My son has a blog

Silly Squirts

I think he is trying to be vaguely dirty. I helped him set up the blog and when it came to naming it he told me it's a brand of ketchup (true enough).

Lately, he's taken to working the word "muff" into every conversation. He had heard some pun on That 70's Show and he asked me what a muff was. I took the cowards way out and told him it was a piece of fur sewed into a circle that women used to keep their hands warm (true enough). My reward for this piece of disembling is that he has taken to asking women if they like muffs. If they like putting their hands in muffs. I can't decide if he knows exactly what he is doing and having fun with people, or if he knows I was telling a half-truth and desperately trying to figure out if his suspicions of what a muff are on track.

What does the Iraqi parliament do again?

This is a serious question.

Abu Aardvark was wondering why the Arab media didn't pay much attention to the Iraqi elections. I know why I didn't. As far as I can tell the Iraqi "parliament" doesn't do anything except dole out money to their friends, while any decision of consequense is up to the U.S. ambassador. I thought maybe I was being unneccesarily mean to them as Father of Aardvarks is pretty sharp on these matters. So I stuck phrases into google trying to find them voting on *anything*. They had their little dust-up about the constitution where after some serious brow-beating from our man in Baghdad a result popped out. As far as I know that's the only business the Iraqi parliament has ever conducted.

By way of contrast, I threw Chechen parliament into google and out popped "Chechen parliament" and they vote on all sorts of things. They are things that seem odd for a Chechen parliament to be doing, things like voting in resolutions to order the seperatists to disarm and go home after Putin flew in and told them to do that. They voted to ask Russia if they could rename the rubble of Grozny after Akhmad Kadyrov, a pro-Moscow death squad leader, later President who got wacked by a seperatist death squad. They do at least go through some nominal functions to appear to have some level of autonomy. There have been three of these elections now and the elected body has never done *anything*.

Once upon a time in New Orleans

When I was about twenty-two, I had a newborn son and a girl who had a father who was living in Tampa Bay. He wanted to see his grandson and a vacation sounded nice. We got some urban legend and medical mumbo-jumbo that made us leary of flying down there with an infant out of concern for his eardrums. We took the City of New Orleans train via Amtrak and a bus to Tampa. One thing I can recommend for this mode of transportation is that you will get to see every bad neighborhood in America on a north/south trajectory because of it's proximity to the tracks and even better an amazing, moving graffiti show. My personal favorite was "Fuck a fish tank". I'm still not sure what it meant but I've got photos somewhere.

I had never met the old man. When I met him, he was incredibly engaging. Intelligent, interesting, had a million stories that would have you hanging off the edge of your seat. I had been told that he and my baby mama's mother had broken up because he was an abusive sadist, but damn was that guy cool and I sort of had it pushed to the back of my mind. He was a Vietnam vet and my dad was a Marine crew chief on a Huey and prone to spazing out so I sort of had a pass for him already built in.

The last night we were there (it wasn't supposed to be) I heard fighting and then silence, then I heard gasping. I'm thinking fucking but it didn't sound quite right. I said "what was that?" and what turned out to be my ex-wife said "He was choking her, what do you think it was?". Oh. Well, it was time to get the hell out of Dodge. She was right as confirmed by later phone conversations. One way or another I figured it was time to go home.

So we get back to New Orleans to take the train back to Chicago. There is this guy there that wants to know if I want to buy pot. I smoked back then and had just bought a piece in Ybor City and it sounded good. I said "Sure, can you sell me an eighth?". He responded "You want an eight-ball? I can get an eight-ball!!!". I obviously should have ended the conversation there but I didn't. Supposedly the weed was in his taxi and we were going to do the deal there. We got in the back seat and as soon as I stepped in a crack head materialized in the driver's seat and we were moving. I was informed that the pot wasn't actually in the car but somewhere else. If you know New Orleans at all you understand exactly how quickly you will disappear into the ghetto if you travel east from the train station.

Within a matter of seconds I was in the thick of a city that I thought I knew. No friendly guy offering you a forty-ounce margarita or daquiri from curbside on the corner. Suddenly it was incredibly desperate hordes of humanity trying to sell you crack or ass. You either drive through them or they are going to bust into the car to pitch one or the other.

When you look out the side window you can see the shitty housing. The houses have no insulation and there are cracks in the slat boards wide enough that it makes a sort of kaleidoscope where you can see about a tenth of what is going on in the house. I've been to Negril, Jamaica and it wasn't quite as desperate as ghetto New Orleans.

To wind down the story, I gave up a twenty to buy pot. When the guy came back I was unsuprised to learn that he had been unable to procure such a substance there, but had picked up some freebase and we had to go somewhere else. The guy started smoking out of broken glass pipe and he said "hold this for me". Human beings being dumb things who are likey to respond the same way to a grenade offered to them, I did stick out my hand and was offered a couple lumps of crack and a bunch of blood from where the guy had been high, cut himself to hell and didn't notice. I just pretented to be sort of dumb and told him I had a train to catch and if he could drop me off I'd be grateful and if he got back with the pot it would be a bonus. He pretended to believe in the whole imaginary scenario and I got back and counted myself lucky I'd got back.

