Afghanistan and Pastunistan

Pepe Escobar has a very interesting take on things Afghani and Pakistani.
He may not know what's really going on there, but he sounds a lot more believable than anyone else I've read.

The link is to the first in a series.
I just read parts one and two, and look forward to seeing the rest.

Unemployment

I've been Googling unemployment rates in EU countries, and find their situation is much the same as ours. What we're seeing is a major shift in the way people live all over the Western world.
I suspect those who aren't able to reinvent themselves will be swept away as the way we define work changes. Most of the world's cash is already bound up in conceptual products, and it doesn't take working hands to maintain that kind of market.

There are people losing jobs now who will never see another day of employment.
To maintain order, we must create and maintain an even larger client population than we have before.

Fort Hood shooter

This looks a lot easier than it is.

What I keep in mind is that a psychiatrist is always the most highly-trained medical staff member wherever you may find him.
That fact dictates he has had the most exposure to science education.

It is oxymoronic to have a Muslim extremist psychiatrist.
It makes no more sense if you replace the name of the religion in that sentence.
All religious orthodoxy flies in the face of reason, and only by the most tortured contortions of thought can a man reconcile the two.

The root problem we have isn't solved by shooting Muslims.
If we're going to shoot them, we owe it to ourselves to shoot the rest.
All religions are now in direct confrontation with the truth, and, by that, with our survival.
We can have our inflexible religious beliefs, or we can have a rational society.
Without individually and collectively succumbing to schizophrenia, we can't have both.

I think it's also worth noting the level of personal arming at the scene, as suggested in this Dallas News report:

... Hasan used two handguns, including a semi-automatic, to fire at fellow soldiers. Neither of the guns was military-issue.

As Hasan fired, an unidentified female civilian officer managed to shoot him at least once before being shot herself. ...

This is a medical office we're talking about here - not the OK Corral. We're so far gone into violence that people are toting their own private heat on a military base?

Oh, Atlanta

They don't call it the "dirty South" for nothing.
Number 1 in Forbes' dirtiest cities in America ratings.

Prattle

I guess we're in for at least a few days, if not weeks, of self-appointed wise men telling us how significant yesterday's election results are to the future political career of the president.

So far this morning, all I can make of things is that all politics really is local, and it's mostly about the money. In Atlanta, for example, a lot of the black bourgeois vote obviously went to the Mary Norwood, the first viable white candidate since the days of Sam Massell.

No matter what your skin color or party affiliation in Atlanta, there's a very powerful desire to change course before billed services and taxes make it impossible to own a home inside the city limits. Add to that the fact we've had a lot of high-profile crimes of violence against persons in the last year, and you have a recipe for revolt from the status quo. Norwood enters a run-off against Kasim Reed now, and the racial battle lines are clearly drawn. However, the battle lines that may matter most in the coming weeks are those defined by Reed being a political operative who cut a large figure in the Franklin administration while Norwood spent years as odd woman out on the city council.

Franklin is personally liked by a lot of Atlantans, but her terms in office have done little to allay the suspicion that Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young machine bequeathed the city more than its share of incompetence and corruption. She only looks the least bit good when compared to her felonious predecessor, Bill Campbell. Reed may suffer by association with the juggernaut that has ruled Atlanta municipal government since 1974.

As for Obama, he continues to enjoy the good will of the people, not least because he also looks pretty good stacked up against the previous occupant of the White House. Despite the labored breathing of the pundits, he's not undone by last night's voting, because it had little to nothing to do with him. The Know-Nothing revolution came up short in upstate New York, where the majority of voters decided voting for a Democrat was preferable to voting for a Sarah Palin/ Glenn Beck surrogate. People up there don't vote for Democrats, but they will when the Republican is a bull goose lunatic usurper of the Party machinery. The Palinites aren't Republicans, as every savvy person on the right side of the aisle understands. They're interlopers and opportunists who have little to no chance of wooing sensible conservatives into their flock.

McCarthy never really goes away

I was a little boy when I first heard this on the radio.
It's one of those moments that needs repeating pretty often.

Bodies exhibition comes to Singapore

I have many misgivings about the enterprise.
Now that I learn Singapore won't allow the corpses to copulate in public, I feel much better.

Preparing myself for travel

One has to pay attention to the signs at the airport.

A tip of the hat to Dr. Boli, travel expert.

Preface to my confession

I was reading Frank Rich this morning, and something he said made me remember Alabama in the early '60s. He compared the current madhouse climate inside the Republican Party to the mess they were in after Nixon lost to Kennedy in the 1960 election.

Some day soon, I have to spend time trying to recall those days a little more fully.

In hindsight, I look like a little boy running through a minefield.

Thanks to my social environment and speaking skills, I was an early target for conservative recruiters of different stripes. While others in my age group jumped on the Kennedy bandwagon, I became a youth organizer and door-to-door campaigner for Barry Goldwater.

Under the tutelage of a fundamentalist preacher, I also enjoyed a brief run as a teenage evangelist, and actually reached some sort of high water mark as the DAR George Washington Medal of Freedom winner in 1964.

They were too late. I'd seen through the ruse by then, and was already on my way to becoming a lifelong fugitive from the right and all its plans for a better world.

Rainy day Halloween

I love rainy days.

Some of my best thinking happens when there's no reason to go out the door.

Today, as I looked out the window at my patch of gray sky and the GDOT landscaping which serves as my buffer against the constant stream of traffic on I-75 as it enters the downtown connector, some very simple things I've never truly understood became clear.

Evil really is banal, and boring.

My dalliance with it has been unsatisfactory, and without any detectable high spots.

When it's the real thing, it's just a bloody mess, and when it's play-acting it's childish and repetitious. In the absence of any new models for the Devil, people simply adapt the old ones with little imagination or gusto. Most of the entertainment value in these charades comes from the intoxicants associated with the rituals, and not from any dangerous thrill that comes through approaching some forbidden unknown.

I'm not going to waste any more time on my honky-tonk friends.

They'll either come to see themselves for what they really are and change, or they'll deteriorate into the hideous self-parodies readily observable among elders in the lifestyle. Souls aren't well-nourished on the dark side, and without robust souls, men and women rapidly age and die. I understand there is the occasional person who thrives in darkness, but they must be rare beings indeed. I haven't seen one in my travels.