Back in my teen years I was struggling with my Roman Catholic environment. Growing up in a small, overwhelmingly Catholic town it was was socially demanded to go to church each Sunday. Being altar girl or boy was an honor and a group leadership in one of the St. George boy scout groups was a high ambition.

This, of course, conflicted with my otherwise quite secular interests and a questioning mind. It took me a while to find some inner arrangement between my upbringing and my self. What did help me archiving this were some trips and several weeks stay in Taizé, a small town in Burgundy, France.

There, a Swiss Lutheran priest, Roger Louis Schutz-Marsauche, Frère Roger, was running an ecumenical Christian men’s monastic order, the Taizé Community.

The order has only about one hundred members, but each summer since the 1950’s there are tens of thousands of young people coming to Taizé to camp out, talk, discuss, meditate and chant about their relation to a higher being. We came from over twenty different countries. We cooked, eat and did the dishes together. We loved and were loved. We sang and meditated and did some skin dipping.

The important thing was the ecumenical environment. The members of the order are Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox and whatever other Christian group may exist. Other people around were from different religions. I meet a Hindi, some Muslim, some Buddhist. All the ceremonial stuff was thrown out, all the artificial differentiations of rites didn´t matter.

After the regular evening prayer/meditation in that mystic church Frère Roger was available for private talks. His English was as bad as my French but he managed to explain to me that church didn´t matter the way I had learned it did. Rites didn´t matter, the type of a god personification one could believe in didn´t matter. What mattered, he explained, was to search for something and to keep searching. And to be peaceful and to accept that different people have different concepts of believe and different insights.

So I learned a lot through him, his community and all the people who were there. Some month later I left the formal church but I kept searching. Today I am a bit of a Buddhist and I am sure he would have embraced this development.

Frère Roger died today at the age of 90. He was stabbed during the common evening prayer/meditation.

Om benza sato shri.

At some point, the voters are going to expect the Dems to come up with a more coherent strategy. And if that strategy is simply neocon lite — i.e., we want to bomb Iran, too, but we’ll do it more effectively — they’ll probably stick with the genuine article. To paraphrase Harry Truman: Give the voters a choice between a neocon and a neocon, and they’ll pick the damned neocon every time.

Elephant Trap

There’s a greater danger here than the threat that the violence in Iraq or Afghanistan might temporarily escalate (would anybody even notice?) It’s the risk that some future administration, or future army commander, might be encouraged to endorse — or cover up — war crimes, on the expectation that they, too, will be able to rely on official secrecy to protect themselves (and the country) from the consequences.

Viewer Discretion Advised

Iraq, in other words, seems to be well down the road towards a Lebanon-style political system, in which cabinet posts, military commands and control over national resources — the entire machinery of the state, in other words — are carefully apportioned along ethnic or communal lines. Such systems tend to be fragile and unstable, since the demographic and economic balance of power they rest upon is constantly changing. They also tend to concentrate power in the hands of powerful political chiefs, since only they have the authority and prestige to broker the backroom deals needed to lubricate the system.

A Day Late and a Dinar Short

Khalilzad: Talk faster, dammit!

The Great Race

At this point, to call the Commander in Chief detached from reality would be an insult to paranoid schizophrenics everywhere. Not just from the reality of failure in Iraq — that’s a given — but from the political reality that public support for the war, and more particularly, for his handling of it, is in something close to free fall.
[…]
One angry mom is dangerous enough, especially when the President of the United States insists on being her unofficial publicist. But now there are 300 of them standing in the dirt and the heat down in Crawford — and millions more watching on TV, silently asking themselves the same questions Sheehan wants to ask Bush: How did we get into this mess? How do we get out? Have our sons and daughters been sent to die in vain?

The machine can try to demonize Cindy Sheehan. But it can’t demonize those questions — not any more, not when so many others are asking them.

Dog Day Afternoon

Bush in Crawford is under siege by Cindy Sheehan and has trouble to keep a balanced life. Rove and now Ashcroft are in ever deeper trouble.

The administration is lowering expectations on Iraq:

"We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic," said another U.S. official [..] "That process is being repeated all over."

Cognitive dissonance hamstrings the leadership.

In the population there has been a change in sentiment since the last election. Bush is on record low poll numbers, so is support for the Iraq war. Nearly 60 percent of
Americans now oppose the war, according to recent polling. Sixty-three
percent want US troops brought home within the next year. The media tide is turning.

This should be the very best moment for an opposition party to take a real lead and call for an end of this expensive adventure and win a significant lead for the next election.

No more flip-flopping like Kerry between being pro-war and anti-war; a call for international consent before going to war; no to a preemptive doctrine that has proven to be catastrophic.

