6,000 violent deaths so far this year. That's just one freaking city! Officials say many many more are not being brought to the morgue, because they are either never found or just never picked up. More holes in the desert. I thought our reason for doing the takeover thing was to ensure that the only holes made in the Iraqi deserts from now on would be made by drill bits for oilwells. Hell, Iraq has to import, repeat, IMPORT refined petroleum products because their energy infrastructure is worse than is was when we invaded, and we've basically spent all the Iraq reconstruction funds, and will soon turn reconstruction on over to the Iraqis, who have no money, but plenty of guns. Sweet.

Of course, before Iraq can start producing and refining oil, appearently they need to decide who is going to get the oil. Again, they are thinking along sectatian lines. There is plenty of oil and relative security in the Kurdish north of Iraq, but everyone knows that's about to change, if for no other reason than the Sunni factions want some oil, they have guns, and Saddam convienently kicked all the Kurds out of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and moved in a few-hundred thousand Sunni's to take their place. Not coincidentally, Peshmerga troops have occupied Kirkuk since the fall of Saddam. They are leery of their Arab neighbors to the south. What's going to happen when/if the Kurdish Peshmerga decides to put some space between the future Kurdistan and all the trife and bullshit happening to the South?

For a preview, read reports about the goings on in northern Iraqi cities like Kirkuk and Mosul. In a land of fracture and strife, the Kurds are the best organized, most disciplined, most pro-American, and have a huge historical axes to grind, both local and pan. Worldwide, Kurds outnumber Palestinians ~8 to 1, and few talk about providing them with a homeland, so they are fixing to take it, and quietly our administration will grease the wheels appropriately, under the table of course. Thing is, because area around Kirkuk is awash in oil Sunni and Shia militia types keep trickling in. Everyone knows that either the Sunnis or Shia will at some point make a play for Kirkuk. It will happen between now and the so-called national referendum on who Kirkuk belongs to, and that will be that...seven years of darkness...war between the neighbors. Didn't have to turn out that way, and history will damn BushCo. for it.

At any rate, kudo's to everyone who had a hand in blasting Zarqawi. He was a half-wit Ivan the Terrible wannabe, and I am saddened only that his end came so quickly, and not as the result of many weeks of fiendish torture, because, we've become pretty good at that too.

- K

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05jun06

A Bubble For Everyone

With Iraq spinning further down into the sinkhole and his approval ratings now south of 30%, I think it's safe to say that George W. has bit off more pretzel than he can chew.

To me, Bush the Junior was always a better fit, professionally, as a middle manager with some construction or hardware store company, dicking up the marketing department for sure, but saving the world at large from the impact of his quasi-messianic touch. Visualize the staff meetings:

Department Underling - Mr. Bush, Hammoburbi's Hammers say they have no budget for this promotional gimmick, er aftermarket tactic, for bi-lateral revenue growth.

Bush the Marketing Dept. Chief - Oh, they got the budget. Believe me it's there. We just need to show them they have it, and then by God they'll buy in to what we're selling. Once they see things the right way then everything else will fall into place.

Underling - Sir, bottom line, they say 15 cents extra per unit for decent product location sounds too punitive given what they expect to see in return.

Bush - Well, we'll embargo them bastards see how they like that. No one will buy their hammers and we'll just watch them wither on the, oh on what do things wither?

Underling - Vines, sir, most things wither on vines. Look, our spies tell me that Wal-Mart is willing to pay Hammoburbi's Hammers an extra 15 cents a unit if they stop working with us altogether and partner exclusively with them.

Bush - What a nefarious decision intersection! We need to bomb Wal-Mart's headquarters! Scramble the GulfStreams! We march to Bentonviille!

Underling - Sir, Wal-Mart has a massive standing army and partisan units everywhere. There's no way we can-

Look, son, you're either with me or against me....