The point of the story is what exactly should be done in New Orleans? I seriously have no idea. I'm extremely hostile to the city leadership which apparently believes in some fantasy world where New Orleans could be some new Disney World or at least a southern Atlantic City. The thing is Atlantic City would be an improvement on what was there. What was there was a shithole people were too poor to escape from when it started to drown them. Is there a serious policy solution out there that seriously questions what was there and what could be there?

It starts..

Sadly No was wondering about the silence of the Sami Al-Arian verdict from the usual suspects. I knew damn well they weren't just going to sit in silence after their witchhunt. Obviously, if a jury finds their victim innocent, the problem lies with outmoded 9/10 ideas like "trials".

I ran across this a bit later. I can't decide which was more nauseating. The post or this tidbit in the comments:

Oh! How I rue the day when a tough minded Janet Reno who put away terrorists like Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and Ramzi Yousef was replaced by the terrorist sympathizer and a generally incompetent buffoon Asscroft and now Gonzalez who have dropped the ball on Sami Al-Arian, the Lackawanna Six, Sami Omar Al-Hussayen and the Detroit Al-Qaeda terror cell trial.Can we please get some patriotism and competence back in the Justice Deparment! I guess we will have to wait till 2008 before we can finally get a Justice Department which will be serious about prosecuting terrorists.

Marc Cooper really fucking sucks

Just thought I'd get that off my chest.

I didn't have much use for him before he tied his star to the odious, ill-fated, turd whose name changes so often I'll not bother trying to identify it. Truth be known, he's an unimportant gasbag who had fairly well escaped my memory until I happened to come across this:

"Perhaps you would like me to catalogue the mirror wingnuttiness that I bump into day-to-day at my more respectable job with The Nation: writers who believe that there’s a burgeoning national Russ Feingold for President movement; that Castro’s Cuba is really more democratic than Schwarzenennger’s California; that it’s a pity the Soviet Union collapsed; that a new book critical of Mao must be written by the CIA; that it’s just fine and dandy to have an anti-war movement managed by acolytes of Kim-Il Sung; that we mst provide material support to the armed resistance in Iraq so on and so on ad infinitum. I find that stuff to be equally crazy."

I'll just refrain from calling bullshit on his whole idiotic strawman routine where he makes up some leftist strawman (and it is made up, some place that according to him is a crypto-Spartacus League/Marcyist communist front wouldn't give him a salary over and above his LA Weekly six figures to bitch about and complain that he needs to hang out with LGF scum to make ends meet).*

Take a look at his blog and notice just how quick the ideological shift changed under his feet as he watched the prospects of The Blog That Shall Not Be Named and Probably Won't Exist Much Longer sink and flounder. His position and tenor shifted in incredible ways. This moment in time is something that should be preserved in amber. He shifted gears in an incredible, newspeak fashion where if you scroll to the bottom you can find him decrying the PC fascism of refering to the Iraqi resistance as "the Iraqi resistance", to throwing spitballs at Rumsfeld for his foolish games at redefining the aforementioned as "“enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government” in the current. Does he really believe in anything?

* Ok, I'll bitch a bit. I know some hardcore anti-imperialists and they support Tariq Ali's notion that the only solution is to "support" the resistance. I find this formulation unacceptable for a number of reasons that are unimportant here but when pressed I've never found anyone who didn't blink when asked if they should actually do anything in the real world to "support" the resistance. I can't imagine any of them having (or even willing to take) a job at The Nation.

One Yanki's analysis of why the Venezuelan military went left

The Bitch posed this question on LBO talk today. As I am just way too au currant to be seen on an internet geezer tech like a mailing list, I thought I'd address the question here.

I've never been to Venezuela, the following is the result of reading random bullshit on the internet, a number of conversations with Venezuelan (not one of them a Chavitista, I've yet to run into a Venezuelan who didn't hate Chavez in the U.S. and I never have and probably never will see Venezuela), and my own wishful thinking and biases.

The short answer is Chavez himself. He was part of the officer class. He speaks their language and he isn't dealing with them as an outsider. He has made the militaries concerns a top priority since he came to power in 1998. It was probably his relationship with the palace guard especially, but more generally with the military that allowed him to return to power after the coup. Certainly, the million strong demonstrations outside the palace during the short lived Carmona regime created the situation necessary, and maybe the country couldn't have carried on with that sort of resistance, but they seemed very willing to wait the whole thing out regardless of the costs. The crowd never stormed the gate and most likely never would have. It wasn't them that personally got rid of the thieves (literally, Carmona and friends broke into the safe and stole all the cash before heading for Florida). It was a palace guard that knew and liked Chavez because he dealt with them as fellow soldiers instead of the help.

After that, the government came back and the most of the military could be persuaded because if not so much the left but Bolivarianism is a strong sentiment that Chavez appealed to successfully and that the Carmona regime could never lay claim to with their open ties the U.S. and how much it just smelled like imperialism. The ones that weren't were outnumbered and purged to go simmer with the rest of the opposition from the oil industry. They are quite literally crazy at this point, they don't even follow the international conventional wisdom that Chavez has "bought off" the poor (like that's not the entire point of socialism). They have lost their cushy oil jobs or such, and live in a fantasy world where Chavez is universally detested and they are the victim of a wildly rigged voting system.

So apparently the key seems to be somewhat ugly. Socialism in South America requires someone with military credibility and a willingness to outbid military expenditures from the right.

A fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects has a blog

and it's good!

Check it out.

Especially for this damn good story.