But no, the Democrats leadership has decided to prepare for the next election by courting the arguments they think would have won the last one. The Boston Globe
writes:

After months of internal debate and closed-door discussions, Democrats have begun to develop a more aggressive foreign policy that focuses heavily on threats they say are being neglected by the Bush administration, while avoiding taking a contentious stance on Iraq.
…
Even Democrats who have been associated with liberal positions on international affairs are calling for more troops in uniform, proposing that threats of force be used to stop nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, and pressing for potential military intervention to ease famine and oppression around the world.
…
[Their report] calls for the United States to engage in more direct negotiations with Iran and North Korea, and for the talks to be reinforced with military pressure, including ”the possibility of repeated and unwarned strikes."

Democrats to Bush: "ATTACK IRAN!"
Bush: "Dear Americans, the Dems asked me to bomb Iran. The planes are on their way. If this goes wrong it’s Clinton’s fault."

To win in 2006 with a concept more hawkish than the Republicans is as stupid as it gets. The people need an alternative.

As Atrios pointed out: If you want bases in Iraq with some 30,000 troops living there, you will need another 100,000 troops to protect these bases plus the ever endangered logistic tail to fill the mercenaries luxury demands.

To stay in Iraq and to demand an attack on Iran in a situation where Iran controls your lines of communication is lunatic. The Strategic Class wants exactly that.

It probably could have helped during the last election (though I doubt this), but it will definitely not help in the next one.

Lifted from a comment

by Monolycus

Oh, come on.  It’s not like this is the first time Bush has demonstrated contempt for the will of the people.  Ten million human beings protested his proposed invasion of Iraq in 2003 (more, if one can believe the rumours, than had ever protested against any single cause in human history)… and his response?  He described them as a "focus group" and gave them a very insincere "I respectfully disagree". To describe this administration as having a ears of tin is missing the larger point; they have hearts of stone and I.O.U.’s where their souls should be. Do not act surprised by the latest demonstrations of sociopathic behaviour when that has been evident all along.

The problem is that these personality defects are not confined to certain individuals, or even political parties.  This is who we are, people.  This is the culture we are so damned proud of.  And a significant part of this culture that creates these antisocial, anti-environmental, inhumane monsters is pretending that we despise it. We pretend to be shocked by each new glimmer of atrociousness no matter how often we are faced with the same behaviours from the same sources; and all the while, we are really just happily devouring the misery as fast as it can be produced by the cultural byproducts we continue to create and support with our values.

We’re like "outrage junkies"… we produce excrement simply to be offended by it.  Makes us feel a bit better about our own meaninglessness.  It would defeat the purpose for us to address and correct the problems we complain about because the real problems are we, ourselves.  "Powerful people" with tin ears, disastrous policies and a demonstrable contempt for the populus are only symptoms. If we cured those symptoms, we would have to trade our beloved outrage for the hard work of trying to repair the damage the symptoms have done.  I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone really wants to make that trade.  Not as long as we can continue to be appalled anew over the same old shit that is taking us all to the grave. 

News and views …

[There was a funny satiric comment here a few days ago. I asked the super patriotic author for some other stuff. Today he did send this piece – not that funny, but some interesting thoughts.]

by Highlander

Back a while, Billmon had an entry analyzing what he referred to as The Liberal Disease. 

As with anything Billmon writes, the whole entry is well worth reading. The money shot, however, came in the following paragraph:

the classically liberal approach to politics, in which the
struggle for power is treated like some kind of glorified courtroom debate, with strict rules of evidence, an impartial umpire (the judge) and 12 jurors, straight and true, to render a verdict.
…
That’s pretty much the last ten years of American political history in a nutshell. While liberals sift and weigh the evidence, debate alternative points of view, and reach for that ever elusive "fairness," the conservative machine sifts and weighs alternative propaganda points, debates the best way to manipulate public opinion, and reaches for power — first, last and always.

There’s more, and it’s all worth reading.

Cont. reading: One Strike, They’re out

A recipe for desaster: Shi’ites demand autonomy as Iraq awaits charter

With four days left until
Iraq’s leaders have promised a draft constitution, powerful Islamist leaders made a dramatic bid on Thursday to have a big, autonomous Shi’ite region across the oil-rich south.

The head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) spelled out his demands to tens of thousands of chanting supporters in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf.

But minority Sunni and secular opponents, as well as rival Shi’ite Islamists in the coalition national government, swiftly poured cold water on an idea that fueled fears about sectarian battles over oil and Iranian-style religious rule in the south.

