Oh, Hell

Seems there's a book out about hell, that is causing a fuss in Christian circles.  

The title of the book ought to be but isn't, "What the Hell."

From what I've seen of those who are quite certain they are going to heaven, I feel hell is the better option as far as the companionship of others.

And from what I've learned about God, both from reading the Bible and the news in the paper, I have to say that hanging with God and singing his/her/its praises the live long day is not so appealing either.

All the most interesting people would be in hell, and some of the worst would not be there.

Some of the best would be, too.

So mark me down for Hell.

TV-- Reflections on a Phosphor Screen

Marshall McLuhan famously wrote "The medium is the message."  I don't know the context.  I have one of his books in paperback, somewhere in a box.  Over the last 30 years I've picked it up several times and tried to read it, but don't get past a page of two before laying it down semi-permanently.  It's that kind of book:  that you put ostentaciously on a living room shelf to impress your latest conquest with how intellectual you are.  With the passage of the years, it even comes to look like it has been read.

This morning I was thinking about ghosts of television past, and writing a little about them in response to a post in a forum.

Trying to crystalize my perception of what is different about television today, I remembered McLuhan's words.

You know, that's it.  Entertainment network TV today is mostly about ... TV.  Many of the reality shows that form a red tide over the airwaves are really about us watching them on TV.   Instead of actors playing a part and pretending there is no camera watching, so that we the viewers can pretend the same, the cameras and the audience have become part of the show. 

More and more, actors are personalities, and we see a drama or comedy in order to see performers we know about separately from their performance.

The medium has finally become the message.

I hate that.  I hate it when an actor's presence or personality overshadows the play.

More honest today?  Maybe.  But also more hammy and less honest when everyone is playing to a camera and microphone.  IMO. 

Hide the cameras, hide the audience.  The play is the thing.

Persistent Rummy

Don Rumsfeld was still at it Sunday on the news show circuit, selling his version of history.

To hear him tell it, Muamar Khadaffi was scared stiff by the Iraq invasion, the winkling out of Saddam Hussein from his spidy-hole, and subsequent execution.

Truth to tell,   Khadaffi started getting downright domesticated in the 1990s, and after 9/11, acted as an informer on terrorist operations.  Before Saddam was winkled out of his spidey-hole, December 13, 2003, the UN had removed sanctions on Libya.  And Saddam was not executed until December 30,. 2006.  

Everything Don Rumsfeld says is filtered through Republican mesh.  He quoted Secretary Gates, who is still a Republican and a holdover from the lame duck years of George W. Bush, and who was making the rounds Sunday as a team with Hillary Clinton.  He studiously avoided mention of Clinton.  Hear no Democrat, see no Democrat, speak no Democrat.    If one is in the room, avert the eyes.

Truth is, another reason for the Iraq invasion was to teach home truths to recalcitrant nations like Iran and North Korea, on the principle that to bully one little kid on the playground bullies all of them.  Invading North Korea or Iran would open up a whole new can of worms that might possibly lead to world war, and so Iraq was the weaker target.   This is in despite of information the government possessed prior to invasion showing closer al Quaeda connections to Iran than to Iraq.

The problem with all that is that the lesson taught and learned is that said recalcitrant nations need nuclear weapons in self-defense, to discourage future invasion by the United States. 

Bush and Iraq Revisited

Bush supporters fall somewhere between rewriting history or ignoring it as it happens. And then when you get to talking about what happened, you are accused of rewriting history.  Here's a little History 101 for Bushaphiles.

Following UN Resolution 1441, UN inspectors combed Iraq finding nothing except some chemical containing rockets that they saw destroyed. Iraq filed a compliance statement in 12000 pages detailing their compliance with Resolution 1441. The UN inspector then said on the record that Iraq had not accounted for some worrysome weapons including anthrax and nerve gas and that while not found, there was no proof it was destroyed.

The UN refused to act further. Resolution 1441 was not self-executing, meaning it did not authorize the use of force against Iraq. Ambassador Negroponte (the Bush appointed representative to the UN) himself said it was not self-executing.