Incite, misjudge, and throw your underlings onto the flames. It's a classic, if not THE classic management style for gimps and losers who run the lives of our less fortunate across the United Spaces of Cubicles. Usually the stupidity and hubris of such folk are tied to the well-being of but one small segment in, hopefully, one business. It's the difference between a skinned knee and a tumor. And speaking to the latter, cancer itself is not aware that it's doing bad things to people, it's just being cancer. I'll let y'all tie up the rest of that analogy.

The two-month sack-gap happened for two reasons. In minor part because I had nothing to say (I know, it's never stopped me before), and in larger part because I've been programming for pay, which seems to be about the only reasonable option for gainful employment in these parts. Thing is, I had to learn the language on the fly, so sleep deprivation was a factor, but now that's all water under the bridge...or doo-doo under the outhouse, as this case seems to be.

It is odd to me that there are scads of half-bright suits shuffling off from pre-fab Sheratons to pre-fab Courtyards who sell stuff that doesn't do anything...folks who also live in nice houses with the finest lawns Central American illegals can water. My friend Balke thinks that it'll take marketers another 20 years to understand IT, but that's assuming that the marketing class can evolve. Ninety-plus percent of the the time, a marketing professional's living arrangement depends on mass consumer appeal. When your kibble is predicated on satiating the lowest common denominator, then IT in your mind is but an acronym, and beyond that, fog.

Before I incur death threats best sent to another writer, let me clarify something. There are two principle branches of marketing pro in Pax Corporata: The Creative and non-Creative marketing pro. Creative marketing has done some good things, check out the newest Apple Computer spots if ye need proof of that. The new Sprite ads are nice as well, though I can tell I'm a few years older than their target audience. Heretofore, the marketers I speak of are the non-creative types, they ones who have neither the ability to rock a nice illustration OR perform a good cold-call...people who somehow end up as business executives because they have no specific talents yet they have wealthy connections, kinda like the dude I was talking about at the start of this fevered screed.

Naturally, I was programming for non-creative professional marketers and now I can safely say that the lot of them should be shot. Really. Who's going to miss a class of professionals who create nothing, and sell lies to materialist boneheads looking to feel good about themselves as quickly and cheaply as possible. If it were not for the fact that politicians - the purest extract of the marketing plant, were gatekeepers of this nation's laws, we could get some anti-marketing legislation passed in a hurry.

I signed a non-disclosure agreement vowing not to leak this ground-breaking technology to competitors, funny stuff, because the application itself is but a shiny navigation system, a few gimmicky compressed videos, and scads of database queries that respond to user input, and generate a dynamic user profile based on consumption habits. The user is notified via email, mobile phone, or sky-writing airplane, when a product that fits within said profile goes on sale. It's called Personal Relevance Marketing. Amazon's been doing it for years, but they prolly call it something else. Whatever. The people who find value in constantly pinging others with this kind of info are people who don't see the value in being left alone.

Taken to its limit, what PRM does is encourage each of us to live in our own little bubble, just like our leader. Don't seek the truth, or seek new ways to enrich your life by relying on the nuances of your own mind. Hell no, that's too complicated. Let the information come to you, via the gentle hand of corporate marketing. Make sure that every product and service you interact with has been fetted and wetted by entities with deep pockets and zero soul. PRM ought to be a boon for Mom n Pops businesses sans to capital to buy airtime on your Motorola Razor.

We only want what's best for you. Really. Now sleep tight.

This kind of thing is what generates a large portion of our GDP today-- educated but bored GenXer's shuttling ideas back ands forth amongst themselves and paid focus groups for 50 hours a week, trying to pinpoint what every consumer needs more of. For some reason I just don't think such bullshit is sustainable indefinitely. Which is why, if you're drawn to corporate marketing, at least have the courtesy to fly around a small yard, because eventually your pyramid scheme is going to fall and tis better to smush a neighborhood of toes than a nation's.

Maybe this is all a failure of my imagination. I've always thought of capitalism and liberty in large part as the intersection of goods, services, and choice. Personal Relevance Marketing takes these things down the same road as political campaign financing, which is what put Bush in the big house in the first place.

Odd, but not really.

- K

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