Post-Menopausal

There was a week period several years ago that I dabbled in photoshop and political cartoons. While waiting for some literary inspiration, I figured I should throw these up. Some are outdated - remember Samuel Alito? - but others still make me chuckle.

Sometimes You Can Throw the Towel Back

Where did 2007 go? The last half of 2006 is nowhere to be found, either. What happens at 28 when you've finally discovered that all you want in life is to to aim lasers at nearly empty space? That it's the goings-on of absolutely miniscule almost nothings that keep the will o' the wisps dancing on the insides of your eyelids at night when you're trying to sleep, when once it was a kiss, a song, a triumph? I'll tell you what happens - the blog suffers like a pair of 34 waist Levis 501s on a 400 lb trucker.

I apologize for all the numbers in that last sentence. They're supplanting words I once knew (what the hell does sesquipedalian mean?), framing every thought I have, sneaking into intimate moments, furtively injecting an artistic xenophobia. So it's not just the blog that suffers, it's the unholy ascent of the Dark Ages once culture is left to putrify. Enough is enough! But I'm a naive and ineffectual man, I never would have noticed on my own. The catalytic call to rise up and overthrow this cerebral apartheid came to me recently from a truly unexpected source, a Copernican shot of adrenaline straight to the frontal lobe is what she delivered.

No personal progress can be made until an extensive critique has been drafted, read, edited, scrutinized, polished, and published. That said, it's a simple admission that an imprecise summary will suffice: I was never artistic, almost creative on the good days, grasping on the bad ones; but once upon a time I acknowledged and appreciated that which wasn't firmly planted in reason. Good enough? For now.

Here is where I issue my creed: "I will be content only as a polymath." That's just the short, sweet, and nauseatingly erudite way of saying I will never again neglect the inspiration streaming from every fucking thing. I will be a lover again.

On that note, here's a golden nugget [on adultery:passion] from Mark Twain:

"...for even the Bible knows enough to know that if the oldest veteran could get his lost heyday back again for an hour he would cast that commandment to the winds and ruin the first woman he came across, even though she were an entire stranger."

God, that cracks me up every time. See you soon.

That's a Shit-ton of Virgins!

The hot button issue, other than Mark Foley's appropriately poor grammar and spelling on IM, is the results of a John Hopkins study of the number of deaths directly attributable to the US-led war in Iraq. Their figure:

654,965 Iraqis

The precision of this figure is a bit misleading since the margin of error in the study (at the 95% confidence level) is plus or minus 250,000 people! But I'll be damned if 645,965 doesn't lend itself to a much more convincing argument. If these guys are right on the money, we've wiped out 2.5% of the population, which is not no mention those injured, maimed, blinded, sterilized, and otherwise damaged but living.

As for American troops - 2753 have lost their lives while an additional 20,687 were wounded. That's more than 7 wounded for each fatality. Let's use this to estimate the wounded Iraqis...7 times 650,000 is...4.5 million. Not exactly sound science here, but that means 1 in 5 Iraqis walks with a limp.

In any case, the number presented by the study has not been accepted by the Bush administration, the Blair administration, the CIA World Factbook (who refuses to update its population figures), Iraqbodycount.org, or anyone living south of Socorro. Why not embrace these numbers? If these guys are right, then we're kicking a lot more ass over there than previously thought. So much ass, in fact, that for every dead American soldier there are 236 dead Iraqis.

Conclusion: Every Marine and Army grunt over there is a freakin' superhero. Let's give these guys some credit! At this rate even if Rumsfeld gets rehired by Jeb in 2008, we could still be out of Iraq by 2016 when 15% of Iraq's population is gone and there are no able bodied men left to serve in the Insurgency because every last one of them has already been injured.

The Energy Scorecard

ENERGY CRISIS!

American geophysicist Marion Hubbert proposed a theory in 1956 that postulates oil production follows an eponymous curve. One of the predictions of this theory is that oil production will or already has peaked, and there is a lot of debate concerning whether the Hubbert peak has passed.

Debate no more.

A little known fact is that the term oil reserves refers to the amount of oil recoverable under current economic restraint, and not the physical quantity of it in the ground. Hence technological improvements and the sky-high price per barrel of conventional petroleum actually increase the world oil reserves.

