***
Strong wind
Strong fire
Night’s contention on a seacoast hill
***
I’ve been away for a few days, completely cut off from the outside world. I had a few pieces primed to go off in my absence, but obviously I miscalibrated the machinery somehow. At any rate, we’ll resume regular programming here as soon as I catch up a bit.
The President of the United States has openly, proudly admitted that he approved the use of interrogation methods that are by every measure — including the measure of United States law — criminal acts of torture. It is one of the most brazen and scandalous confessions of wrongdoing ever uttered by an American leader — and it has had no impact whatsoever. No scandal, no outcry, no protest, no prosecution.
This pattern has recurred over and over throughout the Bush Administration.
I’m away this week at the usual undisclosed, secure location. In the interim, here’s a look back at a piece on the very model of a modern major punditiot. Unfortunately, it is still all too relevant, as the mindset anatomized below still reigns — and roars — supreme over what is laughingly called our “public discourse.” (It is neither, of course; the “public” has zero input into it, and “discourse” is a painfully inappropriate word for the witless barbarisms of our knuckle-dragging mandarins.) This piece originally ran in November 2006.
You would think that
by now
1.
Boris Pasternak’s novel, Doctor Zhivago, is best remembered for its star-crossed love story and its sweeping panorama of the Russian Revolution – themes amplified in David Lean’s 1965 film version, a beautiful travesty which has largely supplanted the book in the public mind. But within his conventional narrative of shattering passions and historic upheavals, Pasternak subtly diffuses a deeply subversive philosophy that overthrows power structures and modes of thought that have dominated human life for thousands of years. Yet remarkably, this far-reaching,
I will be away this week at the usual undisclosed secure location. But to keep the home fires burning at the blog, we’re offering some choice pieces from the past. Here’s one now, originally published in February 2006 in the Moscow Times — and nominated for an “Alternate History” award at the North American Science Fiction Conference last year.
HISTORY LESSONS
BERLIN,
May 12, 2153 – Within the ivy-covered walls of Farben University, a
great battle is now raging. But although the Reich’s ancient capital
has
I’m away this week at the usual undisclosed secure location. But to keep the home fires burning at the blog, here’s another piece from the past (March 2006):
Late-Breaking News: USA Wins Vietnam War
Good
evening and welcome to Conglomerate News Network. I’m your host, Teat
Hodgkins. Tonight we open with some startling news from Southeast Asia:
The United States has won the Vietnam War. Our roving reporter, Jimbo
Hooper, joins us from Ho Chi Minh City. Jimbo?
Thanks,
Teat. Yes, long after we all
I understand from a glance at the newspaper wrapping the fish I bought for dinner that a general appointed by George Bush to escalate the war in Iraq is in favor of continuing the escalation. This seems to be regarded as big news in some quarters.
I think there is more truth in this dead fish’s eyes than in anything that was said on Capitol Hill yesterday.
John Yoo has been getting a bit of guff in the liberal media recently for some legal memoranda he wrote a while back defending the president’s right — and duty — to protect the American people from terrorism. This criticism is as short-sighted as it is pernicious — and we are here today to defend this good and faithful public servant against the unwarranted calumnies that have besmirched his name.
Fortunately for the security of our Republic, the far left’s attempt to turn Yoo’s patriotic labors into yet another persnickety”moral outrage,” a la Abu Ghraib
Justin Raimondo has the goods on George Bush’s bear-baiting in Ukraine this week in his column, Nato Marches Eastward. Raimondo goes behind all the rhetorical “high politics” hokum of mainstream commentary and identifies the three main fronts of this diplomatic (so far) Barbarossa. They are — as anyone who follows American foreign policy with even one half-open eye would know — oil, weapons and hegemony.
The new Cold War that Raimondo (among others) delineates has absolutely nothing to