This would result in a landlocked Kurdish province in the north, with the not-so-friendly neighbors of Turkey, Syria and Iran, all of these suppressing their Kurdish minorities. In the south the new united Shia provinces would be more or less an annex to Iran and in the middle the Sunni provinces and the multi ethic capital of Baghdad would depend on small trickles of oil revenue from the north and the south or, more probable, fight the other entities.

This may have been the wet dream of some Neocon planers who would like all bigger Middle East countries splittered into small, powerless statelets. But as the situation looks now, this will dramatically increase the strategic role of Iran and there seems to be no workable plan to deny it that role. Or is there?

Open Thread …

Via Alchemy of Trading comes this chart made by BCA Research:

If the major newspapers and the financial press think this is a goldilocks economy, i.e. not too hot, not too cold, but just right, one might start to take a contrarian position.

Somehow some numbers just do not add up to what is written in the headlines.

Average weekly wages for most workers rose in June by $1.01 to $541.22. This followed a 59-cent decline in May, the department reported, after revising its earlier figures. After taking into account the impact of inflation, wages for production and non-managerial workers, who account for 80 percent of the workforce, were 0.6 percent lower in May than a year earlier.

As an US military general officer you may:

• publicly promote religious fundamentalism
• allow human rights abuse
• lie to Congress

and then you may even get a promotion.

But as a general officer you may never ever have an extramarital affair with a private citizen. Especially not while your divorce is still pending and you are only six month away from retirement. If caught, you will be relieved from your command immediately.

4-Star General Relieved Of Duty

[General] Byrnes, reached by telephone at his home yesterday, declined to comment. His defense attorney, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the allegation against Byrnes involves an affair with a private citizen. Byrnes has been separated from his wife since May 2004; their divorce was finalized on Monday, coincidentally the same day he was relieved of command, Robertson said.
…
The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.

This is a sure way to destroy the small rest of moral fabric left in the US Army. And it´s not done by chance. Like the Plame leak this is supposed to send a message.

You are not safe. We, the civilian leadership can get at you. No matter how high your rank or how small your failure. You serve at "our pleasure".

George Monbiot has an excellent comment in today’s Guardian on patriotism. Titled The New Chauvinism it is an excellent argument against the false claims of "liberal patriotism". Excerpts (though you should read it in full):

To argue that national allegiance reduces human suffering, you must assert that acts of domestic terrorism cause more grievous harm than all the territorial and colonial wars, ethnic cleansing and holocausts pursued in the name of the national interest. To believe this, you need to be not just a patriot but a chauvinist.
…
When confronted with a conflict between the interests of your country and those of another, patriotism, by definition, demands that you choose those of your own. Internationalism, by contrast, means choosing the option that delivers most good or least harm to people, regardless of where they live. It tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington, and that a policy which favours the interests of 100 British people at the expense of 101 Congolese is one we should not pursue. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of the 100 British people. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How, for that matter, do you distinguish it from racism?
…
I don’t hate Britain, and I am not ashamed of my nationality, but I have no idea why I should love this country more than any other. There are some things I like about it and some things I don’t, and the same goes for everywhere else I’ve visited. To become a patriot is to lie to yourself, to tell yourself that whatever good you might perceive abroad, your own country is, on balance, better than the others. It is impossible to reconcile this with either the evidence of your own eyes or a belief in the equality of humankind.

Take down those flags.

From the New York Times: Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in ’00

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, …

Rep. Weldon is a crazy wingnut, who wants to march to Teheran tomorrow. So the above report may very well be bullshit (it’s the NYT after all) and part of his agenda.

But assuming for a second that the above report is true, some questions come up.

What else did the SOC and the Pentagon knew before 9/11 and what else was not shared? Was the Commanding General, U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg, N.C. involved? Was the idea of an "catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor" (pdf) relevant for that decision ?

Conspiracy theorists – oil for your fire.

News, views, opinions …
(and a link to the forerunner)

True, the latest economic reports also show a modest share of this prosperity is finally trickling down to America’s working families. But rest assured: the Federal Reserve is on the case, and will raise interest rates as high as necessary to nip this dangerous inflationary trend in the bud. America’s true heros — the CEOs and billionaires who control our giant multinational corporations — deserve no less. We must not fail them in their hour of obscene prosperity, and as long as I am president, (sobs) we will not.

Radio Daze

"If you saw the video from Thursday, you can tell the brain is just about gone," said one experienced pathologist. "I’m fairly sure there was gray matter in that stuff his corpse was puking up. You can see it all over that big book on the table next to Henry. I doubt at this point that Novak could do much more than type out a few random, incoherent letter sequences."

But Novak’s editors at the Chicago Sun Times say they hardly expect to see that kind of improvement in the columnist’s work, given his condition.

Death Takes a Holiday