Even so, Bush & Blair declared that Resolution 1441 was violated and that the USA and the UK had the right to use force under 1441 without further UN authorization. Which was their justification for invading Iraq.

Now the U.S. claimed, under Bush, to have found traces of chemical substances. The UN concluded years after the invasion that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weaponry back when Clinton was president.

Why was Bush so certain Saddam had WMD? Mainly it all boiled down to a single source, codenamed "Curveball." Curveball's uncorroborated reports were discounted by the Germans who debriefed him.

Not, apparently, by the CIA, who gave Colin Powell data concerning all kinds of non-existent Iraqi activities, some concerning al Quaida training facilities, others including Curveball's reports.

This has been old news for years now. See the New York Times in 2005:
"...The defector's claims were not discredited by the C.I.A. until May 2004, 15 months after they featured prominently in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's address to the United Nations Security Council that made the case for war.

"Among Curveball's most alarming claims was that Iraq had assembled a fleet of mobile laboratories to manufacture biological weapons without being detected.

"The commission described the episode as a remarkable breakdown in tradecraft and communication, and said it had contributed heavily to the broader failure of American intelligence to learn that Iraq did not in fact possess chemical or biological weapons at the time of the American invasion in March 2003...."

The Germans concluded in 2002 that Curveball was telling lies and so informed the CIA.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507E7D8173EF93BA35757C0A9639C8B63

Curveball's misstatements were aired on 60 Minutes in 2005. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/06/opinion/main685931.shtml   Part of the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq Invasion by Ischikoff and Corn, published 2006, had to do with Curveball.

Still the saga continues. The Guardian published a follow-up last month, after Curveball finally confessed to reporters. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/15/curveball-iraqi-fantasist-cia-saddam

So, the whole lethal mess came down to the Bush administration accepting one primary, dubious intelligence source. Was Bush at fault, or was he an unwitting dupe?

I am critical of Bush, because if someone tells me something important, my first inquiry is, "How solid is this information?" Before launching a war and ending the lives of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, Bush should have dug for answers instead of taking a report at face value.

"George [Tenet], jes' how good is this info?" "A single source you say?"   "The Germans have got 'im? What do they think about him?" "Well, don't you think we'd better get on the horn and check with German intelligence--or do you want me to call Chancellor Merkel? I like to give her back rubs you know."

That's all it would have taken to derail the invasion.   Bush didn't do it.

IMO, Bush had a reason for not digging. He wanted an excuse for invading Iraq, because of the investment opportunities for his friends and in order to clear what he saw as a glaring failure in his father's record (and perhaps as he said, because Saddam tried to kill his dad).    And nothing, not a paucity of intelligence, not the fact that he had no legal grounds for war under international law, would stop him.

Excessive Sensitivity to International Opinion

I get accused pretty often of being a bleeding heart liberal.  [Wonder why?  In my neck of the woods Jesus and the Founding Fathers are considered dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, Republicans before their time.  Why can't I be extended the same indulgence?]

Anyway, I got accused of being too sensitive to world opinion of us, of the United States.  There is something to this.  The poor of the Earth tend to be too critical, too envious of those of us in America and to blame us for all kinds of problems.  For example, in ans because of Iraq.

We spent a lot of money and lives trying to help out Iraq, and what do we get?  Except for those on our payroll, we are not terribly popular over there.  And after all we did for them!  Some people!  There ought to be statues of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in town squares all over Iraq.

Yeah, Guess there were some hurt feelings over in Iraq.

We bombed them back to the stone age to the point that 8 years later, the capital city still does not have utilities that are on all the time. Took 2 years to get water and power working part of the time in Bosra, and that is the port city that was first to be liberated.   Not our fault.  Their infrastructure was antiquated ant not helped any by the years of embargo.

Ten percent of the population of Iraq became refugees, many of who are refugees still. Still not safe to walk or drive around in Bagdad, btw.  (Ten percent.  Hmmm.  That would be equivalent to 30 million Americans.  And look at the trouble we had with a few tens of thousands of refugees from hurricanes a few years ago.)