More importantly are the newly viable petroleum sources - tar sands and oil shale. In the past, it has been unfeasable to obtain petroleum from tar sands and oil shale simply because extraction can cost up to $30 a barrel while crude oil is closer to $10 a barrel. Recently, as crude oil shot to over $70 a barrel on world markets, it suddenly looked like a grand idea to head over to politically stable Canada and dig up some sandy oil. So much so that $100 billion is being pumped in the Fort McMurray area to build the necessary infrastructure.

Below I'm going to provide you with a list of the estimated total amount of oil in all its possible forms, just to prove that we are nowhere near the end of fossil fuels:


Exhibit A) Crude Oil
Estimated world resources: 1.7 trillion barrels

Exhibit B) Oil Shale
Estimated world resources: 1.6 trillion barrels

Exhibit C) Tar Sands (bitumen)
Estimated world resources: 3.6 trillion barrels


These figures are begging the question - so how much oil do we actually use? Currently, annual petroleum consumption is 28 billion barrels which of course is expected to rise steadily as Indians and Chinese start buying Hummers by the boatload. If we make the assumption that annual world oil consumption is steady at 50 billion barrels, we've got 138 years left. Just for giggles 'n grins, we could include coal in our bag of fossil fuels:

Exhibit D) Coal
Estimated world resources: one exagram (1 followed by 15 zeros grams)

This coal will last at 300 years if population doesn't increase and an estimated 164 years if it does. In addition to coal, there are still other hydrocarbon fuels to be included such as natural gas and alternative fuels like ethanol which is extracted from corn or biodiesel which is extracted from the grease pit out back of McDonald's.

Think we've reached the Hubbert peak? Not likely - from the looks of things we've got over 300 years of carbon monoxide and dioxide huffing left to perfect nuclear fusion.

The Holy Qur'an - Now Dolphin Free!

Christians beware: the days of Jesus appearing on a tortilla or a urine stain out back of Burger King are giving way to a new breed of religious incarnation.

A fisherman in the small village of Vanga in Kenya last week came home with more than his typical piscine haul. Said Ali, the lucky Muslim to directly receive the words of Allah, discovered that one of his tuna fish had Arabic writing on its side. Further inspection revealed that it wasn't just any Arabic, this fish was carrying around a passage from the Qur'an which translated says, "You are the best provider." Read for yourself (remember, right to left!):


Now if you only had an infinite number of tuna, an infinite number of monkeys with digital cameras to photograph them, and one damn good color printer, you're guaranteed the entire text of the Qur'an. Who needs Mohammed?

Libya or Bust!

An unprecedented step in America's War on Terror was taken on Monday, as the Secretary of State issued a statement revealing that the US will restore full diplomatic relations with Libya. This move serves both as a historic triumph over past US-Libyan tensions and as another example of the Bush administration's enigmatic foreign policy.

What is surprising is that this decision was made despite the fact that Muammar al-Quadhafi remains the country's leader. It was under his despotic government that the US broke ties with Libya in 1980 after Quadhafi ordered hit squads to eliminate Libyan dissidents who had fled the country and were living abroad. Soon after, in 1986, a bomb exploded in a Berlin nightclub killing 3 and wounding 200, an act widely attributed to Libyan-sponsored terrorism. In response, Reagan bombed the town of Libyan Benghazi and several military outposts.

The conundrum exists not in America's decision to get friendly with Libya once again, but that the decision clearly violates the administration's policy of dealing with known terrorist states. And just when they were convinced Quadhafi had changed, he gave this statement during an interview on al-Jazeera TV on April 10:

"We have fifty million Muslims in Europe. There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe - without swords, without guns, without conquests. The fifty million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades. Europe is in a predicament, and so is America. They should agree to become Islamic in the course of time, or else declare war on the Muslims." (interview on Al-Jazeera TV. Qatar - April 10, 2006)"

American Tattletale & Treason

The alarming allegations by former technician Mark Klein that AT&T was helping the NSA spy domestically have blossomed into a full fledged lawsuit. Citing violation of state and federal laws, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of AT&T customers in January.

Klein's claim, which could be lifted straight from the pages of a Philip K. Dick future dystopia novel, alleges that internet and phone traffic was routed from a switching station in San Francisco to the NSA via a secret room filled with dubious spy equipment. According to his statements, Klein witnessed the construction of the secret room in January 2003 and a special NSA-approved technician installed a splitting cabinet to redirect phone and internet traffic into the secret room.