The number of dead is anybody's guess: Iraq Body Count is pretty  conservative and tolls about 100,000 non-combatants killed by coalition military action, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ;
then there was Saddam's military, which had to have taken at least 10,000-20,000 killed and maybe up to 40,000;   then there are the insurgent dead who might number anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000;
then there are those who have died because of bad water, sanitation, lack of access to medical services, and undocumented crime, and that is anywhere from 100,000 to a million.

Then there are those who were wounded or permanently maimed.  Does anybody try to count them?

[Remember estimates were Clinton's embargo in the 1990s killed 50,000 Iraqis a year from lack of medical supplies. That was another of President Bush's rationales for invading Iraq -- people were dying anyway because of the embargo.  After it was shown that Saddam was not running schools for al Quaida terrorists, after it was shown Saddam currently had no weapons of mass destruction, then our reason for invading Iraq was to help the Iraqi people, to spread democracy and capitalism and the American Way.]

No reason to get one's underwear in a wad over casualties.  We are all born to die, right?  We may have hastened the time and changed the circumstance of death, but we didn't kill anybody who wasn't going to die anyway.  So what's the big freekin' problem?

We spent a fortune building a great big American Embassy in Iraq.  We had to spend more in order to make it as strong and defensible as a fortress.  It sits there, a great gray half empty monument to America.  Iraqis ought to have appreciated the tribute to our relationship with their country.  But no!   (Maybe one day the Iranians will take over that big embassy building, so it won't be a completely wasted effort.  Or maybe it could become a bizarre bazaar.)

Them doggone Iraqis are too damn sensitive, ain't they? Get their hair mussed a little and they go all blame-mode, like the little woman who gets teary and upset and punitive because you beat her up a little.

We are the good guys here and we shouldn't forget it, right? We kill for the best of reasons, and if a few hundred thousand Iraqis no longer breathe because of us, well, hell, Saddam would have offed that many in less than 20 years, huh? At least now the Shia in Iraq have about the same or better prospects as those in Iran.

Rumsfeld's Selective Memory on Coalitions and Leadership

The world according to Rummy:  http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/03/23/rumsfeld-libya-coalition-might-be-trouble

Rumsfeld's memory is flawed and selective.

1. Yes, Bush 2's coalition was suited to the Dubya-Dickie task of invading Iraq and ending all vestiges of Saddam's regime. That was because other potential allies wouldn't touch it with a ten mile pole. So it was the USA and Blair's UK and some other anglo-Brits and some insignificant forces and that was it. A coalition by default, enhanced by bribes in the form of foreign aid, that proceeded despite the UN's refusal to authorize invasion.

2. Rummy is one to be talking about advance planning considering the disaster he helped inflict in Iraq. And he actually wanted to invade with a smaller force than was used! And there was NO relevant planning on how to maintain control and to establish order in Iraq. Short term military objectives were achieved stunningly; everything else, the harder task, was chaos.

3. Rummy is as wrong in his pesudo-memory about the influence of Saddam's capture on Khadaffi as Hillary was in her memory about stepping off an airplane into a war zone. Ghadaffi was an ally and informer for the West before the Iraq invasion. Qadaffy started turning in the 1990s and the UN removed sanctions against Libya in 2003, before Saddam was captured. Totally bogus and self serving memory.

"The Real Owsley," Dead at 76

In an era when bootleg and contraband pharmaceuticals of dubious potency and ingredients are hawked on American streets and threaten the very lives of their users, there was one man whose very name was synonymous with purity. No filler or disagreeable poisons in his products! "This," your host or vendor would say proudly, "is the REAL owsley!"

"If a man bakes a better loaf of bread, or manufactures a better plow or horseshoe, the world," it is said, "will beat a path to his door." And so, even in the shadowy anonymous world of illegal substances, individual reputation and brand trumped the uncertainties and dangers of the marketplace.

One of those universal geniuses, he did much more with his life, which you can read about at http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-owsley-stanley-20110315,0,3733346.story

R.I.P. Owsley Stanley, who, if he didn't do it legally, at least did it well and with respect for his customers.