According to the lawsuit, an AT&T program called Hawkeye maintains a database of over 312 terabytes of data, nearly every domestic phone call made on its network since 2001. As long as AT&T is willing to cooperate, the NSA can get its black-budget hands on anything you and I have said on the telephone for the past 5 years. Dredging through all this data for the all-important terrorist conversations or the ones detailing plans for an upcoming WTO protest is no simple task. The NSA is up to it, though. Although its official ranks are unknown, its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland has 18,000 parking spaces and an annual electricity bill of over $21 million which makes it the state's second largest consumer of electricity. Unless every employee has his own microwave, a freezer full of hot pockets, and the insatiable urge to constantly stuff one into his mouth, that electricity is powering a large network of hardware designed specifically to invade the public's legal privacy.

Inside the secret room was a piece of equipment known as a Narus STA 6400, used for highly sophisticated data-mining. The company offers a variety of products, including the NarusIntercept Suite, which includes something called the Lawful Intercept Module. According to the website, this module gives its owner the ability to track in real time "Internet, VoIP, PTT, e-mail, etc. all in one platform."

No doubt the NSA has their hands on a souped-up version of this product as well, which puts them in the internet game as well. Since Voice-over IP calling is growing quickly and is much more vulnerable to spying thanks to the fact it may pass through many different networks, this eavesdropping tool is bound to become the bane of Skype users everywhere.

Conclusion: it's almost inevitable that the NSA has got their hands in your personal cookie jar of communication, so you should probably reserve the conversations about allegiance to Al-Qaeda, GreenPeace, or the Democratic Party for your local Starbucks.

Scandal vs. Scandal

Two frantic and concise text messages raced to my phone about noon a few days back as I was rolling the final patches of primed wall with a wonderfully warm shade of paint known as Rainier white. At times like these, when I'm covered with construction materials of any sort, it's not unlike me to completely ignore the goings-on of my little Samsung. This time I was compelled, if not by curiosity then by the possibility of breaking the listless drudgery of the task at hand, to check my phone. Both texts said the same thing:

Lewis Libby testifies that Bush authorized leak of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Although this turned out to be severely untrue - Libby's claim is that Bush approved the leak of sensitive information about Iraq - it still qualifies as a bona fide scandal. After all, the disclosure of classified information for political means should not come as a surprise, but the fact that it has been revealed under oath by a former White House staffer should. This also points to the idea that Libby was the clandestine mouth of the White House and defamed New York Times reporter Judith Miller was the inside ear of the media. The Iraq information and Valerie Plame leaks occurred under nearly identical circumstances and were just months apart.

If a connection is made between Bush and the Valerie Plame leak, this will call for some serious takedowns in the White House, but it is bordering on dangerous speculation at this point.

Just days before, the engine of the Republican juggernaut that successfully hijacked Congress over the past 10 years, Tom DeLay, put in his two weeks. He cited as his official reason the looming possibility of losing the election later this year to a Democrat rival. Notwithstanding future information, the chances of that happening are as low More likely was his fear that two of his former top aides, Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy who recently pleaded guilty to various charges in the Jack Abramoff scandal, are in the midst of a plea bargain and intend to implicate DeLay.

After all, DeLay and Abramoff were more than just friends. DeLay's K Street Project, an organized effort by the Republican Party aimed at forcing lobbying firms to hire only Republicans to their top positions, was masterminded in 1995. This was the same year that Abramoff began to represent Indian gaming interests and with DeLay's help defeated a bill intended to levy taxes on Indian casinos. Later in his career DeLay took a trip to Scotland charged to Abramoff's American Express card, which recently served as one of the major catalysts for his political downfall. The connections between DeLay and Abramoff over a 10-year period are not only too numerous to list, but also widely known and unfortunately for DeLay, well documented.

Abramoff recently pled guilty to a handful of felony chages - conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion. On March 29, Abramoff was sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay a restitution of over $21 million. He is still awaiting sentencing for another charge and is still cooperating with federal prosecutors.

It has become a distracting case of Scandal vs. Scandal. With so many outlets for public outrage, chances are the people simply can't keep track of the dubious practices of their elected officials. Techniques of distraction have always been a mainstay of any political entity, but nurturing an overload of scandals to draw the public's attention away from the impeachable act of green-lighting an outright illegal NSA domestic spying program? That's why Karl Rove is really the head of the Republican Party.

The cards have not all been revealed, however. Libby is still speaking to prosecutors and may have further information that could implicate Cheney or Bush, and Abramoff has yet to speak about the scores of Congressional legislators he had personal and financial relationships with. And in light of the fact he's still awaiting another sentencing and being investigated for a murder, chances are whatever he knows will become public sooner or later.